For those still drying their tears after Riverdale’s singular brand of time-traveling, genre-bending, wildly nonsensical thrills bowed its head earlier this year, throw your handkerchiefs in the trash. Then, light the whole bin on fire: The fun’s not over yet. Well, not exactly. There are no Riverdale characters in Totally Killer—Prime Video’s new teen slasher, out Oct. 6—but the movie does hold the same unpredictable essence that the CW’s final bastion of camp television did. The film also stars Riverdale-universe alum Kiernan Shipka, who held her own in the series’ spinoff The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Think of Totally Killer like Riverdale: The Movie, with just a smidgen of more logic—and I do mean a smidgen.
Shipka plays Jamie Hughes, a high school student in an otherwise sleepy town plagued by its brutal past every Halloween. The town is still haunted by the events of fall 1987, when three teens were viciously slain by the Sweet 16 Killer, known for stabbing his victims 16 times and leaving them for dead. The story has become infamous nationwide, attracting a deluge of tourists every year. It also triggers paranoia in Jamie’s mom, Pam (Julie Bowen), who went to school with the murdered girls. Surprise: The killer returns, kills Pam, and drives Jamie to go back in time to try saving her mother and all three of the original victims.
If that sounds at all familiar, it’s because Totally Killer wears its inspirations on its sleeve. The movie is frighteningly similar to 2015’s Final Girls, which also follows a daughter trying to save her mother from a slasher while stuck in another reality. It also has shades of Freaky, Happy Death Day, Back to the Future, and, yes, Riverdale. While these parallels don’t necessarily hinder the film, they do make its plot feel hackneyed. The movie has trouble distinguishing itself enough from its influences, falling back too often on the safety of recycled humor. But when Totally Killer leans into shamelessness, it becomes a piece of frivolous genre fluff amusing enough to justify its own existence.
Like in most time-travel movies, the science behind the phenomenon is murky at best. And in a teen slasher, it’s best to suspend as much disbelief as possible to maximize your enjoyment. After her mother is killed, Jamie discovers that her best friend Amelia (Kelcey Mawema) has been toying with a time machine for their school science fair, only it’s not quite operational yet. Apparently, all it needs is the killer to stab their knife into it—missing Jamie by just a hair, after he tracks her down to continue the murders—to send her back to 1987, a year where the very progressive Jamie feels completely out of place.
Totally Killer never quite nails the right tone for its light commentary on the problematic nature of how things were “back in the day,” but it gets a few great digs in along the way. The movie mines a decent amount of humor from its period-specific setting, especially when it comes to refining each character’s behaviors and dialogue. When she enrolls as a new student at the local high school, Jamie finds that her mom is a member of the class’s group of cool girls, named the Mollys—like the Heathers, only they’re obsessed with Molly Ringwald, and none of them is named Molly—who all died by the Sweet 16 killer’s blade. For a pretty thinly written film, it only takes a short amount of time for each character to fit nicely into their own slasher movie archetype.
The Mollys star in the film’s funniest, most comically cruel moments, and Jamie’s attempts to save each of them from their certain death provides some big laughs. Jamie tries to encourage the teenage version of Pam (Olivia Holt) to call off the birthday party that her friend will be murdered at, suggesting, “Maybe you should cancel it.” Naturally, this earns an acidic retort: “Maybe you should fuck off and die.” Holt and the rest of the Mollys are perfectly cast, capable of flinging out cutting remark after cutting remark with all of the expertise of degree-holding graduates of the school of catty teen movies.
Shipka, a complete natural onscreen, matches them beat for beat. Since growing up in front of the camera on Mad Men, the actress has honed her screen presence into something close to perfect. She knows how to land a joke, deliver emotionally laced dialogue, and convey the urgency of her character’s situation without losing the humor of the film’s silly script. Totally Killer would be a much harder sell if it weren’t for her skill, and Shipka saves the movie from becoming the rote bomb that it could have easily been without the right woman to steer the ship.
That does not, however, mean that Shipka is completely capable of saving the film from itself—Jamie has a hard enough task on her hands, trying to save her mom! Totally Killer is frequently trite, trading its caustic wit and ruthless kills for lame jokes about the strength of weed in the ’80s and the blatant offensiveness of joke t-shirts. These quips come and go quickly, but they appear often enough to impede the film’s overall tone. After every cackle-worthy piece of banter, a cringe-worthy one-liner sits waiting in the wings, and the uneven script keeps the movie from fully connecting with its audience.
But Blumhouse, the studio behind Totally Killer, is no stranger to that. For better or worse, Jason Blum’s production company has carved a niche for itself in the original horror space. Fans of the genre have a clear idea of what they’ll get when they sit down for a Blumhouse movie: a higher-brow campfest that’s reminiscent of ’80s horror conventions but with more gruesome kills and biting humor.
It’s no surprise that Totally Killer shares so much with fellow Blumhouse productions like Happy Death Day and Freaky, but one wishes that it were easier to differentiate the studio’s output of original selections from one another. For every M3GAN, there is a Totally Killer clogging up the Blumhouse pipeline, waiting to do the job of scaring audiences with hilarious horror, albeit slightly less successfully. But while Totally Killer might not always live up to the promise of its title, it provides just enough thrills to satiate fans of the genre, even if they’ll forget about it by the time the next Blumhouse original rolls around.
