Kiernan Shipka as a time-travelling final girl in Scream meets Back to the Future? Has Amazon graduated from spying on my conversations to spying on my subconscious Halloween fantasies?
I’m going to open by talking about Mad Men for a couple of sentences, but not for the reason you think. In Season One, when it was a very good show that hadn’t found its way to greatness just yet, the writers tried to get a lot of mileage out of the cultural dissonance between characters set in early 60’s America and the modern audience. It wasn’t uncommon to try and get laughs at the expense of old-fashioned ideas. “Ha ha, these idiots don’t know that second-hand smoke is harmful!”, that type of thing. It was kind of cute, mostly annoying, and ultimately not in line with the type of smart, character-driven drama that the show would grow into. Totally Killer goes to that same well over and over again, and it turns out that the concept (now with 80’s culture as the butt of the jokes) works a lot better for a breezy horror-comedy with those types of metatextual shenanigans baked into its DNA. Whether its laissez-faire fat-shaming, “twigs and stuff” in the weed, or the unchecked brutality of gym class dodgeball, contemporary 16-year old Kiernan Shipka is in a constant state of incredulity as she attempts to navigate the distant past of 1987 in order to try and prevent a series of teen murders. And, yes, that Mad Men comparison likely only occurred to me due to the Shipka connection. They also do the second-hand smoke thing, natch.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I threw on Totally Killer. I didn’t even realize there would be a time travel component, despite the title referencing 80’s slang. I had a lot of fun watching it, though. I wouldn’t call it remotely scary, but it doesn’t shy away from blood and murder even though that’s clearly not the main point. The plot is cleverly constructed, blending horror elements from the two timelines like real crime podcasting (modern) and absentee parenting despite a serial killer on the loose (80’s), while weaving a mystery that requires investigations in both eras to solve. Its really the acting, though, that makes the movie a fun watch. It is not emotionally demanding by any stretch, although there is a decent arc with Shipka and her mother (played by Julie Bowen in 2023 and Olivia Holt in 1987) that resonates, but the performances are all very winning and enjoyable. You come to like all of the characters, even the archetypical 80’s high school bullies. Ultimately, it is clever enough, fast-moving enough, and funny enough that you really don’t miss the scares.
I feel like streaming services have not fully cracked the code on motion pictures in the same way that they have with episodic television. A show produced for Apple TV or Hulu or, yes, Amazon, has just as much chance at being great, if not more, than a show that is a product of the traditional network system. Streaming movies, on the other hand, tend to aim lower and risk less than the best of the films that are intended for theatrical release. The good thing for Totally Killer is that those modest aspirations fit right within the target zone of a movie like this, regardless of the channel by which it came to be produced. So the benefit of the streaming content model – the fact that I could go from being unaware of its existence to writing a positive review of it in less than three hours – isn’t hampered by unmet expectations. It probably sounds like I’m qualifying this recommendation more than I mean to, but seriously, if you have access Amazon Prime video you don’t have any reason to pass over Totally Killer this October.
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