This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Totally Killer is a slasher-comedy that follows Kiernan Shipka as she goes back in time to stop a serial killer from killing her mom and her friends. I had some fun watching this, even with some things that I didn’t love.
Shipka does an excellent job playing the fish out of water character as she ends up in a time machine that takes her back to the date of her mom’s friend’s murders. She balances caring with the urgency of knowing that she is on a strict timeline to save people. The comedy in this movie is pretty hit or miss but she stood out from the rest.
The comedy itself relies heavily on taking modern sayings and ideas and saying them well before their time. Some of the best jokes were the off-handed lines about how many kills it takes to be a serial killer or the mimosa gag. When the comedy was forced, it didn’t work.
The horror/slasher side of the movie is also pretty solid. The opening fight choreography was so much better than I would’ve expected from this movie, and it stays at that level all the way through. The killer had a stupid mask (which played into the comedy aspect) but had some fun kills and good chase scenes. All of that led to an interesting conclusion in a fun location which I thoroughly enjoyed.
To address the elephant in the room, yes – I am not a fan of time travel movies and Totally Killer doesn’t escape that. I will give it the benefit of primarily staying in one time period for most of the film but the idea that a bunch of high schoolers built a functioning time machine (and again in the 80s!) is very dumb if you think about it for more than a second.
I don’t know how the events in the present are still happening, just being slightly altered, when there is a whole person in the past changing things. They don’t explain it well in the movie, and every other stupid time travel movie taught me about the butterfly effect, so I need more.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Totally Killer is fun. The comedy doesn’t always land but when it did it got me to laugh. The action was impressive and the story was fun if the concept of time travel in movies doesn’t piss you off. I know I only shouted out Shipka but the other main performances by Olivia Holt and Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson are also very solid. I don’t know if I’d watch it again but I think it’s good for at least one watch.
