For better or worse (mostly better), the effects of Chrstopher Landon’s genre blending Happy Death Day are still keenly being felt as every year now seems to bring another mash up of a slasher movie and the plot of a famous family movie. As we all know, Happy Death Day (and its multiverse breaching sequel) mostly takes its cue from the Bill Murray comedy, Groundhog Day that saw its heroine reliving the the day of her murder over and over again and next came Landon’s Freaky; which was essentially Freaky Friday with a hulking serial killer thrown into the mix. Awaiting release as of when I write this is Tyler Macintye’s It’s A Wonderful Knife which seems to be pretty self explanatory, but lurking between these titles is Nahnatchka Kahn’s Totally Killer, which takes all the stabby, slashy tropes of the smart-ass slasher flick and grafts it onto the DNA of Back To The Future. Can this latest entry from the tireless Jason Blum use incredibly careless time travel to keep this adorable streak going? Only one way to find out…
The small town of Vernon has something of a twisted history thanks to the murderous efforts of the Sweet Sixteen Killer; a masked madman who brutally stabbed three friends to death over five nights as they all celebrated their birthdays. The killer was never caught and Pam Hughes, the fourth member of that little clique, went on to become something of a helicopter mom over her exasperated daughter, Jamie. However, when the Sweet Sixteen Killer seemingly returns after thirty five years of inaction and murders Pam, Jamie vows to bring the crazed lunatic to justice.
Enter Jamie’s brainbox best friend, Amelia, who, with a run down photo booth and he book of mother’s science notes, has managed to almost create a working time machine, however, when the Sweet Sixteen Killer shows up, an accedentially well placed knife kicks the machine into gear and blasts Jamie back in time to 1987.
Arriving only days before the Sweet Sixteen Killer claimed his first victim Jamie has to try and blend in during a time when things like political correctness, tolerance and even basic security checks hardly exist and try to catch the killer before he starts taking out Pam’s friends.
After getting over the shock that her overprotective mother and her friends were actually mean girls back in the day, Jamie has to infiltrate the group and try to keep them all alive but this is hampered by the fact that they’re all horribly irresponsible and frustratingly entitled, making it harder than you’d think to keep them out of trouble. However, two major issues raises their heads – if Jamie is in the past, who is going to protect Amelia in the present from that time period’s killer? Worse yet, what if Jamie’s heroic attempts manage to change the future to such a degree, she’ll return to a future where she never existed?
Those more familiar with the more vicious stylings of Radio Silence’s Scream revivals may find Totally Killer way too frothy to take seriously; but in the flip side, not being taken seriously seems to be the movie’s main goal. Not only does it share the broad tone of Christopher Landon’s earlier works, but it also contains more than a few similarities with 2015’s The Final Girls which also saw an out of time heroine tumble into an 80s horror movie to also save her mom from a bloody fate. However, while Totally Killer plays fully into its goofy nature, it’s actually a hell of a lot of fun that makes full use of its Scream/Back To Future melding by leaning heavily on comedic future shock as Kiernan Shipka’s typically spunky lead finds that wrestling with the 80s is just as tough as wrestling with a mad dog lunatic with a stylish mask and knife. Following in the footsteps of other starlets such as Katheryn Newton and Jessica Rothe, Shipka proves to be yet another charismatic lead who handles the comedy of her predicament very well as she lurches from exasperation with an entire decade to fighting for her life.
Lovingly ripping the piss out of the 80s is hardly new territory for a horror comedy, but Totally Killer manages to somehow mine new material from proceedings with the best running joke being Jamie’s added plot armour that practically allows her to walk into any situation – be it simply walking into a high school and claim to be an exchange student or even taking control of a fairground ride – due to there being literally no security measures in place at all.
Admittedly, some of the more hardcore horror beats take a back seat to the chuckles with none of the outlandish gore of, say, Freaky, making it onto the film (no table saw dissections here), however, the deaths are still bloody enough to get the point across without going full bloodbath. However, Totally Killer benefits from a striking mask design for its central murderer with its Rob Lowe-smile and its chiseled jaw resembling every male, 80s douche-nozzle that ever emerged from a cinematic high school football team.
Some of the set pieces are pretty imaginative too, with the movie getting good mileage from various settings such as a house party, log cabin and, best of all, a fairground. In fact the final battle that rages on one of those centrifugal force rides that uses inertia to pin people to the outer wall is one of the more out-there slasher scenarios of recent years.
The cast gives Shipka able support with the youthful members giving it their best 80s airhead and we even get Modern Family’s Julie Bowen as the older Pam and the ubiquitous Randall Park as an impressively ignorant town sherriff who tosses away a sample of the killer’s blood because its gross.
Those unable to push past the jovial tone or the cartoonish science involved, might find things to childish for their liking (if you gonna have a problem with a kid building a working time machine for science class, you might be best sitting this one out) and the final reveal of the killer is both clever, but weirdly throwaway too, but Kahn isn’t particularly interested in the mechanics of the thing as much as how much fun she can make it. Taken in this regard, Totally Killer is a primary coloured attack on the eyeballs that has energy to spare and while it may not be as well handled as Happy Death Day or as brutal as Freaky, it still manages to plunge its oversized happy-knife deeply enough into your body to scrape the funny bone and because worthy continuation of the perky, family/slasher trend.
Hack to the Future, anyone?
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