If the nearly three decades since Scream have given us an abundance of meta slasher movies, including a whole bunch of sequels to Scream itself, the new Amazon film Totally Killer tries to do one better by throwing in the added twist of being a meta time travel/slasher movie. Its heroine has seen plenty of other slasher and time travel movies and knows all their rules, which ought to prepare her well for being catapulted back to the 1980s to stop a psycho on a murder spree. That’s pretty rad, right?

Where the film might not measure up to Scream, unfortunately, is that it lacks the pedigree of being made by an established master of the form being parodied. That Scream and its first three sequels were directed by Wes Craven, creator of The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, added extra layers of metatextual complexity lacking here. Still, the movie is fun. Perhaps it’s best not to overthink it so much.

Title:	Totally Killer
Year of Release:	2023
Director:	Nahnatchka Khan
Watched On:	Amazon Prime Video

Even 36 years later, the small town of Vernon (is that a nod to Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon?) remains best known as the site of the so-called Sweet 16 Killings, in which a loony wearing a rubber Billy Idol mask killed three 16-year-old girls by stabbing them sixteen times each. Of course, with so many years having passed, those events seem like ancient history. Kids now dress up in Sweet 16 Killer costumes for Halloween, and a local podcast host conducts tours of the murder sites to capitalize on the public’s faddish obsession with true crime cold cases.

Teenage Jamie Hughes (Kiernan Shipka from Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) isn’t especially interested in that old story. She resists attempts by her overprotective mom (Julie Bowen) to keep her home on Halloween night and goes out to a concert with friends anyway. Sadly, while she’s out, the Sweet 16 Killer returns without warning and murders Jamie’s mother. Though she doesn’t realize it yet, Jamie herself is next on his kill list.

Fortunately, Jamie’s best friend Amelia (Kelcey Mawema) is a super-genius who’d been building a time machine to present at the school’s upcoming science fair – because obviously that’s the sort of thing a smart teenager could do in her garage. With the killer on her tail, Jamie is propelled back to 1987, the era of big hair and DayGlo colors, where she discovers that the younger version of her mom (now played by Olivia Holt) had been a nasty bully and was very close friends with the original three victims. Their little clique of mean girls had given plenty of people motive to want them dead.

Recruiting the help of Amelia’s future mother (Troy L. Johnson), Jamie tries to identify the Sweet 16 Killer before he can claim any victims, thus also hopefully saving her own mom in the future. In doing so, she’ll need to avoid creating too many paradoxes that will ruin her own original timeline. Luckily, she’s seen Back to the Future a bunch of times and knows how this stuff works.

Totally Killer is a fairly clever and entertaining time travel and slasher spoof. The characters are appealing, and the script does a good job poking fun of the decade and the tropes of those genres. However, as directed by Nahnatchka Khan (creator of Fresh Off the Boat and Young Rock), the film feels a bit too much like a sitcom. In addition to Modern Family star Bowen, Randall Park from Khan’s Fresh Off the Boat has a major role as the town sheriff. The story is set in an exaggerated fantasy version of the 1980s where sexism may exist but racism somehow doesn’t. The logic of its time travel premise also breaks down into nonsense pretty quickly, and a final plot twist about the killer’s identity is way too obvious from early on.

The movie’s a comedy, I get that, but it’s not always as sharp in that regard as I hoped going in. It’s amusing enough for a one-time watch, but – unlike Jamie – I don’t foresee myself ever revisiting this story.

Video Streaming

Amazon Prime Video streams Totally Killer in 4K HDR with Dolby Atmos audio. Photographed digitally, the 2.00:1 image is pleasingly sharp and almost totally grain-free. Colors are a bit pushed to exaggerate the ’80s fashions and style trends. It looks good, and I’m sure most viewers won’t give it a second thought, but it also feels very much like a modern-day TV movie pretending to be set in the 1980s. I think director Khan missed an opportunity to shoot the movie in the style of an actual low-budget 1980s slasher, with grainier photography, drabber colors, and a more appropriate aspect ratio for the era – 1.85:1 at the very least, if not 4:3 to simulate the experience of watching on VHS. Maybe that’s just me overthinking it again.

The Atmos soundtrack is set for a surprisingly loud default. The mix is very bassy, sometimes obnoxiously so. Surround activity is generally used effectively, though it only calls attention to itself on a couple occasions. (A school dodgeball match is pretty fun in that respect.) If anything at all happened in the overhead speakers, I didn’t notice it.