From the comedic creator who brought us the series Fresh Off the Boat and the feature film Always Be My Maybe, Nahnatchka Khan, comes a turn into horror comedy with Totally Killer, an overly complicated but highly energetic story about 17-year-old Jamie (Kiernan Shipka), who lives in a small town where a series of three ghastly murders took place 35 years ago, murders that were never solved and committed by serial killer known as the Sweet Sixteen Killer. In an act of perverse gallows humor, every year at Halloween, many local kids wear the same mask that the killer wore that night and roam the streets in search of candy. But this year, the Sweet Sixteen Killer returns to claim a fourth victim in Jamie’s mother (Julie Bowen), who happens to be the only survivor from 35 years ago.
Ignoring her mother’s pleas to be careful going out at night, Jamie comes face-to-face with the killer, who chases her to the remnants of an old fair ground where Jamie’s best friend Amelia (Kelcey Mawema) just happens to be working on a time machine (based on her mother’s old design, of course). When Jamie hides in the machine and a knife gets plunged into the control panel, she is shot back to 1987, right before the original killings began. She hopes that if she can prevent the original three murders, she can keep her own mother from dying in the future, but as she begins to ingratiate herself into the high school scene of the period, she meets her teenage mother (Olivia Holt) and realizes that her kindly, overprotective mom was kind of a bitch back in the day, making Jamie’s attempts to undo the past all the more difficult.
Mom Pam and the three original victims (Liana Liberato, Anna Diaz, and Stephi Chin-Salvo) were all part of a group called the Mollys (they all dressed like different Molly Ringwald movie characters), and they were the local high school mean girls, bullying other kids and generally being shallow and callous about anyone else’s pain. Jamie quickly seeks assistance from Amelia’s mom, Lauren (also a teenager in 1987, played by Troy L. Johnson), and because Back to the Future had been such a popular movie two years earlier, it doesn’t seem weird to her that someone figured out time travel based on her designs. Their mission becomes twofold: stop the Sweet Sixteen Killer and get Jamie back to her time, even though it will likely be altered by whatever she does in the past (if it saves her mom, she’s willing to take that chance). Naturally, most of those plans don’t pan out, and so Jamie and Lauren scramble to salvage any parts that they can, and the results are both chaotic and ultimately pretty amusing.
Produced by (among others) Jason Blum, Totally Killer gets mixed results as both a slasher film and a comedy. Jamie’s observations about 1980s culture and how inappropriate much of its is—from sexist male behavior accepted as the norm to the racist school mascot—are actually pretty funny, but most of the film is just mixing and matching material from other, better movies. That may be the point, but that doesn’t make the film any more interesting. I liked the relationship Jamie has with her dad Blake (Lochlyn Munro), but she has to keep him and her mom from hooking up any earlier than they did in her timeline. Did I mention that not all goes according to plan? The young cast is certainly game and energetic, especially when the violence kicks in, but the actual mystery of who the killer is, what his motives are, and why he resurfaces 35 years later almost don’t matter by the end of the film. When you want the audience to get invested in the movie’s central mystery, do a little better with your reveals.
Jamie’s return home ends up becoming dependent on her cell phone’s battery life and her ability to find something resembling a wifi signal in 1987, both of which are circumstances just bizarre enough to be amusing but not actually all that funny. That’s kind of the movie in a nutshell. But Shipka and her squad of young actors save the film in many ways and give it a lifeforce that isn’t there in the screenplay. Enthusiasm and good intention win the day, but just barely, making Totally Killer something of a muffled scream in the horror-comedy realm.
The film is now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.
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