From the trailers and flashy advertising, Totally Killer looked like a movie full of promise and a well-timed slasher for the upcoming Halloween Season. A teenage girl goes back in time to stop a serial killer from attacking her mom’s friends in high school and an attempt to save her mom in the future. But what you end up with instead, is a muddled mess of popular movie plots thrown at a wall to see if any of them stick.
Totally Killer follows Jamie, played by Kiernan Shipka, best known from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, as a moody and brooding teenager who just wants to go have fun for Halloween. But since her mother’s friends were all killed by the now infamous serial killer in their town, she feels limited and restricted and acts out like a moody teenager. But with the help of her best friend’s invention (based on her mother’s notebook) she goes back in time to 35 years ago, to try to stop the killing before it starts.
Again, the premise has promise, but unfortunately fails to deliver. What we are left with instead is a mishmash of super common slasher tropes, with a few others from pop culture that will make the audience roll their eyes and lose interest along the way. The time travel is similar premise to Marty McFly in Back to the Future, even down to the meeting his parents and finding one of them attractive – sure the teenage versions of everyone we know looks better than the aged version we know now. Thankfully the interest instantly disppears when she finds out who the adonis coming out of the pool is – and the story just moves on to the next trope.
Jamie’s mom and her friends are known as the Molly’s, similar to the Plastics of Mean Girls but more notably the Heathers from the 1988 film of the same name. A group of four popular girls who are mean and bully others. Yes, we all know the mean girls grow up and they could be some of our moms. But what the movie does a good job doing is showing that some of their traits never fade, and while that is a good thing the movie doesn’t try to redeem who they are – it doesn’t make a single one of the characters likeable. Like should the audience even care that they are killed? If you were ever bullied by the mean girls in high school you may actually find yourself cheering for the killer or even at least ambivilant about their deaths.
And the killer – well, it’s easy to figure out who it is early on as well. If you’ve seen a slasher movie or two, there is no doubt you’ll figure out who the killer is in the first third of the movie.
We wont even go into the time change paradoxes created or the other issue the movie has overall. But in short, the movie is disappointing. It seemed like there was a lot more potentional to the story and instead they shoved in a lot of popular elements to try to see what would stick. The only thing we seem to be missing here is the generation traumatizing logging truck from Final Destination. Sometimes, more really isn’t a good thing.
Totally Killer is streaming on Prime Video this weekend.
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About Totally Killer
Thirty-five years after the shocking murder of three teens, the infamous “Sweet Sixteen Killer“ returns on Halloween night to claim a fourth victim. Seventeen-year-old Jamie (Shipka) ignores her overprotective mom’s (Bowen) warning and comes face-to-face with the masked maniac and, on the run for her life, accidentally time-travels to 1987, the year of the original killings. Forced to navigate the unfamiliar and outrageous culture of the 1980s, Jamie teams up with her teen mom (Holt) to take down the killer once and for all, before she’s stuck in the past forever.
