Back To The Suture

‘Totally Killer,’ which closed Austin’s Fantastic Fest last night and will appear on Amazon Prime a week from today, is is a time-travel slasher comedy that repeatedly references ‘Scream’, which itself was a reference-based movie, and also ‘Back To The Future,’ to which it owes its life but refuses to acknowledge as the final word in time-travel cosmology. It’s a meta-movie about a meta-movie, at least six steps removed from any discernible reality. But it’s also fun and observant, and, at times, genuinely thrilling and scary.

Kiernan Shipka, who TV lovers know as Sally Draper and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, plays Jaime, a surly alterna-teen with a mother, played by Julie Bowen, who lives with trauma from a terrible series of murders her friends suffered 35 years earlier. The gory return of the “Sweet Sixteen Killer” is really just a pretext to get Jamie to travel back in time to 1987, via her best friend’s science project. Once there, she determines to stop the killer, who has really messed up her life.

TOTALLY KILLER ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Nahnatchka Kahn
Written by: David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver, Jen D’Angelo
Starring: Kiernan Shipka, Olivia Holt, Charlie Gillespie, Randall Park, Julie Bowen
Running time: 106 mins

That’s the basic premise. Shipka has shown she can carry a TV show, and she now has shown she can carry a movie. There’s some urgency to her performance, and she can scream with the best of the scream queens, but her real job is to roll her eyes at the absurdity of the 1980s. It doesn’t hurt that Olivia Pope, best known for her performance in the superhero TV show ‘Cloak and Dagger,’ plays a hilarious but also soulful version of Shipka’s mother as a teenager. They have great chemistry, and the rest of the teen ensemble is also really funny, as is Randall Park, who worked with director Nahnatchka Kahn on ‘Fresh Off the Boat,’ and ‘Always Be My Maybe’ as a mediocre town sheriff.

Totally Killer works on a lot of levels. The clever script has a lot of fun with the 1980s in semi-unexpected ways. Jamie’s mom is part of a group of Mean Girls called, not Heathers, but Mollies, because they all dress like Molly Ringwald.  Shipka has to deal with cigarette smoke everywhere, a ridiculous lack of security at school, and, most hilariously, the crappy weed of yesterday. After a bunch of kids get wasted on pot brownies but Shipka doesn’t feel anything, she asks to see the stash. She holds up the back and grimaces, “this is dirt! What’s with all the stems?” “It’s from the Earth,” the stoner responds.

The town of “Vernon” in Totally Killer is pretty generic and exists out of geographic space and time. That’s consistent with Back to the Future, but it also makes the movie feel cartoonish. This makes sense, given that the villain is a knife-wielding super stalker wearing a creepy earringed bro mask. But because of that, when they finally unveil the killer, it feels more like a bloody episode of Scooby-Doo than something hefty and important. Also, while the movie does a good job of building suspense and tension and mystery around the killer’s identity, time travel, or both combined, the actual slasher scenes are very violent, and even a little upsetting. While that’s consistent with the slasher genre, it does snap the audience out of what’s otherwise a cute time-travel adventure comedy.