Actually, I’d like to take this opportunity to talk briefly about the history of the slasher movie leading up to Totally Killer, a time-travel comedy horror that dropped on Amazon Prime this past Halloween season, which I only got around to watching last week.
After Halloween slew at the box office in 1978, the early 80s saw a glut of slasher movies all trying to replicate its critical and commercial success, mostly without much of either. 1980 to 1983 in particular saw the releases of such timeless classics as Prom Night, The Slumber Party Massacre, Sleepaway Camp, The Prowler, My Bloody Valentine, The Boogey Man, Sweet Sixteen, Student Bodies, Maniac, Pieces, The Burning, Final Exam, The House on Sorority Row, Halloween II, Don’t Answer the Phone, He Knows You’re Alone, and – yes – Friday the 13th Parts 1 through 3 (among many others, only a small fraction of which I’ve taken the time to watch). Most of these were cheap imitations, shameless rip-offs, and desperate cash-ins that were slapped together on shoestring budgets with scripts that had been written over a weekend on a bit of toilet paper, which is why most of them are set in either the director’s house or the woods (Friday the 13th famously entered production on the basis of a movie poster). The 80s became so notorious for generating cheap, tasteless B-movies about masked killers carving up half-naked teenage girls that it became a recurring joke in the early years of Calvin and Hobbes, with six-year-old Calvin sneaking such films as Vampire Sorority Babes and Cuisinart Murderer of Central High (for the record… I would totally watch Cuisinart Murderer of Central High). By 1984, the genre had become so tired and saturated that audiences began to check out.
Enter Wes Craven.
In 1984, he reinvigorated the slasher with A Nightmare on Elm Street, a creative, visually-interesting new angle that focused on a group of teenagers getting picked off one by one in their dreams by malicious burn victim Freddy Krueger. As far as premises go, it was wholly unique – Freddy can only get you when you’re asleep, so the key to survival is staying awake. It was a breath of fresh air for the slasher movie, which up to that point hadn’t strayed too far from the “generic masked killer stalks teenagers/babysitters/camp counsellors through house/cabin/school/mine/building/the woods” premise. Unlike the largely mute baddies before him, Freddy was fun and had personality, and was instrumental in reviving the genre, leading to a new wave of inventive, high-concept films in the late 80s and early 90s that centered on equally engaging villains. Child’s Play placed the soul of a vicious serial killer in the body of a doll that no child in their right mind would ever want to own, Hellraiser brought sadomasochistic pleasure demons into the mix, and Candyman utilized the concept of urban legends and folklore to bring its eponymous villain to life. All were modest hits, and all were subjected to the dreaded sequel treatment (with mixed critical and commercial results). By the mid-90s, the genre had once again become stale – Freddy was still dreaming, Jason was still slashing, Michael Myers was now a puppet for a druidic cult, Pinhead was in space, and Chucky was definitely dead this time. The genre had become marked by diminishing returns, and audiences had once more grown fatigued.
Enter Wes Craven again.
In 1996, he gifted the world with Scream, a smart, fun, self-aware slasher for modern audiences that delivered fresh thrills while simultaneously critiquing the genre’s most infamous tropes. With Ghostface at the helm, Scream broke new ground with its characters referencing iconic slasher films and villains, delivering meta-commentary between kills, and exhibiting full awareness of “the rules” (i.e., virgins always survive, transgressing by partaking in drugs and alcohol gets you killed, and saying “I’ll be right back” is an instant death sentence). Audiences loved it, critics applauded it, and the genre once again received some much needed dimension (thanks, Dimension!). The slasher was back, folks, and it was now hip. Like Halloween before it, Scream’s success spawned a new wave of pale imitations and derivatives attempting to ride its bloody coattails, including I Know What You Did Last Summer (which I actually kind of like), Urban Legend (which I actually really don’t), and Final Destination (a guilty pleasure). Sequels followed, money flowed, and the genre’s founding franchises that had oh-so-recently been laid to rest found themselves resurrected yet again. Chucky returned with a killer sense of humour, Halloween got a reboot that erased most of its dumber installments, Freddy and Jason squared off on the big screen WWE-style (both would eventually receive reboots of their own in the late aughts), and Scary Movie lampooned it all. As before, the novelty soon wore off. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, the times they had a-become quite different, and the scares that had once satisfied audiences in the 80s were now considered most ungroovy. Viewers were savvier, more educated, and fully aware of the clichés, tropes, conventions, and tricks the genre had up its tattered sleeve. The youthful, energetic spark of the late 90s/early 00s soon gave way to more gritty franchises like Saw, and barring a remake or two, the traditional slasher faded for a time.
Not even Leprechaun in the Hood could save it this time.
Flash forward to 2012, when Drew Goddard delivered his own love letter to the slasher that was Cabin in the Woods, a film that redefined the term “high-concept.” Every year, we learn, engineers in a secret facility orchestrate a complex ritualistic “sacrifice” of five young adults (each conforming to a traditional slasher archetype) by luring them to a remote cabin in the woods, where they are offered up to one of dozens of nightmare creature types waiting in the wings in order to appease ancient deities that represent modern audiences and their, shall we say, strange ideas of entertainment. Not content to merely satirize the genre, Cabin in the Woods completely deconstructed it, subverting all the usual tropes by practically escorting the viewer behind the camera to mingle with the crew. Pushing the envelope in terms of what metafiction could accomplish, it balanced its humour and horror elements perfectly, crafted memorable characters out of otherwise flat stereotypes, and payed homage to the strengths and pitfalls (mostly pitfalls) of its predecessors, all while establishing a new, inventive mythology to thrill viewers. Both critics and audiences agreed it was bloody good fun, and it ranks among my top ten for the decade.
Since Cabin in the Woods, however, the slasher has suffered something of an identity crisis, and much of the blame lies with films like Cabin in the Woods and Scream (similar to how Jurassic Park can technically be blamed for today’s overreliance on CGI). In an effort to keep viewers interested, slashers started relying heavily on gimmicks and genre-bending premises, with some practically leaning into parody territory. Gone were the days when a knife-wielding maniac could simply chase a babysitter down the street on Halloween night – with the 2010s, movies had to include meta-commentary in order to be considered relevant, or at the very least not take themselves too seriously. Though A24 has recently taken a stab at more serious fare like X and Pearl, most slashers now aim for irreverence or even total comedy, with many even borrowing concepts from other movies in order to entice a new generation of viewers. In the decade following Cabin in the Woods, we got The Final Girls, in which a group of young moviegoers get sucked into a Friday the 13th-esque horror and are forced to survive; Happy Death Day, which involves a college student who is caught in a temporal loop, reliving the day of her murder at the hands of a masked killer over and over; Freaky, a high school serial killer flick with a body-swap element; and You Might Be the Killer, which could best be described as Friday the 13th by way of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. “It’s Friday the 13th meets The Last Action Hero.” “It’s Scream meets Groundhog Day.” “It’s Halloween meets Freaky Friday.” And so on.
See Hollywood? I can do it too.
This isn’t to say that some of these movies aren’t pretty good. In fact, I really like Happy Death Day (less so its sequel), and I found myself charmed by Freaky as well. Conversely, I never finished The Final Girls, and not even Buffy’s Alyson Hannigan could win me over to YMBTK (forgive me, Willow!). Truth be told, I’d rather watch any of those movies than most of the garbage from the 80s heyday, because let’s be honest – I’m not that much of a purist. The cinematic landscape has changed dramatically since John Carpenter first pitted an escaped mental patient against a fledgling scream queen, and it’s natural for films to evolve and adapt as culture progresses. The earliest slashers strove for scares at best and shock value at worst, and most of them are badly dated; the second wave got creative with its villains and concepts, and easily stands as the most memorable era for the genre; and the third went meta and started having fun with itself, short-lived as it was. This nebulous fourth era we find ourselves in, however, is a little trickier to define, and can hardly be considered a wave. Time was, the hook of a slasher movie was the villain, the concept, and the promise of crowd-pleasing kills; nowadays, it seems to be the concept alone. The killer is practically incidental.
Which bring us to Totally Killer, a black comedy slasher that might have been pitched as “Back to the Future meets Heathers meets Halloween.” The setting is small-town Vernon, an idyllic community that was rocked back in 1987 when a masked madman known as the Sweet 16 Killer violently stabbed three teenage girls to death in the days leading up to Halloween. The killer is still at large in 2023, and his memory looms over the town, giving mothers something to worry about and wannabe true crime podcasters something to gush over. Similar to how the in-universe Stab movies garnered a tone-deaf cult following in the Scream sequels, trick-or-treaters in Totally Killer don replicas of the killer’s grinning mask when hitting the streets – though since the killer was never caught and his victims died in isolation, it’s dubious as to how the townsfolk even know what his masks looks like. Anyway, our heroine is Jamie Hughes, an atypical teenager on the cusp of turning sixteen whose mother Pam survived the killings that claimed the lives of her high school friends. Pam channels a bit of prepper Laurie Strode from the recent Halloween soft reboot trilogy, having trained her daughter in self-defense in the event that Sweet 16 ever resurfaced. Jamie scoffs at her mother’s overprotectiveness and lack of chill – and then the killer does indeed return, stabbing Pam to death in an apparent act of finishing what he started thirty-six years ago. Fortunately for Jamie, her best friend Amelia has constructed a time machine for the school fair (based on her own mother’s schematics – you’re expected to just go with it), which Jamie uses to travel back to 1987 in an attempt to stop the Sweet 16 Killer before he commences his spree. By saving the original trio of victims in the past, Jamie hopes to save her mother in the present. Imagine her surprise when she discovers that her responsible, embarrassing, safety-oriented, and completely lame parents were a little wilder and more hormone-driven in high school; in fact, they’re straight out of Heathers (or perhaps Mean Girls), rocking the party scene and savagely bullying anyone who dares make eye contact. Worse, they have zero interest in befriending some responsible, embarrassing, safety-oriented, and completely lame girl from the future.
The past is full of surprises.
Having been underwhelmed by similarly-themed nostalgia-heavy pieces like Summer of ’84, The Final Girls, and every season of Stranger Things following the first, I hit play with low expectations. Imagine my surprise, then, when Totally Killer turned out to be pretty all right.
Mostly. Well, sort of.
Despite its title, Totally Killer is first and foremost a time travel comedy. Much of the humour stems from Jamie’s culture shock as she navigates the 80s, a world without wifi where everyone smokes inside, bullies employ problematic slurs, drunk driving is socially acceptable, teachers are allowed to be jerks, and municipal concerns over security are non-existent. I particularly enjoyed a scene where she manages to collect a sample of the killer’s blood following an attack and delivers it to the police, only to learn that DNA testing hasn’t been invented yet.
Also, it’s comforting to see dodgeball acknowledged as child abuse.
Star Kiernan Shipka sells the fish-out-of-water reactions and exasperation at everyone’s period-specific lack of awareness perfectly, and her chemistry with Olivia Holt, who plays her teenage mom, hits both the comedic and sentimental notes nicely. Infuriating as Jamie finds teenage Pam, we see how deeply she regrets their fraught relationship in the present timeline, and the two share some moments of genuine tenderness that offset the moments of comedic conflict. The dynamic Jamie shares with both her teenage parents is jolly good fun, especially in how it subverts the Marty/George McFly relationship in Back to the Future. Where Marty despairs over his teenage father’s chronic dweebiness and lack of confidence, remarking aloud that it was a wonder he was ever born, Jamie works overtime to ensure that her horny, rebellious parents don’t conceive her early. It’s a lot of fun, and the two lead actresses share a chemistry that is believable for the circumstances; you can’t help but like them even when they’re being snotty teenagers. Though the humour surrounding 80s culture and the grown-ups who call it home is exaggerated, the situational jokes mostly land, and the characters all pop in their own way.
…Except for the killer.
Believe it or not, the weakest parts of this movie all involve the slasher element, which is why I placed Back to the Future and Heathers before Halloween in my mock studio pitch. The killer’s weirdly dashing mask is exceptionally lame, coming across as douchey more than scary, like Michael Myers if he were a frat boy who found the smell of his own farts delightful. It lacks menace, and subsequently robs the kill scenes of much of their tension. The kills themselves lack imagination, as the Sweet 16 Killer’s modus operandi is merely stabbing his victims sixteen times in the chest. See, part of the fun of a slasher movie is the variety in which the victims are dispatched – the more outlandish the death, the further removed it is from reality (this mayyyyyyyyyy be why these sorts of movies desensitize us to violence, now that I think about it…). The point is, watching Freddy Krueger pop out of a television set and smash a girl’s face into the screen hits different than the Zodiac Killer knifing a picnicker to death in broad daylight, simply because one of them clearly isn’t real. Sweet 16’s kills are blunt and just a little too real, and I found myself sympathizing with the victims even when it was revealed what awful transgression (and it is awful) they committed to “earn” their fates.
Totally Killer’s worst transgression, however, is that the killer’s identity is easily predictable for those who have ever seen a movie before. Mild spoiler, but halfway through I had whittled down my predictions to either this guy or that guy, and wouldn’t ya know it, I was right. Even the execution of the reveal was underwhelming, as if the movie completely lost interest in its own mystery. The unmasking almost felt like a lazy Family Guy gag where the reveal is intentionally undercut by a lack of response from observers in an effort to disguise how lame it is, because the wildest reaction this movie can expect from viewers is a halfhearted shrug and an “Oh, I guess it’s that guy.”
These guys, meanwhile, could have figured it out before the first act break.
Otherwise, the time travel element is pushing the suspension of disbelief a tad… but mostly it works because it just has to. Back to the Future got away with it more easily because Doc Brown is a mad scientist who has spent years outfitting the silver DeLorean with a flux capacitor, but Totally Killer encroaches on implausibility because the architect is a high school student, whom I doubt had any Libyan terrorists in her contacts list to nick plutonium from. The movie attempts to get around this by having her build the contraption based on her mother’s decades-old notes (because having a teenager build a time machine all on her own would be completely implausible), which ultimately facilitates Jamie’s passage back to the present, since Amelia’s mother attended high school alongside Pam. In the end, though, the time machine had to come from somewhere, so it’s not really worth CinemaSinning. The temporal mechanics follow the dubious logic of the 2000 sci-fi thriller Frequency, in which alterations to the past gradually filter into the future, when in reality any changes to the past would instantly result in an entirely different timeline. That being said, if you’re writing a time travel story, I suppose you can create whatever rules you want, so long as the story and characters work.
For example, it wasn’t the duffel bag that got Making History cancelled after only nine episodes…
As a final nitpick, I was a bit perplexed over the ages of Jamie’s parents, who were sixteen in 1987 and have a sixteen-year-old by 2023. Jamie is an only child (at least for most of the movie), which means her parents didn’t have her until they were thirty-six. While actors Julie Bowen (adult Pam) and Lochlyn Munro (adult Blake) are in fact in their fifties, I’m not sure their characters were intended to be. Though it is established that Pam and Blake didn’t get together for good until after college, I still find it difficult to believe that they waited so long to have their first child. The argument could be made that Pam maybe couldn’t get pregnant for a while, but this argument is nullified in the final scene, where Jamie’s meddling with the past results in her having a thirty-five-year-old brother. Like the time travel mechanics, I suppose it just doesn’t matter.
To close, Totally Killer is a modern slasher homage that does a better job of being a time travel comedy than a slasher movie. It’s luckily redeemed by its performances, character dynamics, and fish-out-of-water humour, but the slasher elements that are core to the story sadly weigh it down. Overall though, it was pretty okay, and I kind of liked it.
The slasher genre is a bit aimless at the moment, having been forced to rely on gimmicks in order to attract attention. Sometime the gimmicks work (as in the case of Happy Death Day and Freaky), and sometimes they don’t. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a weird genre-bending concept (as long as it’s executed well), but where the genre is truly floundering is in its lack of memorable antagonists. There are no new villains to scare the hell out of us anymore, and the ones we know and love are either dormant or have evolved with the times. Chucky’s carved himself a nice little niche for himself on Syfy (I watched the first season before tapping out), and Ghostface is up to his old tricks again, making menacing calls to Gen Zedders’ smartphones on the big screen (Scream 6 was actually decent); on the flipside, Michael Myers is officially dead as of Halloween Ends, and there are no plans (at the moment, anyway) to resurrect Freddy or Jason. After the trash fire that was 2022’s Texas Chainsaw reboot, it’s safe to say that Leatherface has been put to bed for the time being, and nobody cares about Pinhead anymore (not even Doug Bradley). Honestly, we’ve pretty much seen all there is to see from the genre’s founding fathers anyway, so it’s probably best that most of them stay retired.
What we need is a new villain – an all-new masked baddie to spearhead a new killer franchise that will thrill modern audiences for nine or so installments (four of which will be considered sorta good!). Sadly, nobody can seem to craft a good bad guy anymore. The most compelling villain we’ve had in recent memory was The Grabber in 2022’s excellent The Black Phone … but The Black Phone wasn’t really a slasher, and I don’t foresee it getting a follow-up anytime soon. Otherwise, I suppose there’s Art the Clown in those Terrifier movies, but there are some things even I don’t have the stomach for. Employ all the gimmicks you want, dear Hollywood screenwriters, but if you can craft a new villain with a new shtick sometime soon, it would go a long way to making this snooty film critic happy.
Until that day comes, well … you could do a hell of a lot worse than Totally Killer. Unfortunately, you could also do much better.
6.5/10
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