Kiernan Shipka stars as a teen who time travels to the ’80s – on a mission to stop a serial killer – in horror comedy Totally Killer. It’s a fantastic ride that delights in skewering the tropes of the horror genre in the name of a bloody good laugh, writes David Michael Brown.
Totally Killer
Taking a bloody page from Blumhouse’s own Happy Death Day copybook, Totally Killer mixes Back to the Future time-travelling conundrums with Scream’s murderously meta bloodletting to vicious effect. Throw in a snarky sneer at Heathers and you have a hugely entertaining stab at that difficult-to-nail(gun) sub-genre, the horror comedy.
And, like the best films in that sub-genre like John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, this fish-out-of-water pic has the guts to take its laughs as seriously as its gore-soaked chills.
Best known as Don Draper’s petulant daughter Sally in Mad Men, Kiernan Shipka plays Jamie Hughes, a typical teen in Vernon, a town haunted by the horrific crimes of the “Sweet Sixteen Killer” who butchered three 16-year-old girls, stabbing them 16 times back in 1987. Now, 35 years later the masked maniac is back. On Halloween. While 17-year-old Jamie’s father (Lochlyn Munro) is chaperoning his daughter to a concert, her mother Pam (Modern Family’s Julie Bowen) opens the door to a trick-or-treater, only to be stabbed to death by a seemingly resurrected “Sweet Sixteen Killer.”
A distraught Jamie talks to her brainiac friend who happens to be building a time machine and before you can say “Marty McFly”, she finds herself in the year that the three girls were murdered. She hopes to prevent those deaths and in turn, stop her mother’s murder in the future while still going to High School. But when she meets her mother as a teenager, perfectly played by Olivia Holt, she is shocked to discover that her helicopter mum is not only known as the “Wicked Witch of Vernon” but is also a member of the snarky school clique known as “The Mollys” because they dress up as Molly Ringwald characters.
With her phone battery rapidly depleting, she plans to track down the killer by listening to a true crime podcast that will help her predict when and where the murders will happen. Eventually teaming up with her teen Mum, what she doesn’t bank on are the raging hormones of the ’80s teenagers, the ineptitude of the local cops and the horrendous sexism of the era. The script snaps like a broken neck as an exasperated Jamie is thwarted at every turn. Director Nahnatchka Khan keeps proceedings bright, focusing more on the humour than the horror (not that the murders aren’t gruesome, after all each victim is stabbed 16 times).
Behind the grue and the gags, this faux ’80s slasher is surprisingly knowing and intelligent in its characterisation. When was the last time you heard Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees talk about the space-time continuum and the Mandela Effect?
The dialogue zings as a shocked Jamie deals with a tactless era. Whether aghast at skimpy gym attire, “How is this school issue, we look like we work at Hooters” or shocked at crass slogans, “by the way, your t-shirt is super problematic,” Shipka, who has displayed similar sass in the lead role of the teenage witch in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, is fabulous in the role. Especially as she becomes increasingly exasperated by the “anything goes” attitude of her new classmates.
For all the wicked ingenuity, gallows humour and jibes aimed at the decade that taste forgot, the big reveal and the subsequent final battle in a fairground to get back to the future do fail to live up to the promise of the ferociously paced set-up. Much like many of the Blumhouse high-concept slashers, including the aforementioned Happy Death Day, Totally Killer’s mind-bending central conceit and the big slice-and-dice moments can’t maintain the mirth and murderous machinations through to the climatic puff of pink mist. But despite this slight tempering of spirits, Totally Killer is a fantastic ride that delights in skewering the tropes of the horror genre in the name of a bloody good laugh.
