Back To The Future meets John Carpenter’s Halloween? That sounds right up my alley. Give me a time-traveling slasher film infused with blood and humor any day of the week and, more than likely, I’ll be content. Totally Killer certainly is all of those things. It’s a horror-comedy cocktail that’s made with all the right ingredients but not all of the skill. It’s not as good as it should be, but it get’s the trick done regardless.
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Totally Killer Plot
A masked killer terrorizes a group of friends on one bloody Halloween night in 1987. Now, in 2023, it seems the killer has returned to finish what they started. Jaime, the daughter of a surviving victim, accidentally travels back in time where she meets younger versions of her parents. As she navigates through a decade that is completely foreign to her, she must work to stop the killer while being careful not to alter the timeline too drastically.
The Critique
Films of this type — a genre-bending slasher that fully embraces its cheesy nature rather than attempting to rectify it — are often accompanied by an instinctual lowering of standards. That’s not to say that they’re always of a lower quality, with Happy Death Day coming to mind as a more recent stand-out of the genre. This film’s similarities to Happy Death Day — and its sequel Happy Death Day 2U — are abundant, straight down to the time-travel element. But while that series remains a shining example of a very specific subgenre done properly, Totally Killer is mostly totally forgettable.
The humor relies primarily on the most obvious and blatant of jokes related to the generational divide and differences of growing up in the 80’s versus the current era. Creativity and originality are sparse, with films like Heathers and Scream acting as the building blocks of what the finished product would become.
The film becomes significantly better once the time-travel has occurred. While the first act feels painfully reminiscent of a 90’s Goosebumps episode — albeit a mature-rated one — the second and third acts utilize the retro 80’s style and the inherent campiness of the story to their benefit. While there were moments that I genuinely loved — especially in relation to the film’s climax — much of it felt too little, too late. To make it even worse, the big-reveal to the stories mystery is one that feels largely predictable and lazy.
Totally Killer‘s shining achievement is in its lead actress, Kiernan Shipka. Shipka is likely best recognized for her role in Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, but here she proves she has the talent and commanding presence to become a full-blown star. She takes dialogue which lacks any subtlety and delivers it in manner that feels effective and true to the outlandishness of the situation.
In Conclusion
Totally Killer is a film that checks all of the boxes, taking great pride in its inclusion of the tropes and clichés of the genre. However, in doing so it never finds its own path. The end result is a mostly fun, often generic and ultimately forgettable entry in the world of horror-comedy. Spooky season has only just begun and this one is a bit of a mixed-bag. A little trick, and a little treat.
6/10
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