Some films aspire to high art.
Some films just aspire to make people laugh when they’re high.
Totally Killer fell squarely into the latter category.
This is one of those movies that would be absolutely awful if it tried at any point to take itself seriously, but it succeeds in being an enjoyable watch because it never bothers.
The slasher story is a slight deviation from the typical trope. In 1987, three teenage girls were murdered on their sixteenth birthdays by someone wearing an otherwise nondescript smiling surfer dude mask. The killer stabbed each girl sixteen times.
The Sweet Sixteen Killer.
There is no point during the entire film when this is adequately plotted. Foreshadowing is inadequate at best, and it does not seem as if the makers of the film cared much about developing the whodunit element. All plot points worth guessing were revealed as afterthoughts instead, as if to discourage us from even asking.
The important thing to understand is that the Sweet Sixteen Killer killed thirty-five years ago and resurfaces again on Halloween night to kill the protagonist’s mother.
Our teenage protagonist Jamie (played with quirky aplomb by Kiernan Skipka) has a friend who built a time machine out of an old photo booth… for the high school science fair.
Which also happens to be on Halloween.
The time travel premise has no grounding whatsoever in science of any kind. But I think we can all admit that none of us to this day know what a flux capacitor is or what it does.
Jamie is accosted by the resurfaced killer and chased into the time machine, which is set to the day of the first murder all those years ago and… yeah, you see where this is going.
Can she stop the murders and change history? What will happen when she does? All this will be answered by one ridiculous plot device after another, though with a surprisingly straight face by the movie itself.
What this movie does right is view our 80s nostalgia through a critical lens by giving the modern teenager an opportunity to react to it.
Everything else, it does wrong on purpose, which makes it funnier. It plays out like an 80s sitcom more than a movie. The only things missing are the laugh track and the laughable FCC censorship.
At one point in the film there is a clever reference to the Mandela Effect. I have a direct experience from my everyday life to relate about this.
I have a brother who is twelve years my junior, who swears he learned about Nelson Mandela dying in prison when he was in high school. I recall watching the HBO original film Mandela with Danny Glover in 1987 (the past year, incidentally, in which Totally Killer was set).
Three years later it was all over the news that Mandela was released from prison.
I was about twelve. My brother would be born soon after. Yet we’re living examples of the Mandela Effect, having two distinct memories of who Mandela was and what we learned about him.
I have a certain book. When I first read the book, the author used the term pugilist in one particular sentence. I recall this quite vividly, because I was in my early twenties and never heard that term before. I looked it up in a hardbound dictionary, because the internet was still in its early stages, and never forgot either the book or the passage.
A pugilist is a boxer.
Years later, while rereading the same copy of the book, I happened upon that passage, which I never forgot, and it said boxer instead of pugilist.
Did something change in the past that changed that word in the present? Absurd, of course. Despite the vividness of my memory, I must have misremembered, right?
Right, guys? Please? *ahem*
I’ve also had my experiences with dream precognition, a description of which you can find here.
Alas, dear reader, I cannot tell you what to make of this. I can only admit that I’ve had many other such experiences over the course of my forty-six years and counting.
I learned to do what Totally Killer does: not take it seriously. My life feels like an afterthought sometimes, and I got tired of trying to guess where it was going when I never seemed to get all the relevant information until the mystery is already solved.
It is not for me to suggest you do the same. Maybe you have more information than I do. But whatever you do, make room for laughter. You’re gonna need it.
On that note, Totally Killer is currently on Amazon Prime and worth watching just for the fun of it. Even if Mary Jane isn’t in the audience to lighten it up a little more, you should still get a chuckle.
