Totally Killer review: Horror-comedy offers a fun '80s ride

The slasher is a subgenre of patterns. There’s a rhythm to it, from the opening kill to the Final Girl, a pattern that fans can get happily lost in. But as much as we love those patterns, slasher fans also want to see something fresh, a disruption to the pattern that, if not subversive, is at least somewhat surprising.

The challenge for slasher storytellers, then, becomes finding the right balance between the expected rhythms and the new groove of their particular tale. It’s easy to find the films that do this well. Scream is a perfect example, as are Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon and more recent successes like Freaky. These are films that understand the rules intimately enough to know when to bend them and when to break them.

Totally Killer, the latest horror release from genre power player Blumhouse, sets out with similar ambitions. With a mash-up plot that’s basically Halloween meets Back To The Future, a horror-comedy dynamic that’s not afraid to poke fun at the world of ’80s nostalgia, and a cast eager to dive into genre conventions, it’s the kind of spooky season fun you can get happily absorbed in this Halloween.

Teenage Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) grew up in a town with its own slasher legend. When her mom Pam (Julie Bowen) was in high school back in the ’80s, a guy in a mask dubbed the “Sweet Sixteen Killer” murdered three local high schoolers, then disappeared. Thirty five years later, the killer still hasn’t been found, which means that Pam and her husband Blake (Lochlyn Munro) are constantly telling Jamie she has to be safe, training her to fight off intruders, and warning her that at any moment her life could change.

Little does Jamie know, of course, that they’re right. When the Sweet Sixteen Killer makes an unexpected return and takes a swipe at Jamie, she flees into what turns out to be a working time machine (long story) and ends up transported back to 1987, just before the killer is set to claim his first victim. With history firmly in her head, Jamie realizes she has the chance to undo the killings before they happen. All she has to do is befriend the teenage version of her mom (Olivia Holt) and try to keep a group of drunk, horny ’80s teens from putting themselves in danger. What could go wrong?

The bulk of the film’s script—by David Matalori, Sasha Perl-Raver, and Jen D’Angelo—dives headlong into the clash between the world Jamie knows and the world her mother grew up in. For Jamie—a socially conscious, thoroughly 2020s teenager who scoffs at almost everything her mother tells her about the past—the world of her hometown in 1987 may as well be a different planet. There’s lots of comedy to be mined there, but it’s not always from where you think. To Jamie, the ’80s is a strange place full of inappropriate jokes, teens with no sense of danger, and a general lack of emotional openness that both disturbs and fascinates her. It’s a refreshing approach to the decade at a time when so many stories embrace the ’80s as a magical wonderland of nostalgia and glamor, and watching Jamie turn into a scold that reminds her of her own mother makes for some welcome character comedy.

The resulting clashes of culture and personality are handled quite well by director Nahnatchka Khan, whose previous feature film, Always Be My Maybe, showed a continuation of the comedic prowess she displayed as a showrunner (Fresh Off The Boat, Young Rock) and underscored her ability to play with genre conventions. Here, Khan is once again gleefully tinkering with our expectations of a slasher film, diving not just into the comedy, but into the sci-fi concept that provides Totally Killer’s main hook. The film, you see, isn’t just about how weird it is for a modern teen to exist in the 1980s, but about how time travel might work in a situation where a teen girl is trying to undo a very specific part of her local history, and the resulting ripple effects that may or may not extend into her own future. With the help of some very solid production design, Khan pulls it all off, even if the film never quite rises to the heights you’d hope.

The real winner in all this, though, is Shipka. One of the most gifted actors of her generation, she’s proven herself adept at both genre material and more cerebral character drama over the years, and she brings the full force of her talent to Totally Killer, with great results. We can clearly see the world through the eyes of this slightly misanthropic, in-over-her-head teenager, and that makes both the comedy and the horror—of which isn’t there much, but when it hits, it really hits—carry through not just the film, but the rest of the cast. Shipka’s not only the star, but the natural leader of this film, and her talent and enthusiasm for the material reverberate through her co-stars, from Holt’s impish ’80s teen to Randall Park’s bumbling local sheriff.

Totally Killer is a film full of great talent, great moments, and an infectious sense of fun, which means that even when it doesn’t quite work, it’s an entertaining balance of slasher tropes and time travel adventure. It’s not necessarily a new slasher classic, but it is the kind of film horror devotees can happily kick back and enjoy on a cozy Friday night in October, and that’s a particular achievement all its own.

Totally Killer premieres October 6 on Prime Video