Movie Review : Totally Killer (2023)
Eighties nostalgia has reached a logical end. By now, we collectively understand that what we like to remember from that era (mullets, neon colours, A Flock Of Seagulls) is just a tiny, superficial fragment of a decade that wasn’t all that fun to begin with. Nahnatchka Khan’s horror comedy Totally Killer loves the eighties, but it’s also glad that it's over. It’s one of the smartest and funniest movies I've seen in recent years and it starred no one I knew, except maybe blast-from-the-past Lochlyn Munro.
Totally Killer tells the story of Jamie (Kiernan Shipka), a teenage girl growing up in the shadow of a triple murder that wiped out her mother’s three best friends thirty-five years prior. When her mom gets unexpectedly murdered by the killer over three decades later, Jamie and her genius best friend Amelia (Kelcey Mawema) find a way to send her back to 1987 in order to investigate the murders retroactively and stop them before they even occur even if it screws up space-time continuum and kills everyone.
The Eighties Were Kind of Shit
The main calling card for this movie is that it’s not REALLY a slasher. The whole my-mom-was-murdered plot device is just an excuse for a Gen Z to travel back to the eighties where everyone was just gross and stupid. Most of the humour in Totally Killer (and it thoroughly IS a comedy) derives from the eighties being a walking catastrophe where a serial killer would’ve had a ball and it's quite efficient without being sanctimonious. It’s just the way it was back then and telling them otherwise would be futile.
There's this great scene where Jamie just walks into school and registers herself as an exchange student to a secretary who spectacularly doesn’t give a fuck. It's so simple, but it ends up being uproarious as it severely clashes with the micromanaging approach we've developed around student safety, personal data, identity theft and whatnot. It’s no use just scolding the lazy and unengaged secretary for being this way too as no one ever told her a job was supposed to make her happy. It was dumb to think this way then.
Same goes for the character of Randy (Jeremy Cyubahiro who seemed preordained for this part) who just burps, grabs his crotch, the lazy and entitled local cops and says something inappropriate, seemingly on command or the gym teacher who loves to see her students bleed. The fact that Totally Killer is a slasher movie highlights one important nuance no one ever brought to their eighties nostalgia: it was not an era that bred tougher people, it was just a more unsafe to be alive then.
It might seem like a detail, but it’s smart and it makes everything sing.
The Weirdest Slasher You've Ever Seen
Another odd quirk that makes Totally Killer more than than it seems on paper is the utter contempt it has towards slasher movie convention. It’s idiotic stuff you could call sloppy in any other context, but it’s so blatant here that it’s joyous. For example, there’s hardly any dramatic buildup whenever the killer shows up. He's just there and everyone in his path starts to freak out. Our expectations are never subverted, but they’re always off-balanced. It’s not an anti or a metaslasher. It’s a slasher that doesn’t give a fuck.
There are also several characters versed in the art of self-defense, making the killer's life way harder than it should be by the genre standards. You're expecting a one way pursuit just like in every slasher and suddenly you're looking down the barrel of a somewhat fair fight. Totally Killer never tries too hard to revolutionize anything, but it will gladly call its predecessor boring before doing something outlandish and that's fun. It has a paradigm breaking laissez faire attitude that made me want more of that.
*
I've been telling you for a few hundred words how awesome Totally Killer is, but it's not an emotional experience or anything like that. It's a fun, refreshing comedy that asks smart questions about the way we've always done things and that offers equally smart, off-kilter answers. It’s very much a smartass movie, but it's a smartass you love to hang around. The kind that has the dry wit and the innate adventurousness to never be boring. I was not expecting to like it that much, but it's low-key a brilliant film.
Maybe there should've been more Lochlyn Munro too. But only a little bit more.
7.8/10
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