USA. 2023.
Crew
Director – Nahnatchka Khan, Screenplay – Jen D’Angelo, David Matalon & Sasha Perl-Raver, Story – David Matalon & Sasha Perl-Raver, Producers – Jason Blum, Greg Gilreath & Adam Hendricks, Photography – Judd Overton, Music – Michael Andrews, Visual Effects – Ingenuity Studios, VFX Legion, ULC & Visionary FX, Special Effects Supervisor – James Paradis, Production Design – Liz Kay. Production Company – BH Television/Divide-Conquer Productions/Fierce Baby Productions.
Cast
Kiernan Shipka (Jamie Hughes), Olivia Holt (Pam Miller), Troy L. Johnson (Teen Lauren Creston), Julie Bowen (Pam Hughes), Lochlyn Munro (Adult Blake Hughes), Kelcey Mawema (Amelia Creston), Jonathan Potts (Adult Chris Dubasage), Liana Liberato (Tiffany Clark), Stephi Chin-Salvo (Marisa Song), Anna Diaz (Heather Hernandez), Nathaniel Appiah (Teen Doug Summers), Randall Park (Sheriff Dennis Lim), Charlie Gillespie (Teen Blake Hughes), Kimberly Huie (Adult Lauren Creston), Ella Choi (Teen Kara Lim), Patti Kim (Sheriff Kara Lim), Tate Chernen (Teen Eddie Royal), Andrew Barber (Deputy Brody), Jeremy Monn-Djasngar (Teen Randy Finkle), Zach Gibson (Teen Lurch), Nicholas Lloyd (Teen Chris Dubasage), Amy Goodmurphy (Coach Zane), Conrad Coates (Principal Doug Summers), Fred Henderson (Norm Dubasage), Eliza Norbury (Pam’s Mother)
Plot
Halloween nears in the town of Devon. It is the 34th anniversary of the Sweet Sixteen Killings in 1987 where a masked killer struck and killed three girls around the town, stabbing each sixteen times. The killer was never identified. Teenager Jamie Hughes goes out with her friend Amelia Creston, while back home the Sweet Sixteen Killer bursts in and kills Jamie’s mother Pam. Jamie’s father reveals that the killer left a note in Pam’s locker back in 1987 saying that she would be next one day. Amelia has built a time machine developed from her mother’s unfinished plans using the photomat booth in the local abandoned fairground, although has been unable to get it working. Jamie is then pursued by the killer and hides in the booth. As the killer stabs at her, they strike the machine with their knife and activate it. Jamie emerges back in 1987, just before the killings occur. She sets out to find her mother and the other three victims, who form a bitchy clique known as The Mollys, and prevent the killings from occurring. However, as the killer strikes, the girls seem more interested in partying than heeding Jamie’s warnings.
Totally Killer is a production from Blumhouse, the near ubiquitous production company of Jason Blum, which has been behind the success of the assorted Paranormal Activity, Insidious and The Purge films, among a good many others. (See below for Blumhouse’s other films). In the director’s chair is Iranian emigre Nahnatchka Khan, a writer who has created tv comedies such as Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23 (2012-3), Fresh Off the Boat (2015-20) and Young Rock (2021-3), as well as having directed one previous non-genre film with the romantic comedy Always Be My Maybe (2019).
Some of Blumhouse’s more recent films give the impression that they have been pitched in terms of combining horror themes with unlikely other films. Happy Death Day (2017) felt as though it was a conceptual mashup of Groundhog Day (1993) and a slasher film, while Freaky (2020) seemed a mashup between a slasher film and a bodyswap film like Freaky Friday (1976), while less than a month after came this out there was It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023), which was a slasher version of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Both of these influence Totally Killer, which feels as though someone has pitched it as a mashup between Back to the Future (1985) and Halloween (1978). I neither much cared for Happy Death Day or Freaky but Totally Killer is a good deal of fun. Surprisingly, unlike these other two, it didn’t receive a theatrical release but was made directly for Amazon Prime.
I liked the snide snappiness of the dialogue. There are some amusing digs at cultural differences between 1980s and the present with Kiernan Shipka’s disbelief at the lack of privacy when she goes to the school desk clerk, or her throwaway comment “Flying on a plane right now must be insane.” In another scene, she is handed a baggie of weed and hands it back in disbelief commenting on the greater effectiveness of gummies. Or where after a viewing of RoboCop (1987), Olivia Holt asks “Do the machines kill us all?” to which Kiernan replies “No, the machines don’t kill us all. They more just rip apart the fabric of society via dance videos on TikTok.” There is a particularly amusing scene where Kiernan goes into the police station with a cloth that has the killer’s blood and is ridiculed when she talks of DNA and suggesting they look up the database.
One of things that initially switched me off about Totally Killer was its insistence on writing modern morality over everything. In the first half of the film, much of Kiernan Shipka’s dialogue consists of her going around greeting 1980s culture with moral disapproval. Upon seeing her gym attire, she comments “We look like we work at Hooters.” Encountering a guy wearing a t-shirt that says ‘Federal Booby Inspector’, she renounces him “Your shirt is super problematic.” After being evicted from entering a party, she is remonstrating the guy “Unwanted touch.” The issue for me is that the film seems to make the assumption that the far more buttoned and morally censored 2020s is superior to the 1980s – as someone who has lived in both eras, I can say I far prefer the freedom that the 1980s offered.
On the other hand, when we get to the second half, the film is not exactly siding with Kiernan’s strident moral attitude. Much of the comedy in the later scenes has her as a nag trying to stop the teens from partying or her parents getting together too soon only to be ignored by the carefree teenagers. There is a particularly well written scene where Kiernan sits down with her teenage mother (Olivia Holt), suggests she shouldn’t be so awful to her mother and gives a paean to mothers, which is dismissed, and accidentally let slip that her mother will end up with Blake. The juggling of balls in the scenes – and the way they play out later in the film – contains some adept writing.
As a Time Travel film where the entire machine is a disused photomat booth in a fairground, you can see we are not exactly in high plausibility stakes here. Indeed, much of Kiernan Shipka’s explanation of who she is consists of telling people “Can you please just watch Back to the Future?” The film also namedrops the Mandela Effect – the persistent belief/conspiracy theory to have emerged in recent years where people misremember events and it is theorised that this is due to changes in the timeline. It specifically states that Back to the Future got it wrong where it has people fading out in photos. Unfortunately, Totally Killer’s set-up where some people have dual sets of memories ends up being equally wrong.
All that happens when you change a timeline is that one track ceases to exist and another pathway takes its place. There should have no crossover or lag between the two because the original path of events that created the other timeline is now something that never happened. The only person who would have dual memories would be the person who travelled back in time and now finds themselves living in two timelines. There is a nice scene at the end where Kimberly Huie presents Kiernan Shipka with a scrapbook of all the changes that occurred in her timeline, but this leaves the question of how she as a single individual in one timeline would know which events are significant alterations. From her point-of-view, she would just be living in a regular timeline and unaware that things are different to anything else.
Jason Blum and his Blumhouse production company have produced a number of other genre films including:- Hamlet (2000), Paranormal Activity (2007) and sequels, Insidious (2010) and sequels, Tooth Fairy (2010), The Bay (2012), The Lords of Salem (2012), The River (tv series, 2012), Sinister (2012) and sequel, Dark Skies (2013), Oculus (2013), The Purge (2013) and sequels, the tv mini-series Ascension (2014), Creep (2014), Jessabelle (2014), Mercy (2014), Mockingbird (2014), Not Safe for Work (2014), Ouija (2014) and sequel, 13 Sins (2014), The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014), Unfriended/Cybernatural (2014), Area 51 (2015), The Boy Next Door (2015), Curve (2015), The Gallows (2015), The Gift (2015), Jem and the Holograms (2015), The Lazarus Effect (2015), Martyrs (2015), Visions (2015), The Visit (2015), The Darkness (2016), Hush (2016), Incarnate (2016), The Veil (2016), Viral (2016), Amityville: The Awakening (2017), Get Out (2017), Happy Death Day (2017), The Keeping Hours (2017), Split (2017), Stephanie (2017), Bloodline (2018), Cam (2018), Delirium (2018), Halloween (2018), Seven in Heaven (2018), Truth or Dare (2018), Upgrade (2018), Black Christmas (2019), Ma (2019), Prey (2019), Don’t Let Go (2019), Sweetheart (2019), Black Box (2020), The Craft: Legacy (2020), Evil Eye (2020), Fantasy Island (2020), Freaky (2020), The Hunt (2020), The Invisible Man (2020), Nocturne (2020), You Should Have Left (2020), Black As Night (2021), The Black Phone (2021), Dashcam (2021), Firestarter (2022), M3gan (2022), Mr Harrigan’s Phone (2022), Nanny (2022), Soft & Quiet (2022), Run Sweetheart Run (2022), Sick (2022), They/Them (2022), Torn Hearts (2022), Unhuman (2022), The Visitor (2022), The Exorcist: Believer (2023), Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023), There’s Something Wrong With the Children (2023), Unseen (2023), Imaginary (2024) and Night Swim (2024).
(Nominee for Best Original Screenplay at this site’s Best of 2023 Awards).
Trailer here