Describe This Movie In One Terminator Quote:
SARAH CONNOR: Are you saying it's from the *future*?Brief Plot Synopsis: Basically Timecop meets Mean Girls.
KYLE REESE: One possible future. From your point of view. I don't know tech stuff.
SARAH CONNOR: Then you're from the future, too. Is that right?
KYLE REESE: Right.
SARAH CONNOR: Right.
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 2.5 Flux Capacitors out of 5.
Tagline: "Murder is so 1987."
Better Tagline: "Your parents were assholes, too."
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Waaaay back during Halloween of 1987, three 16-year olds were stabbed 16 times by a murderer dubbed the "Sweet 16 Killer," for some reason. All three were friends of Pam Hughes (Julie Bowen), who fears for her own 17-year old Jamie (Kiernan Shipka). Tragic circumstances during Halloween 2023 force Jamie to seek out her friend Amelia's (Kelcey Mawema) time machine (don't ask) and travel back to the era of bowheads an Benetton to stop the killer before he can start.
"Critical" Analysis: Totally Killer may be set in 1987, but its influences run the gamut from the original Halloween to the '90s wave of self-aware slashers embodied by the Scream franchise. And that's without even throwing in Back to the Future, a movie referenced more than a few times.
1.21 gigawatts aside, the most accurate precursor to TK might just be another movie about someone traveling through time to head off a serial killer: 1979's Time After Time, in which H.G. Wells uses his famous machine to chase Jack the Ripper to modern-day San Francisco. Yeah yeah, the time stream stuff goes in the opposite direction, but the fish out of water aspect remains, even if Jamie's journey is a little less disconcerting than a guy who's never seen a tube top getting plopped down in the 1970s.
Totally Killer would be like Somewhere in Time, if Christopher Reeve went back to 1912 to murder Jane Seymour.
Where was I? Oh, right. Director Nahnatchka Khan presents us with a tasty array of suspects. Could it be Jamie's dad Blake (Lochlyn Munro)? The surly amusement park custodian? The murder podcaster (Jonathan Potts)? The creepy kid in the Good Times van?
Or maybe Michael Myers. The town of Vernon in 1987 may as well be Haddonfield, and several shots shortly after Jamie's arrival are straight out of Carpenter's original film. After that, it essentially becomes Hack to the Future, though it makes a few tweaks to the temporal theory which allows Khan to switch between 1987 and the present day to show the ramifications of Jamie's actions.
The initial fish out of water aspect is pretty funny, if over-exaggerated. Yes, the '80s were rife with problematic T-shirts and racist school mascots, but Khan threatens to go overboard before pulling it back and choosing to focus on Jamie's attempts to both stop the killer and return to her own time.
One anachronistic error your humble reviewer would point out: there's an unrealistic lack of mullets, especially for Illinois. And for someone so well-versed in 21st century tech, you'd think Jamie would know the best way to preserve her iPhone's battery would be to turn the freaking thing off.
But in deciding to veer more heavily into slasher territory, Khan ends up with a movie that's less than the sum of its parts. The murders are effectively disturbing (Khan really wants to make sure you can count all the stab wounds), but Totally Killer somehow manages to be too camp for a slasher, and too grim for a comedy.
Finally, we need to address the bigger mystery: what the hell is that mask?
A) A glowed-up Max Headroom
B) The dude from Animotion
C) Ricky Schroeder before the worms ate his brain
Best Line: "Would a serial killer wear Gloria Vanderbilt?"
Totally Killer is now streaming on Prime Video.
