Totally Killer
Director: Nahnatchka Khan
Year: 2023
Rating: 7.0
This is a total hoot. I wasn't really sure what
I expected but I didn't think a time travel slasher film could be so charming
and so family oriented. It is basically Back to the Future (which is referenced
a few times) mashed together with Time After Time (which isn't.) with a touch
of Halloween. It manages a fine balance of laughs, suspense, mystery and
graphic murders. Director Nahnatchka Khan (Always Be My Maybe) keeps it light,
clever and fast moving. And though it is basically a comedy, I got caught
up in the narrative - is she going to be able to save her mother and just
who is the serial killer. It gets tenser than one would think and when the
killings come it is holy shit time. Sweet Sixteen girls getting sixteen stabs.
It starts in 2023 in a small town mainly
famous for three grisly murders 35 years previously in which the killer was
never caught. Jamie (Kiernan Shipka - Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) and
her friend Amelia (Kelcey Mawema) are off to see a concert and Jamie's father
(Lochlyn Munro) drives them there and waits for the concert to finish. Her
mother (Julie Bowen - Modern Family) believes in security having been around
during the killings. She has taught her daughter self-defense and learned
a few things herself. But not enough. A man in the same kind of mask as the
killer breaks into the house and in a brutal fight is able to kill the mother.
Jamie is devastated and when she learns that her friend has built a prototype
time-machine from her mother's notes, she uses it to go back to the past
to catch the killer and stop the murders of the three girls. Or so she hopes.
Of course, as we know from many time travel films changing the past is never
easy and when you do, you change the future.
It becomes a frantic and non-stop attempt
by her to do that though. It turns out her mother is one of the school's
Mean Girls and three of the girls who are to be murdered are part of her
Mean Girl clique who all dress like Molly Ringwald. No one believes her warnings
except for the mother of her friend, now a teenager (Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson)
who has already begun on her time-machine. Like all movie serial killers,
he is close to invulnerable and just keeps on coming. Some songs from the
80s on the soundtrack. A good young cast and in particular Shipka does a
good job as a 16-year-old though she was 24. It must be the magic she picked
up as Sabrina.
