TOTALLY KILLER - Mark Reviews Movies

Totally Killer, Prime Video

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 5, 2023

There's such a clever conceit to Totally Killer, which adds a time-travel gimmick to a slasher movie, that it's just a shame the movie doesn't live up to its own potential. The screenplay teases us with multiple ideas, but it ultimately takes a fairly straightforward approach to a concept that deserves a bit better.

At least the story gets going with only a little delay. We meet Jamie Hughes (Kiernan Shipka), a teenage girl living in the present day and in a small town that has a dark history. More than three decades ago, a serial killer murdered three teenage girls in the days leading up to and on Halloween. The killer—dubbed the "Sweet Sixteen Killer," because he stabbed his victims, each of them celebrating a birthday, 16 times—was never caught. A whole generation of adults, now with teenaged children of their own, who lived through it are still haunted or traumatized by what happened.

That's the basic setup, and it's as routine and predictable as it would seem. Thankfully, that doesn't last for long. Jamie's mother Pam (Julie Bowen), who was friends with the three murdered girls in high school, has been preparing for violence to befall her for 34 years. That, though, isn't enough when someone in a slightly creepy mask—of a smiling, blond-haired bro type of man—shows up at her door on Halloween night.

From here, the screenplay—written by David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver, and Jen D'Angelo—seems to have established a familiar pattern for itself. The killer has apparently returned, or someone is copying what happened all those years ago. Pam was connected to the murdered girls, and a note suggests she was supposed to be next. As with so many slasher movies of the period this one is harkening back to or its various copycats, we anticipate the usual: more killings, a lot of suspicious characters, and a whodunit plot that will eventually reveal the murderer or murderers and their motives.

Instead, the whole thing takes a hard left turn, and it's immediately refreshing, unexpected, and pleasantly silly. Jamie's best friend Amelia (Kelcey Mawema) is a science whiz who, while the rest of her classmates are working on boring projects, is building a time machine out of an old photo booth for the high school's science fair. Yes, she's building a time machine, which almost seems like a throwaway joke amidst the script's routine exposition-building.

Suddenly, though, Jamie finds herself alone with the masked killer at the abandoned carnival where the science fair is being held, and sure enough, the time machine starts up just in time for her to escape the murderer. Instead, she ends up in the carnival's bustling past in the year 1987—just days before the Sweet Sixteen Killer first strikes.

The resulting story unfolds on three distinct levels. The first is a comedy about the clashing cultures of Jamie's time and the one in which she finds herself, where bullying is seen as no big deal, people smoke everywhere, security is basically non-existent (Jamie enrolls herself in school simply by telling an administrator she wants to attend), and participation in a particularly brutal game of dodgeball is mandatory. It's amusing for the fish-out-of-water angle, as well as for digging at a sense of nostalgia for allegedly better times.

The second level has to do with seeing her mother and father (played in the present timeline by Lochlyn Munro) as a teenaged Pam (played by Olivia Holt), who's a popular-girl bully and not the kind woman she has known, and Blake (Charlie Gillespie), who is dating one of the soon-to-be victims and comes across as a dunderheaded jock. It's pretty obvious why the screenplay repeatedly references the quintessential time-travel film from the 1980s (many times to subvert our expectations about how time travel in this movie's world works), since director Nahnatchka Khan's movie is essentially hitting some of the same thematic and emotional beats. Jamie learns that her parents were kids like her once, while learning a greater appreciation for them by witnessing and interacting with them in their past element.

As for the third level, it has to do with the killings, which—in Jamie's timeline—took place at a house party and a cabin in the woods (This leads to a good gag in which one of the future victims reveals she doesn't know what a condo is) and somewhere else that may or may not matter by the time this altered past gets there, and Jamie's attempts to stop them before they occur. The movie stumbles here, unfortunately—not only because the plot thread plays out in such a routine way, but also because the screenplay itself shows us exactly how that approach doesn't need to be so.

The story's concept of time allows Jamie to affect the past, while, in the present, Amelia and Sweet Sixteen Killer expert Chris (Jonathan Potts) live through the consequences of those changes in real time. It's a fascinating hook, so as it becomes clear that the Totally Killer is simply going through the motions of a slasher movie and bringing everything toward a final showdown with the killer (or killers, as Jamie suspects, since she's seen horror movies the '80s kids haven't), the movie's lost potential of doing something distinct with its time-travel gimmick is disappointing.

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