Totally Killer (2023) – Tubular

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 6th October
Seen: 7th October

One of the most fun additions to the horror genre recently has been when someone takes a classic supernatural comedy film and throws a serial killer in the middle of it. Groundhog Day with a serial killer? You get Happy Death Day. Freaky Friday with a serial killer? You get Freaky. It’s insanely simple to pull this off, half the work was done in the 80s so changing it from a zany comedy to a camp slasher is a fun new addition that we need a lot more of. There’s also some upcoming stuff like Caddy Hack, a horror version of the classic comedy Caddyshack and something called Time Cut which sounds like it’s going to be a spin on Back to the Future but with a serial killer… but apparently, that film has been waiting too long because it got beaten to the punch by Totally Killer and the bar is now set pretty damn high.

Totally Killer starts in the year 2022 in a little town that, 35 years ago, was rocked by a brutal series of murders known as the Sweet 16 Killings due to them happening to a trio of girls on their 16th birthdays who were all stabbed 16 times. It’s a legendary story that had everyone in the town scared of what would happen around Halloween of every year, including the parents of Jamie Hughes (Kiernan Shipka) who are extra protective and scared for their daughter.

Those fears are realised when the Sweet 16 killer returns and kills Jamie’s mother who is seemingly connected to the murders from 35 years ago. Jamie is distraught at first but soon learns that her super-genius best friend has built a time machine for a school science fair which ends up accidentally sending Jamie back to 1987. Now she has a chance to stop the original Sweet 16 killings, save her mom, and change the future for the better… and possibly do some weapons-grade cocaine since it is the 80s, that shit is everywhere.

From the moment it starts, Totally Killer might as well have a big sign on its head that says “We’re doing something very silly, stop overthinking it and have fun” because that’s the vibe that basically flows throughout the feature. Everything is heightened to a borderline cliche, especially in every sequence set in the 80s. Every hairdo is as high as you can get, every outfit is high camp and tacky and every single person is as un-PC as you can possibly get. It’s almost a parody of what the 80s were like from the perspective of someone who only heard about the decade from movies, which is the most fun way to present the decade. There’s nothing here to take that seriously, it’s all just a very silly setting that allows Totally Killer to indulge in making fun of the tropes that Back to the Future created.

Throwing a teenager from 2022 into the late 80s leads to a long series of jokes where someone looks back on how people behaved back then and points out the problems with it, most of the time those jokes work pretty well but sometimes they just kind of kills the fun vibe that’s being built. It’s a tough balancing act to pull off, commenting on the issues of the 80s in a film that’s leaning hard into the campy vibe of the decade and most of the time Totally Killer manages to make it work but there are a few times when some modern critique is thrown out and it’s hard not to sigh and go “We get it, the 80s were problematic!”.

The big thing that Totally Killer needed to get right was how they were going to handle the time travel issue, since it’s borrowing from Back To The Future it has to bring up the question of how things change because of what Jamie does in the past. Fortunately, that element is well handled and explained pretty clearly so the stakes (beyond, you know, being stabbed over a dozen times by a guy in a Billy Idol mask) are easy to understand. It’s not trying to be more complicated than it needs to be, it’s a fun slasher borrowing the basic plotline of one of the greatest sci-fi comedies of all time and that’s all it needs to be. 

Totally Killer does admittedly have a fairly instantly iconic villain with the Sweet 16 Killer, the strangeness of the Billy Idol mask is just right for the era and fits the tone of Totally Killer in being creepy but also very silly. While he might not be going for anything unique in his kills and you won’t get much more than a few shock stabbings, there’s still enough menace behind him to make the scenes where someone gets confronted/killed by him actually effective, in particular the scene where the main characters mother really kicks his ass before he finally does what needs to be done to begin the plot. 

Totally Killer pretty much delivers, it’s a time travel slasher set in the 80s that has a lot of fun with the basic premise. There’s definitely a lot more that it could do that’d make it more interesting, there are a few jokes that don’t land like you would hope they would and a little more variety in the death sequences would be appreciated but it gives the exact experience you expect upon hearing the premise of Totally Killer. It’s good enough that a little part of me hopes that it does well enough to get a sequel so they can just do a slasher version of the entire Back to the Future trilogy, let’s keep this going until we get the slasher set in the old west. It’s stupid fun and that’s all it had to be.