Totally Killer is a pretty fun mashup of multiple genres and multiple familiar movies… many of which it references directly. It’s a slasher comedy first but a pretty good time travel movie too.

The flick stars Kiernan Shipka as a 2023 teen living in a town where the Sweet 16 murders occurred back in 1987. Through the magic of plot convenience and photo booths, she travels back in time to stop the killer.

This flick knows its time travel rules and tries to establish its bona fides… but it’s a little sloppily written at times. they dialog seem to forget the rules or forget what it just said a few times. For example, Shipka tries to explain herself by referencing Back to the Future only to say she’s from Canada later in the same scene. The movie has multiple moment of inconsistent dialog that make the script feel a little sloppy (especially compared to, say, Back to the Future).

It’s “stranger in a strange land” theme of a modern teen in the caveman ’80s is hit or miss too. Sometimes the “gee weren’t the 80s backwards?” jokes get a little smug and on-the-nose. I was alive in the ’80s and some of the gags were amusing… but others were kinda lazy and simplistic. I probably shouldn’t take it too personally… probably this movie wasn’t meant for some grumpy Gen Xer (but jokes on them… I’ll watch anything with time travel).

But to take my fake outrage one step geekier, they show a clip from a bootlegged copy of RoboCop which released theatrically in ’87. I’m unsure if anyone would have a copy of a copy of RoboCop that year… but even if they did, they wouldn’t have had the director’s cut (they show the extended scene where Mr. Kinney gets blown away by ED209. The director’s cut didn’t come out until 1995, thank you very much… umm… yeah I googled that).

But I’m getting pretty deep into the sci-fi weeds here. The actual movie is fairly amusing and has fun with its time travel and slasher gimmicks. I especially enjoyed the creative finale as the slasher tries to kill the final girl. Very clever use of a familiar theme park ride.

This movie is enjoyably fine… I liked how it played with its genre gimmicks. It’s not particularly scary and it’s reasonably funny… while being just pop culture nerdy to get away with a lot. It mostly did a good job so I’m giving it mostly a pretty good review.

Score: 81