As a capsule description Totally Killer sounds totally familiar. A nice white-picket American town in 1987. Three 16-year-old females murdered, stabbed 16 times by the same masked mystery assailant. The murderer never caught. Now, 35 years later, on Halloween, it’s happening again.
A Nightmare on Elm Street? Friday the 13th? Most obviously Halloween – the date, the mask, the teenagers, the burbs and all that. Yes. But no. Because to that heady bestiary of 1980s horror, writers David Matalon and Sasha Perl-Raver add another mid-1980s staple – the time-travel movie, à la Back to the Future (1985) or Peggy Sue Got Married (1986).
Kiernan Shipka plays Jamie Hughes, the Peggy Sue/Marty McFly avatar who gets propelled into the past when someone in her own family is brutally murdered by what appears to be the same masked killer who terrorised the town decades before. There, her job is to disarm the killer, with a bit of luck before he starts going to work on three innocent teens, but certainly before he lays down the trail that will lead to her own family decades in the future (being a bit non-specific here for obvious reasons).
And one other thing. She has to get back to the present in a time machine which now seems to be broken.
What ensues is more or less what you’d expect to ensue. But Totally Killer does it in a smart way. It messes around with both horror and time-travel movies of a very 1980s sort with much of the fun coming from knowing what’s being referenced. So when the time-travel boffin turns to be a young black female rather than an old white male, in 2023 we understand it’s making a point that a 1980s audience would have found quite possibly baffling, even if the point is only “why always an old white guy?”
When Jamie arrives back in the 1980s and enrols at her mother’s school, under a false name, she’s stunned that she can walk right in there and enrol, no ID required. Even more stunned when it turns out that gym classes are not optional and that her gym teacher’s favourite sport is the belittlement of her students.
In what’s possibly a 1980s comment on 2020s behaviour, Jamie is concerned with words more than deeds, of inappropriateness most obviously. She’s a woke(ish) girl in an unwoke era where guys wear T shirts emblazoned with the big letters FBI (in smaller letters “Federal Boob Inspector”).
Both the grand concept and the small details work. Which is handy because there is another movie out, called The Final Girls (2015), whose fans claim Totally Killer has heavily borrowed its big idea – time travel into a 1980s burbs-killer movie. The director went as far as to tweet (as I believe we no longer say in 2023 – ah, time travel) about the similarities. I checked the Wikipedia page for Totally Killer. At the bottom it said, quite baldly, “See also: The Final Girls”. Update: this part of the Wikipedia entry now seems to have been deleted.
It wouldn’t be the first time a concept has been ripped off wholesale and I’ll obviously have to get round to The Final Girls but either way Totally Killer is clever, well done, funny and thoughtful. Kiernan Shipka is a good choice as Jamie, likeable and plucky in the way that Michael J Fox was, rocking tight jeans and white sneakers like Marty McFly did – and a white fringed leather (vegan leather?) jacket – like he didn’t. It deals with time paradoxes because that’s what films involving time travel – or “fucking time travel” as it’s described in the movie’s final three words – are meant to do, in a manner that’s just about adequate. In its heart this is more about the horror than the time travel.
It’s director Nahnatchka Khan’s feature debut and it’s clear that years of writing and producing spoofy shows like American Dad have stood her in good stead. She gets it all right. This is what it sets out to be – great entertainment.
Totally Killer – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
