Totally Killer

(Nahnatchka Khan, USA, 2023)

There is a strange idea about the 1980s – and particularly, emblematically, ‘80s teen movies – that has become quite popular in the 2020s. It’s the notion that the ‘80s constituted another world, very alien to us now – and decidedly neanderthal in its values and behaviours. I find the picturing of that decade as the absolute bastion of backward conservatism – more so than the 1950s, for instance? – peculiar, to say the least. And certainly when the teen movie is the most prominent evidence of this supposition that is waved in our faces.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Suburbia (1983), My Bodyguard (1980), The Legend of Billie Jean (1985), The Prince of Pennsylvania (1988), and literally a hundred others: were they the detritus of an age predating the evolution of contemporary political-social-cultural consciousness? Before feminist and queer movements?? They certainly didn’t strike me that way then (we already had the 1960s and ‘70s, after all!)– and they still do not, today. We are forgetting (or simply not registering) the complexities of that time – just like every other time, in that regard, whether at the movies or anywhere else.

This misappropriation of 1980s teen movies has come about largely, I suspect, because of Molly Ringwald’s heartfelt public intervention as a concerned parent discussing her previous roles in John Hughes films with her impressionable daughter (an event which I’ve earlier discussed in my review of Amy Poehler’s Moxie [2021]). Let’s face it: any of us can pick out the worst moments of National Lampoon-type humour from Hughes’ outstanding œuvre – loose jokes about date rape, Asian migrants, and the psychopathic homeless – and paint a pretty dire portrait of ‘80s pop culture. But is that all his films amount to? No. And that’s not the whole genre, or the whole culture, or the whole decade, or the whole world back then. Nothing is, except in some dopey journalistic tagline, or instant cliché of the past.

If you want to experience the full oddness of this retrospective view of the ‘80s, watch Totally Killer. Almost every line, every gag, is premised upon it – thanks to the time-travel premise that lands modern gal Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) back in 1987, with just enough window-of-opportunity to try to stop the triple teen-murders by a obligatorily-masked serial killer. Jamie spends most of her screen time uttering out loud a running commentary-monologue about the shocking, regressive customs of her parents’ generation: a time when girls gladly gave blow jobs to their brutish, nunchuck-swinging boyfriends, played dumb and sweet and adoring, never gave a fig for their own safety at parties or wandering in the woods … Wasn’t Carrie in 1976 already sending up these (already old) stereotypes rotten?

And there’s so much more of it in Totally Killer! One of its most amusing – and weird – lines of satire involves the complete lack of bureaucratic efficiency in the ‘80s (come again?): no identity checks at school, no DNA testing by police, no monitoring by teachers of violence levels on the sports field … When a film of our time expresses sincere longing for and appreciation of State administration, we are surely inhabiting a Foucauldian nightmare of alarming proportions.

To tell the truth, Totally Killer is a pretty good and enjoyable film, despite its – how you say? – ideology. It has a touch of Joseph Kahn’s Detention (2011), and even more of his Ick (2024), given the generational crossed-wires, who-gave-birth-to-whom framework. Director Nahnatchka Khan serves up a few lame bits of burlesque along the way, but she’s a figure to watch in pop cinema – this is several notches above a similar project like It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023), and a lot less pretentious than, say, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026). And it has an excellent action denouement in a fairground Rotor attraction named the “Quantum Drop”.

Totally Killer makes a virtue of its by-now mandatory self-consciousness (but please stop calling this sort of playfulness meta because it, too, goes back a long way): movies like Back to the Future (1985) and songs including “Venus”, “Lady in Red” and especially “Let the Music Play” (over a bloodbath) are cleverly wielded. I especially appreciated those lines of dialogue that circumvent the whole ‘upsetting the spatial-temporal continuum and thus no longer existing’ conundrum that many time-travel stories (serious or otherwise) get stuck on. One actor really carries this film with their veritably screwball rhythm and energy: Shipka (of Mad Men fame) in the lead role. I sure want to see more of her on screen.

By the by: there must be an intriguing backstory to the scripting of this project. The two credited co-writers are David Matalon and Sasha Perl-Raver. He, in 2023, was a long-retired studio executive, and he died in 2025 at age 82; she’s a 48-year-old “writer, actress, film critic and TV personality” (thanks, Wikipedia). Then Jen D’Angelo (Quiz Lady, 2023) came in, I presume to beef up the comedy. I wonder how long the treatment for it circulated – and in what specific balance of action, drama and comedy – before Blumhouse Television picked it up?

© Adrian Martin 20 October 2026