Totally Killer

I promise, I did like this film. Please keep that in mind as we go on. It is impossible to watch this and not compare to Happy Death Day and Freaky, for the reason that all three of these movies take a movie concept that was played for laughs back in the day and use it to build a horror movie. Happy Death Day is Groundhog Day’s time loop, and Freaky is the Freaky Friday body switch (I can only assume we’ll eventually get to either Weird Science or Zapped soon enough). Totally Killer is Back To The Future. That’s my favorite movie, so that feels like a personal cheat code. Among the many, many reasons I felt those other two movies worked was a commitment to the bit. HDD used the time loop concept to its fullest extent, presenting both the physical and psychological horror of repeating the same day and always dying at the end of it. Freaky had Vince Vaughn doing a flawless recreation of a teenage girl, while Kathryn Newton somehow manifested the presence of a hulking, brutish killer, and both are used for laughs as well as tension. Totally Killer never finds a way to go full bore on its BTTF-slasher comedy hybrid. The main character being out of her own time is mostly presented for laughs, and they’re funny, sure (especially if you were alive in 1987), but the other two generated comedy AND horror from its gimmick. This never did. It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. Similarly, this movie doesn’t go far enough in embracing the 80’s nostalgia. I wouldn’t have wanted to go full on Stranger Things and just shout pop culture references in my face, but more akin to Summer Of ‘84; every frame of that movie oozes 80’s nostalgia. Other than the occasional hairdo, some music, and everybody smoking, there are so many scenes that have no trace of the decade in which it’s set. Again, a missed opportunity. I wish it had stuck the landing on those two elements, because outside of that, it is a fun movie. Kiernan Shipka and Olivia Holt are the shining stars here, bringing a lot of energy to their duo of a daughter and her teenaged mom who isn’t a mom yet and doesn’t know she’s talking to the daughter she’ll eventually have. The whodunit kinda clunks in the third act, but to the movie’s credit, it keeps up the tension in spite of it and builds to a decent showdown in my least favorite carnival ride ever, the Gravitron. And seeing Shipka’s Jamie view 1987 through a 2023 lens is quite fun, from the omnipresence of smoking to the more lax attitude toward safety to the language used. My wife watched this with me, having only seen HDD (and not it’s My Science Project-esque sequel, not Freaky). She didn’t have the same frame of reference as I did. She didn’t see the missed opportunities I did, and said I was expecting too much. I don’t think I was, but I think she has a point in that your experience with this will largely determine on your expectations on how far it goes with its central conceit. I liked what I got but I know I would’ve loved it if the makers would’ve went all-in on it.