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“Totally Killer” is a meta modern day slasher comedy in a unique blend of some familiar favorites: “Halloween,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Back to the Future.” Confused as to how these movies all fit together? Let me walk you through it.
It’s Halloween night in a small town with a legacy: a legacy of a serial killer. Thirty-five years ago, a masked murderer killed three teens by stabbing them each sixteen times on their sixteenth birthdays, earning themselves the name “The Sweet Sixteen Killer,” whose presence is strikingly similar to that of Michael Myers. This story haunts the people of Vernon but most of all Pam, the mother of Jamie Hughes, whose friends were murdered so many years ago.
Jamie (Kiernan Shipka), whose name is inspired by the scream queen herself and OG slasher star Jamie Lee Curtis, just wants to go out for the night, but her paranoid mother has hesitations. It is Halloween, after all. Jamie insists she and her brainiac friend Amelia will be fine going to a concert on their own, and begrudgingly Pam agrees. In the quiet night and in Jamie’s absence, The Sweet Sixteen Killer strikes the Hughes household, stabbing Pam sixteen times.
The town offers Jamie little to no sympathy as she grieves the loss of her mother, desperately searching for attempts to right this wrong. She spends her time helping Amelia tinker with a science project in an abandoned carnival (this location seems irrelevant at the time, but it makes sense later, I promise). The project Amelia is working on just so happens to be a time machine. That same night Jamie is chased down by the masked killer, escaping death only by finding safety in Amelia’s invention, which then takes her back to 1987, the year of this killer’s first spree.
The 80’s are a much different time than 2023, or so the film argues. Nearly everyone chain smokes, people put way too much trust in strangers, and there are subtle hints of racism just about everywhere. Adjusting to this strange new world around her, Jamie is met with the high school version of her mom who is in a preppy quartet of mean girls who call themselves “The Mollys” and all dress like different versions of Molly Ringwald in John Hughes films. Now Jamie has to find a way to fit into 80s culture, stop the Sweet Sixteen Killer, find a way to travel back home across time, all while trying to be friends with her mom.
Just like any good modern day horror film, “Totally Killer” is completely aware of the genre it is in. It is indebted to the long lineage of slasher films that have created its own tropes and conventions that this film closely adheres to. There are blatant references to horror films like “Halloween,” and “Scream” each with their own masked killers, and Jamie even refers to herself as Marty McFly, referencing “Back to the Future.” For fans of the slasher, or even modern film history in general, this one is filled with fun nods and Easter Eggs to dissect.
There are a few odd editing choices, like some overtly oversaturated color correction giving a campy neo-noir feel to the tone and some audio that doesn’t quite line up. But despite this, “Totally Killer” is a great women lead slasher film with a perfect blend of humor and not-too-scary horror.
