In the vein of Happy Death Day comes this Blumhouse tale of a young woman who gets a second chance to save her mother. 

Eighteen-year-old Jamie Hughes loves rock music, being her own woman, and loves Halloween. However, her mother Pam is totally against Halloween because over three decades ago, a mysterious killer murdered her three best friends. While Pam finally relents and lets Jamie go to a concert, Pam finds the killer had returned and she becomes his latest victim. Heartbroken, Jamie learns that her tech savvy friend Amelia has built a time machine from a busted photo booth. When the killer goes after Jamie the next night, a stab to the control mechanism activates the time machine with Jamie in it.

When Jamie comes out of the booth, she is shocked to discover that she is now in the year 1987. Pretending to be an exchange student from Canada, she finds her mom only to learn she was one of the mean girls in school. However, despite the issue, she does meet her best friend’s mom, who is clearly a nerd like her daughter in the present day. Jamie decides if she can find and stop the killer in 1987, she can change the timeline and help her mother live. Will Jamie succeed in doing what could be an impossible task?

Happy Death Day and its sequel helped pioneer a new subgenre in horror: the time travel horror film. While it may have been done before in some way, it was the film about a woman who constantly dies on her birthday only to be looped back to the beginning became something considered fresh for this generation. While we wait on the upcoming Christmas take on it with It’s a Wonderful Knife, we do have this new film from Blumhouse about a young woman who goes back in time to possibly stop her mother’s murder in the future and maybe save more lives in the process. 

What is very interesting is that once our heroine Jamie, played by the recent iteration of Sabrina Spellman, Kiernan Shipka, is that in 1987, one particular trope of classic 80s horror seems to be prevalent. While there is no gratuitous nudity, just the mere notion that a good 90 percent of teens in the film tend to have their hormones and libidos explode. In other word, they’re mini Austin Powers and in horror films, what happens to the horny couples? They’re most likely going to be victims. 

Shipka’s Jamie is a modern day woman in the past, where the whole #MeToo movement and female empowerment wasn’t as well known as it is today. Of course, this clearly gives her a fish out of water riff. While Modern Family’s Julie Bowen plays her mom in 2023, Olivia Holt is great as the 1987 teen version of the mom, who is the 80s equivalent of a Mean Girl. However, kudos goes to Liana Liberato as the Regina George of 1987 and one can guess in the film’s opening, she is one of the past victims.

Speaking of the killer, taking a page from Happy Death Day, the killer is decked out in black and wears a mask that could like the baby mask in HDD but if that baby was a teenager. The death scenes are a bit graphic and are more of the Ghostface-like slashings. The third act offers some insane twists in the story that if you miss any part of it, chances are you won’t get it. However, if you do see all of it, you will get the full understanding of the film.

Totally Killer is a fun meshing of modern day horror and life in the 1980s via time travel. Kiernan Shipka is great as is Olivia Holt. The kills are great to watch and the twists in the third act gel it all together. 

WFG RATING: B

Amazon Prime presents a Blumhouse/Divide & Conquer production. Director: Nahnatchka Khan. Producers: Jason Blum, Greg Gilreath, and Adam Hendricks. Writers: David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver, and Jen D’Angelo. Cinematography: Judd Overton. Editing: Jeremy Cohen.

Cast: Kiernan Shipka, Olivia Holt, Charlie Griffiths, Troy L. Johnson, Liana Liberato, Kelsey Mawema, Stephy Chin-Salvo, Anna Diaz, Randall Park, Julie Bowen.