Movie Review: "Totally Killer" Is Generally Okay
7/12 ForReel Score | 3/5 Stars
In a mother/daughter spin on Scream and Back To The Future, Nahnatchka Khan’s sophomore feature Totally Killer is a fun and socially conscious spin on the teen slasher, although it might be a little too late to the 80s nostalgia train.
In her first feature since 2019’s Always Be My Maybe (which I still consider to be an incredibly underrated rom-com), Nahnatchka Khan draws from the likes of Carpenter and Craven to make a campy teen slasher. However, the film’s genericism draws back its enjoyability. Trauma-rooted horror is becoming incredibly trite, especially horror films tackling family-specific trauma. The film is a bit too sincere at times, which undercuts the tone that Khan is trying to convey, and it also pales in comparison to the newer Scream reboots, which handle their tonal consistency (and pretty much everything else) much better than this film.
Image courtesy of Amazon Studios
The film follows Jamie (Kiernan Shipka), a scrappy high-school junior who travels through time to prevent “The Sweet 16 Killer” from killing three girls in 1987 and her mother in 2023. The film revels in the absurdities of 80s culture through a 21st-century lens, tackling teen social circles, bullying, and problematic iconography. When Jamie travels back in time, the film shifts into a fish-out-of-water situation where the contemporary protagonist has been thrust into the world of Animal House. The main plot following Jamie interacts with the subplot that takes place in 2023, where Jamie’s friend Amelia is trying to get Jamie back from 1987. The film finds humor in the disconnect between 1987 and 2023 and alludes to temporal phenomena such as the butterfly effect, which really heightens the film’s sense of humor.
Kiernan Shipka plays a fun and wisecracking take on the 80s-era final girl and carries the weight of the film on her back. She marches to the beat of her drum, speaks her mind often, and kicks ass in the impeccably well-lit third act. Her facial expressions are distinctive and dynamic, which is paramount to genres as reaction-heavy as comedy and horror. Her character seems to follow the classic Sidney Prescott archetype with a comedic Gen-Z twist, like a goofier version of Melissa Barerra’s character in the new Scream films.
The killer is enjoyable and menacing, with the mannerisms of Ghostface and the hulking physique of Michael Myers. The kills themselves leave something to be desired, but the whodunnit aspect that carries the plot is still engaging enough not to mind the lack of graphic violence. About one or two kills actually left an impression on me, but the film is still quite thrilling without the gratuitous violence I usually expect from slashers.
Despite feeling somewhat generic and being way too late to the 80s nostalgia of the 2010s, Totally Killer is an entertaining whodunnit/star vehicle, and I sincerely hope to see more of this type of performance from Shipka in the future. Nahnatchka Khan has proven herself capable in both the romance-comedy and horror-comedy spheres, and I will be seated for whatever she does next.