Totally Killer

Thirty-five years after the shocking murders of three teens, an infamous killer returns on Halloween night to claim a fourth victim. When 17-year-old Jamie comes face-to-face with the masked maniac, she accidentally time-travels back to 1987. Forced to survive in an unfamiliar world, Jamie teams up with her teenage mother to take down the psycho killer once and for all.

Totally Killer is mostly filled with a ton of jokes about how a Zoomer would react at experiencing the casual cruelty and complete disregard for a child’s safety that was growing up in the Wild Wild West of the 80s. It’s basically Back to the Future meets Scream meets A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, but while the film does use both Back to the Future and Scream as cultural touchstones, all while wearing those films’ influences clearly on its sleeve, it never once mentions A Sound of Thunder, which is odd to me, as that’s the source material it actually has the most in common with. Okay, maybe it’s not that odd, but still, Jamie’s mere presence in the past is enough to alter future events, which then becomes a problem for her as she attempts to use her future-knowledge to stop the murder spree before it can even happen, so you’d think they’d at least make a nod. It’s not like it’s completely obscure, not only was the story directly adapted into a terrible film, but Ashton Kutcher made the film The Butterfly Effect, which was also terrible, but popular enough that it had multiple also terrible sequels.

Anyway…

So, yeah, right from the start, you should understand that this is the kind of film where the plot hinges on two kids just casually inventing a Time Machine in an old Photo Booth for their school science fair, and it doesn’t give a fuck if you think that’s a huge narrative leap.

Does not give a fuck.

For me, being an old fart, the main thing that really stuck with me here is how most 80s set movies these days all look like the production design was done by people who, while they may not have actually been alive back then, they have watched a ton of Saved by the Bell episodes. One detail they did get right is how ridiculous and weird waterbeds were, and how inexplicably popular they were. Keep in mind, I say all this while still dealing with the fact that Back to Future was released in 1985, and how, in that film, Marty McFly time-travels back to 1955, which was 30 years earlier, but felt like a million and a half, and Totally Killer is set in 2023, and in the film, Jaime travels back in time to the year 1987, which is 36 years ago…

…wait, so 1987 is farther away now, then 1955 was when Back to the Future came out?

…

That can’t be right…

Anyway… to sum up, this is a film where the plot is honestly pretty secondary to a bunch of “look how crazy the 1980s were” jokes, jokes that are not all bad either, to be fair, but this also means that the reveal of the killer’s identity is a bit underwhelming and doesn’t quite make sense, but again… this is a time-traveling Photo Booth movie. Whatta ya’ want?

Also, most of the adult characters aren’t well enough established in the beginning of the film so that we can easily make the connection that they’re the same characters later on when we meet the teen versions. In most cases, this connection is only made when it’s revealed by the movie’s ending, which is when you then realize that you were even supposed to have recognized that the teen characters were the adults you met in the beginning, and that that was important, because the way that the adult characters acted was the basis for a lot of the jokes about the teen characters… so that was a bit awkward.

In the film’s favor, it does have plenty of blood and some raunchy humor, so at least there was that for your Halloween season. Also, I was pleasantly surprised with how the film eventually decides that the murder victims in 1987 all basically deserved it, and also, it wasn’t totally wrong about that either, at least… y’know, in theory…

Impressive risk.

Not bad. Kinda fun. Worth a matinee.