Totally Killer

Grade: A-

Time travel stories pose a lot of narrative challenges and paradoxes. I call them but-what-abouts. Totally Killer does a pretty good job preemptively answering/explaining those questions. Here, unlike in Back to the Future, if you go back in time and prevent your parents from ending up together, you don’t disappear. You become just an extra person that nobody knows, in your home time. This movie ends with a character helpfully giving another one a notepad that lays out everything in this new timeline that will be different for them. I like that touch, but unfortunately, there’s an unresolved, unaddressed problem that made me say “but what about…?”

No matter. Totally Killer is a Tilt-A-Whirl of a film – dizzyingly exciting, entertaining, and a bit disorienting. Time travel is just one of several pies the movie has its fingers in. There are elements of slasher (this is where it’s the weakest; it’s never really that scary), John Hughes tropes, the obsessiveness of podcasters who will do anything to chase that next like or follow, and more. It’s so consistently sweet, fun, colorful, hip, and sneaky-funny that I accepted every last flight of fancy it chose to veer off to.

The movie is carried by the enormously committed and engaging lead performance by Kiernan Shipka (Sally Draper from Mad Men). She plays teenager Jamie Hughes, ever so symbolically named. It’s Halloween 2023, and, according to the characters, the 35 year anniversary of the “Sweet Sixteen Murders” of late October 1987. You can do the math on that. 1987 from 2023 isn’t 35. I’m surprised that goof made it into the movie, but I can move on now that I’ve picked that bone. The murder victims were three of Jamie’s mom’s high school friends, stabbed by an unknown person wearing a mask that looks like a cross between Max Headroom and Billy Idol. When the Sweet Sixteen killer claims another victim in the present day, and is after Jamie, she hides in what ends up being a time machine, and accidentally sends herself back to 1987. Now, being however many years in the past, she makes it a mission to stop these killings before they happen. You might think of Minority Report.

The fish-out-of-water jokes are clever. I laughed unexpectedly and frequently. There’s a very amusing recurring motif that shows how lenient school front offices were in those days, when it came to getting information about students. Or how Jamie keeps clocking instances of quips, comments, and situations that haven’t aged well, and would never fly however many years later. I liked how the dodgeball game was staged like Saving Private Ryan. We’ve all felt that way, I’m sure.

The climax lost me a little bit, with its lengthy, convoluted, confusing explanation. Talk about a case of the but-what-abouts. However, by then, I was so won over by the sheer charm and campy cinematic spectacle of it all, that I hardly cared. Totally Killer is a shining example of a would-be cult classic fall popcorn annual rewatch done well – and I was taken aback by how well it got away with it. It’s candy.

Grade: A-