Horrorfest 2023: Totally Killer

Totally Killer

Written by David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver and Jen D'Angelo

Directed by Nahnatchka Khan

Starring Kiernan Shipka, Olivia Holt and Greg Gilreath

USA, 2023

TOTALLY KILLER has a premise that had me interested from the get-go -- it's basically BACK TO THE FUTURE if Marty had to go back in time to stop a serial killer rather than getting his parents to fall in love. Also, in this one, it's someone from today going back to the 80s, and that someone is a teenage girl played by Kiernan Shipka, who used to be the little girl on MAD MEN.

The movie has a lot of fun with this premise, focusing more on the cultural differences between present-day and the late 80s than on the technology or lack thereof. BACK TO THE FUTURE was made at an interesting time when there wasn't that huge of a difference between 1955 and 1985 -- sure, back then we thought there was, but with the benefit of hindsight and knowing how exponentially quickly the world continues to change, there's a much bigger gulf between 1987 and 2023.

Now that I've written that I'm beginning to waffle. I guess it's all relative, and since I lived through the last 30 years I'd be more likely to be sympathetic to the way times have changed than I would be to several decades before I was born. But, I do think the attitudes are different -- this movie has a lot of fun with the way kids are more in touch with their feelings, less prone to bullying, and more inclusive than they were in the 80s. Shipka's character isn't baffled by the lack of the internet, for example, so much as she is by the fact that the high school has absolutely no security standards and the students and teachers are all openly awful to each other.

Going into the movie, I assumed the time travel would be magic or fantasy based, or maybe even unexplained, but no, there's a teenage whiz kid (Kelsey Mawema) who has built a time machine out of a photo booth for a class science project. When the Sweet 16 Killer appears after a 30-year hiatus, the whiz kid's best pal (Shipka) is accidentally sent back in time, where she realizes armed with the knowledge of the future, she might be able o put a stop to the Sweet 16 Killer's reign of terror before it begins, and in the process, save her own mother's life (Olivia Holt as a teen, Julie Bowen as an adult).

The time travel stuff is the silliest stuff and is really only there to get the premise going, so once we hand wave it away we have a way-more-inventive-than-usual slasher whodunnit with lots of great "then vs. now" jokes. The movie also has a lot of fun with the younger versions of characters vs. the older versions of characters, and in the end, a funny epilogue showing how the events of the movie have changed the fates of several characters. On top of all that, it tends to take turns you don't expect, rather than just playing out the way you assume it will, which is a nice added layer and a sign the filmmakers here weren't content to just do the bare minimum.