Totally Killer: 80s time travel slasher comedy trailer

Yikes! Like I'm freakin' Eric Cartman or Marjorie Taylor Greene over here or something... yeesh.

It does seem much like The Final Girls, but the trailer made a point of it being from the 'producers of' and it's a blumhouse thing.. and I do think this is a little more outwardly and obviously dumb like Freaky... which I kinda liked, for the record. Pluse those movies were big hits and The Final Girls was kind of a smaller, minor success so it kinda seems like thats what theyre trying to capitalize on.

But before I checked on who made it, I kind of assumed it was Chris Landon. again.

Watched this on Amazon over the weekend. It's passable but not good. The time travel thing is lazy and silly, but the movie is silly so they think that excuses it... which is fine if the jokes are good... but they're all very simple and dull. There are some attempts at some commentary on what was acceptable in the 80s and our main character not being used to that having come from high school in 2023, but there isn't as much of that as I'd have thought, and those jokes are flat and don't really have anything to say.

It's a basic slasher idea plus time travel, she has to go back in time to solve the slasher killings and prevent that from coming back in the future because her mom dies on Halloween night 35 years after her friends were killed in high school in the 80s. So it basically becomes a slasher semi-spoof but then the killer is revealed near the end and you say '...ok? I guess.' It may not make sense and it doesn't seem to mean anything at all. And then there's another who-is-the-killer twist and again, you're left saying 'who cares?'

What saves it is the cast. Kiernan Shipka is good and holds the interest of this dumb story quite well, and the actress that plays the young version of her mother/Claire from Modern Family is lovely and magnetic. She doesn't have much to do, but she has a real charisma and she can land the jokes even though they're uninspired and poorly written. I haven't seen her in anything before, but I expect we will be seeing a lot more of her in the near future.

Anyway, the killer wears a mask that nobody could possibly see through, and it looks like Max Headroom, a character I've only recently become aware of, but I found that kinda weird.

Oh ok. I saw some of both seasons because my wife watched, and we both agreed it was pretty bad, but this actress seems to have actual screen presence and ability.

And I don't mean to shortchange Kiernan Shipka. I've seen her here and there, but this was the first time I've seen her carry a movie and she can pull it off (I listened to a narrative podcast she did a couple of years ago for Halloween called Treat which was pitched as an 'audio movie' and she was good there too).

The rest of the cast is all fine and able to do what is asked of them, but nobody else stands out.