Nahnatchka Khan’s Totally Killer is an entertaining riff on John Carpenter’s Halloween by way of Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future. It might not be quite as incisive a piece of genre dismemberment as Wes Craven’s Scream or Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods, but it has a lot of fun poking at the tricks and tropes of slasher movies all the same.
Totally Killer begins in a small suburban town where a masked murderer known as The Sweet Sixteen Killer gruesomely slayed three teenage girls on Halloween night in 1987. Fast-forward to the present and the one that got away, Pam (Julie Bowen), still fears that one day the killer will return for her or, worse, for her 16-year-old daughter, Jamie (Kiernan Shipka). It turns out that Pam is paranoid but not paranoid enough, as the masked man reappears on Halloween night while Pam is home alone and finally adds her to his list of victims.
Shortly after this tragic event, Jamie goes to see her best friend, Amelia (Kelcey Mawema), a budding genius who reveals that her latest science fair project just so happens to be a time machine. Naturally, this teen-built time traverser is exactly where Jamie ends up hiding when the killer comes for her, sending them both hurtling back to that fateful Halloween in 1987.
That’s a stupendously silly plot device that Totally Killer—as written by David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver, Jen D’Angelo—casually introduces, making no attempt to justify rationally or lampshade with self-aware gags about how goofy the whole situation is. Instead, it opts for a refreshingly unself-conscious “just go with it” attitude that comes to define the rest of the film.
Jamie steps out of the time machine into a world of big hair and bad outfits, and the culture clash she experiences as a Gen Z teen in an ’80s world is the source of a lot of the film’s comedy. The jokes about the era can be more than a little obvious, with a few overly meta moments that threaten to drag the whole thing into the realm of pure parody (one sight gag about smoking involves a plume of smog so oversized that it would fit right into a Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker movie). But Jamie is such a likeable character that she easily carries Totally Killer through its weaker stretches. The furrowed brow that Shipka perfected on Mad Men serves her well, and her deadpan responses to each bewildering new anachronism are unfailingly funny.
Nothing surprises Jamie quite as much as the first encounter with the teenage version of her mother (played by Olivia Holt), a gum-chewing mean girl who spends her school days bombarding less popular kids with insults and dodgeballs, each delivered with the same deadly precision. Since Pam is friends with the three murdered girls, Jamie does her best to ingratiate herself within her mother’s social circle in the hopes of stopping the killer before he can strike. The script doesn’t really make much room for the rest of the characters to transcend the archetypes they’ve been assigned—mostly as dumb jocks and Molly Ringwald wannabes—but every performance brims with an infectious energy and an almost irrational confidence.
Although it does contain some surprisingly gnarly violence, Totally Killer is more interested in making audiences laugh. As Jamie tries to stay one step ahead of the killer, there’s a running gag about the total lack of basic security measures she encounters; school officials are happy to provide her with the full name and schedule of another student just because she asked. It’s a funny joke that simultaneously gives Shipka another opportunity to be charmingly baffled and Totally Killer the excuse to move at an enjoyably brisk pace for the remainder of its runtime.
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