Totally Killer has been sitting on my to-watch list since it came out last year.

I’m glad I finally got around to watching it. I had a damn good time. I’m very aware, however, that I was watching this movie through the lens of my love for time travel movies. I have a weakness for them. I feel less comfortable rating this movie as part of the slasher genre—I don’t have the context, it’s not a genre I know as well.

Yes, in case you missed it, this is a time travel movie that was caught in a horrific lab accident and fused with a slasher flick: teenage Jamie Hughes from 2023 is thrown back to 1987 and tries to save her mother and her mother’s friends from a serial killer, without creating a paradox that will erase herself from existence. Your mileage may vary, but I…

…I loved it. I think I want to watch it again right now.

Here’s a little background context before I go deeper. My experience of the slasher movie genre has always been from the weird tangential edges: Terminator (and to a lesser extent Terminator 2), Alien, John Carpenter’s The Thing, The Cabin in the Woods… they’re all horror movies that play with the ideas and themes of a slasher film without fitting easily into the genre. Thus, I think I understand the basic elements of a slasher movie, but I don’t feel like I have as good a sense of them as I do with time travel movies.

With that context, I’m not sure whether Totally Killer is a good slasher movie. I mostly thought it worked, but I’m not the best judge. Maybe slasher movies are a more rigid and codified genre than time travel movies, and a more discerning fan would say that Totally Killer didn’t, uh, make the cut. 

Crucially, Totally Killer didn’t freak me the hell out. It hasn’t given me nightmares yet. That might earn it a failing grade from more hardened fans. Totally Killer has absolutely given me fun and scary ideas for use in my own horror games, though those were mostly time travel and paradox related. Regardless, I enjoyed a lot of Totally Killer’s slasher movie themes.

For me, Totally Killer delivered on the feelings of persistent mystery, of grinding inevitability, and of desperation to ID the killer before it’s too late. This movie doesn’t try to ”hide the monster” the way so many other horror movies do; by my understanding, that’s just not how slashers work. The point isn’t to prevent you from seeing the killer, the point is to prevent you from knowing who the killer is—like Hot Fuzz. 

I think slashers ideally use those elements to create constant tension; you’re never sure when or where the killer will strike, and you know the main characters are in a race against time. In that respect, Totally Killer’s time travel premise worked against its slasher side. There was a sense of inevitability, yes, but that same feeling of inevitability also gave us (and our POV character Jamie Hughes) clearer understandings of when and where the danger was. For much of the movie, there was more predictability than uncertainty about when the slasher would strike next. Because of that, my tension was intermittent rather than constant. That made the movie less scary overall.

I was okay with that! It didn’t stop me from enjoying the movie. Maybe that’s because I love time travel stories and I was having enough fun with the ways in which the movie played with time travel, paradox, and cause and effect. The slasher is a (mostly) known quantity—the real question is whether Jamie’s life in 2023 will still exist, if she even manages to survive and return. I definitely felt like this was a time travel movie first, and a slasher movie second.

That doesn’t mean Totally Killer isn’t violent or scary at times. The writers, editors, and directors clearly know how to amp up tension with their shots. And while the movie’s gore is pretty tame, the fight choreography and performance felt good to me. There is tense and visceral violence. There’s one particular stunt involving a staircase that made me wince in sympathy and admiration. Better yet, people who are supposed to be skilled and prepared feel like they are skilled and prepared, even as they also feel fragile and human. That’s a tough balance to strike, and they manage it.

The movie is also damn funny. The jokes mostly feel like they naturally arise from the characters, contextual or in-character moments rather than witty lines slipped in later by a writer called on to punch up the script. The movie also lingers in the sometimes-comedic sometimes-awful culture shock of being thrown back into the 1980s from 2023, in ways that I thought worked really well. Where many time travel movies ignore the profound culture shock of being in another time, Totally Killer delights in those details.

Plus, Totally Killer wrings emotional weight from its time travel premise, even as it moments later mercilessly turns that emotional heft into harsh comedy. There are lovely moments of deeply meaningful sharing and vulnerability, and sometimes they’re shut down in the most crushing ways. This was good. This was what I wanted. I also loved the ways in which Totally Killer delivered on the occasionally brutal self-absorbed callousness of teens; as we discover, the serial killer’s original victims are the 1980s version of Mean Girls’ Plastics. The more our protagonist learns about the girls she’s trying to save, the more outraged she becomes. It’s great!

There were some bits that sat oddly with me. I didn’t feel like I got a clear enough, consistent enough read on who most of these 1980s girls were. Because we’re following our protagonist, we don’t get a lot of time inside these 1980s girls’ lives or inside their heads. As someone who wasn’t a popular mean girl in the 1980s, it’s hard for me to tell whether these characters felt real or like a writer’s caricature, a set of cardboard cutouts tossing out jokes about casual sex. I think that was okay, but given the depth or perspective offered to other characters it felt like a missed opportunity.

Have I missed any other good things?

There are fun homages that feel clever without slipping into the failure mode of clever. I caught a couple of references that I enjoyed, and there was enough context delivered around them that I don’t think I would have felt left out if I hadn’t known. I never needed to know something that I didn’t. Whatever I did need was included in the movie itself. That said, knowing a little about famous ‘80s movies and their actors and directors may heighten your enjoyment (ahem, Hughes). Those references aren’t big, but I enjoyed the chuckles.

So, do I recommend this? Yes. Absolutely yes.

Who wouldn’t like this movie? Probably people who hate time travel movies, or who crave a brilliant slasher flick instead of time travel with a side of slasher. If you absolutely can’t handle slashers at all, you might nope out of this too. This really does feel like a fairly gentle entry into the slasher genre, but it’s not not a slasher.

If you like time travel, and if you don’t have impossibly high standards for slasher movies or are at least willing to dip your toes into that bloody genre, try Totally Killer.