I can imagine that the pitch meeting for TOTALLY KILLER started something like this: “What if we combined Wes Craven’s Scream with Back to the Future?” That’s essentially what the new Blumhouse/Amazon Prime horror comedy is going for — there are even multiple lines of dialogue that reference the two movies, in case the audience doesn’t already see the resemblance. TOTALLY KILLER is a perfect addition to Netflix for this time of year, containing a cast of familiar faces, some bloody slasher fun, and a comedic tone that would land at parties. However, other than being a decent crowd-pleaser, the film leaves much to be desired on most other fronts. It is a horror comedy without anything that stands out as scary or funny, and it doesn’t succeed in flying colors at being either a time-travel film or a slasher horror film.
The movie starts out with a typical horror buildup: just under thirty years ago in the town of Vernon, three girls were murdered by the Sweet Sixteen killer — named so because they would stab their victims sixteen times. Now, the hysteria behind the killings has vanished, and kids dress up as the killer for Halloween, donning the creepy mask that they used back in 1987 when the killings occurred. The film follows teenager Jamie Hughes (Netflix veteran Kiernan Shipka) on Halloween night as she goes to a concert for a local band, but when she returns she finds that the Sweet Sixteen killer has returned and killed her mother (Julie Bowen of Modern Family), who survived the initial killings in 1987. Devastated by her mother’s death, she decides that possibly going back in time using her friend’s unfinished science fair time machine (totally plausible, I know) would be a way to stop the killings from ever happening in the first place.
The buildup to TOTALLY KILLER doesn’t reinvent the wheel in any way, but it has a good foundation for a Netflix high school horror comedy. The first few moments of suspense are heavily inspired by John Carpenter’s Halloween, with the killer lurking in the background as Jamie walks home similar to Michael Myers in the classic 1979 film. The first major scene of slasher horror is genuinely fun and shocking, creating a good amount of menace for the Sweet Sixteen killer that helps build the scares to come. The major flaw comes in the form of the time travel plotline, which feels very unexplained and out of left field. I fully understand that TOTALLY KILLER is not taking itself as seriously as something like Halloween, but it seems common sense and logic fly out the window as soon as the setting changes from 2023 to 1987.
With the change in setting comes a whole new cast of characters (other than Shipka’s Jamie), including Olivia Holt as Jamie’s high-school-age mother. The 1987 landscape should create new opportunities to explore interesting horror plot devices, but instead it just comes across as far less interesting than the present day scenes. The ironic part of TOTALLY KILLER’s clear influence from 80s and 90s slasher films is that it can feel like a retread of every horror cliché from those films. The masked killer seems to operate in the exact same manner as the Scream killer, the settings for the suspenseful scenes (a high school house party, an isolated cabin, a carnival Haunted House ride) feel like repeats of scenes viewers have seen plenty of times in countless other horror movies. Even though this movie is branded as an interesting sci-fi spin on the comedy/horror genre, TOTALLY KILLER lacks any elements that let the narrative stand out from any other slasher of this kind.
The other aspect TOTALLY KILLER could have relied on to succeed is the comedic timing, which can often take an average horror film into cult classic status. Unfortunately, the comedy lands about as well as the scares. Once Jamie goes back in time, the movie wastes most of its humor on reminding us how politically correct 2023 teens are compared to the in-poor-taste comments of the 1980s teenagers. This joke might be mildly humorous the first time, but after ten-plus times it made me wish the film was taking itself as seriously as an A24 horror film about grief. The humor attempts to be self-referential, which can often be an admirable trait, but after characters reference Scream and Back to the Future multiple times in a movie that is clearly taking material from both films, the unoriginality ends up shining through more than any possible jokes. TOTALLY KILLER has its occasional campy highlights, but those are few and far between moments that just make viewers crave the fantastic movies it references.
Campy horror movies often make for some of the most underrated and fun experiences in cinema, but when they lack the initiative to create an original experience, they can sometimes become boring and flat. This is mostly the case for TOTALLY KILLER, which never justifies its decent premise with anything interesting enough to make it stand out from other Netflix releases. Shipka is always a standout and certain supporting actors do their best to increase the energy of this slasher, but after the unsurprising end reveal comes and goes, one realizes the script doesn’t contain enough surprises to support any of their efforts in a meaningful way.
C-
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