Totally Killer: Back to the Future Meets Scream

In 1987 in the small town of Vernon, Washington, three girls are murdered, each on consecutive days leading up to Halloween. and each one was killed on their 16^th birthday and stabbed 16 times, giving the murderer the nickname the “Sweet Sixteen” killer.  Thirty-seven years later, in 2023, the town is now notorious for the murders.  Chris Dubusage (Jonathan Potts), the son of a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, runs a podcast on the subject and gives tours of where the murders took place. On Halloween night, Jamie Hughes (Kiernan Shipka) wants to go to a rock concert with her best friend Amelia (Liana Liberato) but her mother, Pam Miller (Julie Bowen), is concerned, having been good friends with the three girls that were murdered years before.  She finally relents if her father drives her. While there, Pam is brutally murdered, and it appears like the Sweet Sixteen killer is back. Days after her mother’s death, Pam is helping Amelia with her science fair project, a time machine, based off plans her mother, Lauren (Kimberly Huie) drew when she was in high school.  Later that night, Jamie is chased by the killer and hides in the time machine accidentally activating it which sends her back to 1987, just before the first murder.  Jamie believes that if she can stop the murderer in 1987, she can save her mother from ever being killed.  But once meeting the teenage version of Pam (Olivia Holt), and her three friends Marisa (Stephi Chin-Salvo), Heather (Anna Diaz) and Tiffany (Liana Liberato), she realizes that her mother was not the sweet, nice person she is in the future, but a “mean girl” who bullies everyone around her.  Enlisting the help of teenage Lauren (Troy Leigh-Anne), the pair attempt to save the mean girls, but in the course of doing so, change the future, creating ripples in the memories of Chris and Amelia back in 2023, who are working on a second time machine to help save their friend.  Can Jamie prevent the three murders saving her mother and make it back to 2023 or will she become a victim as well?  Watch and find out!

Although the film has a sci-fi twist to it with the plot being absurdly fantastical, the characters do a great job at helping us accept what is happening within the film as being real. The cast is composed of some well-known television actors like Kiernan Shipka, best known for playing Sabrina Spellman in the Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and Julie Bowen, best known for her role as Claire Dunphy on the ABC sitcom Modern Family. Kiernan is fantastic in the leading role and really is the anchor of the film.  She plays the “fish out of water” character well, with both confidence and bewilderment, as she tries to navigate what it was like being in high school in the 1980s.

This was a really fun horror comedy with more of a chuckle type of humor and not so much out right laughing.  Much of the comedy comes from seeing a girl who grew up in a very politically correct and overly cautious culture shocked by how things were done in the 80s.  The script is witty and smart and used interesting ways to give the audience expositional information especially once Jamie has time travelled, allowing the audience to better understand the character dynamics back in 2023. There are a lot of pop cultural references to 80s movies as well.  The production value is high, and there weren’t a lot of over-the-top special effects, just a little bit used in the time traveling sequences.  And I am quite grateful that the gore is kept to a minimum as well.