Summary
The latest in Blumhouse’s mixture of classic comedies and slasher movie tropes, Totally Killer is a lot of fun.
With Nahnatchka Khan directing and Jason Blum producing, Totally Killer does exactly what the audience expects regarding its mixture of time travel and horror movie tropes. Thankfully, that’s a good thing. With a great cast and a well-tuned screenplay, the mix of comedy, slasher movie thrills, and pop culture references combine to make for a fun effort from Khan and the Blumhouse stable. We break it down with an official, spoiler-free review.
Totally Killer Review and Plot Summary
Thrity-five years after her mother survived a brutal killing spree in her hometown, teenager Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) finds herself mourning the loss of her mum when the killer strikes again during Halloween night.
Thankfully, her best friend has invented a time machine and soon finds herself back in 1987, trying to change history, find out who the killer is, and hopefully return to the present day before she is wiped from history forever.
Following in the footsteps of Happy Death Day and Freaky, Totally Killer follows the recurring Blumhouse format of combining a beloved comedy film with the iconography of the slasher movie.
If the Happy Death Day films were slasher variants of Groundhog Day and Freaky a more brutal version of Freaky Friday, then Totally Killer asks the question of what Back to the Future would be like if a Max Headroom-masked serial killer was in the mix.
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Themes of nostalgia, pop culture references, and the horror of meeting your parents when they were your own age abound throughout Nahnatchka Khan’s film. Like her previous work in the romantic comedy Always Be My Maybe and television series such as Don’t Trust the B**** in Apartment 23 and Fresh off the Boat, there’s a clear love of genre infused throughout even while it’s unafraid to take it apart and refer back to previous works in the genre.
What makes the film function as entertainingly as it does is that, like previous Blumhouse concoctions of this nature, there is an abundance of charm and fun to go alongside some admittedly very brutal set pieces. This is a very stabby film throughout.
Totally Killer is totally worth it
The film radiates a love of the films it is calling back to while also doing its own thing to very entertaining effect. Kiernan Shipka makes for a very fun protagonist throughout, the jokes are legitimately funny, and much comedy is mined by not only the set-pieces but also in the horror of seeing how your parents were compared at your age in comparison to the people they have grown up to be.
Nicely timed for Halloween, Totally Killer is breezy fun and well worth streaming over the scary season. It may not reinvent the envelope in regards to horror or time travel comedies, but sometimes it’s just fun to get a well-produced mixture of those genres that know how to play the hits to humourous and entertaining effect.
What did you think of the 2023 movie Totally Killer? Comment below.
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