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Killing Time

totally killer 2023

TOTALLY KILLER

4 Stars  2023/105m

“Murder is so 1987.”

Director: Nahnatchka Khan / Writers: David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver, Jen D’Angelo / Cast: Kiernan Shipka, Olivia Holt, Julie Bowen, Lochlyn Munro, Charlie Gillespie, Troy L. Johnson, Kelcey Mawema, Stephi Chin-Salvo, Anna Diaz, Liana Liberato, Ella Choi, Jeremy Monn-Djasngar, Nathaniel Appiah, Jonathan Potts, Randall Park.

Body Count: 7

Laughter Lines: “Let’s give it up for Angie, who wishes there were more people killed.”


Happy Death Day took the time-loop from Groundhog Day and put a masked killer in the mix; Freaky took the body swap from Freaky Friday and switched a teenage girl with a hulking psycho killer; and now Totally Killer takes the time machine from Back to the Future and throws a teen-hunting wackadoo at it.

Slasher films have been entrenched in an inflexible straitjacket of rules and tropes since forever, so this recent advent of pilfering major plot elements from big films and staple-gunning a teen slasher opus to it has made for a welcome mini-cycle of inventively comical ways to keep the genre from being stuck in its own loop of recycled motifs.

totally killer 2023

In the requisite suburban town of Vernon, 35 years have passed since the unsolved Sweet 16 Murders occurred: Three teen girls slain over a short period. Jamie’s mom Pam (Julie Bowen from Modern Family) was the only member of the clique not to meet the business end of a knife and has remained anxiously on edge ever since.

On Halloween night, Jamie revolts and heads off to a concert, leaving Pam to be attacked and killed by the maniac. Devastated, it’s a very fortunate coincidence that Jamie’s best friend Amelia is building a time machine in an old photobooth for her science fair project – and it works! Well, it works when the killer attacks Jamie and the action of the knife blade penetrating the device gives it the jolt required to zap the girl back to 1987, on the eve of the first murder… So far, so Marty McFly.

totally killer 2023

Intent on stopping the killer and thus saving her mom in the future, Jamie tries to blend in and befriend The Molly’s, a Mean Girls crew made up of the victims – and dear ol’ mom, all of whom are your typical John Hughes era rich bitches, along with their vapid boyfriends. Jamie tries to explain the situation to the cops, but as they’ve not yet seen Back to the Future, the concept is lost on them. Instead, Amelia’s mother Lauren, who first drew up the plans for the time machine, is instantly onboard.

While Lauren works out what they need to do to return Jamie to the 2020s, she continues to shadow the teen versions of her parents, the future high school principal, coach, sheriff and various others. Preventing the murders proves difficult though, as time just bends around her and changes it up, rewriting the future as it goes. Interestingly, characters in 2022 are able to sense the changes, with Sweet 16 Killer Tour Guide Chris seeing the adjustments manifest as Jamie runs interference in the past. A helpful ‘time is happening all at once’ explanation makes sense of all this, and is kinda zen.

totally killer 2023

Jamie manages to convince the others she’s psychic rather than explain the time travel thing, and the friends band together to try and trap the killer before he wipes the rest of them out, resulting in a great finale inside one of those Gravitron fairground rides where you pretty much get pinned to the wall of the spin dryer.

The plot was criticised for being too similar to The Final Girls, where a girl essentially time travels back to save her mother, although acting like that was the first film to build itself around this idea is about as productive as pointing out how much that one had to copy from Friday the 13th in order to function. The entire genre liberally steals from its contemporaries and just bends things to fit.

totally killer 2023

Maybe not quite as fun as Freaky, but definitely top tier inside it’s burgeoning sub-sub-genre. It’s a Wonderful Life has already been co-opted and changed to It’s a Wonderful Knife for the end of 2023, doubtlessly scattering other producers to hunt for tried and tested plots that they stir a dead teenager template into. Can’t wait.

Blurbs-of-interest: Liana Liberato was in Scream VI; Lochlyn Munro was also in The Tooth FairyFreddy vs JasonScary MovieHack!, and Initiation.

Things that are

seance 2021

SEANCE

2.5 Stars  2021/93m

“A joke might have caused an awakening.”

Director/Writer: Simon Barrett / Cast: Suki Waterhouse, Ella-Rae Smith, Inanna Sarkis, Madisen Beaty, Stephanie Sy, Marina Stephenson, Seamus Patterson, Djouliet Amara, Jade Michael, Megan Best.

Body Count: 6


Spoilers. The epitome of average, Seance – ‘from the creators of You’re Next and Orphan‘ – leads us to believing that a group of boarding school girls have conjured up the vengeful spirit of a past student who committed suicide there in the 90s. A prank orchestrated by a couple of them seemingly scares poor bookish Kerrie to death, as the others find her dead on the ground outside minutes after she fled.

Shortly after, taking Kerrie’s space is British girl Camille, who almost instantly finds herself in the crosshairs of bitchy chief-prankster Alice. Seven girls are given detention and decide to try to contact Kerrie through a homemade spirit board and, thereafter, the girls begin meeting their maker as they find excuses to go off on their own. Is it the ghost? Is it Kerrie? It’s certainly someone in a papier-mache drama class mask.

Remarkably, after a series of disappearances and ‘accidental deaths’, the headmistress doesn’t close the school and send everyone home, allowing the killer to continue offing the pack, until we arrive at the now-requisite girl-tied-to-a-chair-for-exposition scene.

With such a small cast, the killer’s identity is no real surprise. The motive though, what the actual fuck? Covering up a stolen essay. For real. Fortunately, Seance has another trick up its sleeve, albeit not game changing, it at least provides some context, and a couple of the kills towards the end are pretty gnarly. I know I won’t remember a damn thing about this a year from now.

“A boy’s best friend is his mother”

mother's day 1980

MOTHER’S DAY

2.5 Stars  1980/91m

“I’m so proud of my boys – they never forget their mama.”

Director/Writer: Charles Kaufman / Writer: Warren Leight / Cast: Nancy Hendrickson, Deborah Luce, Tiana Pierce, Frederick Coffin [as Holden McGuire], Billy Ray McQuade, Rose Ross.

Body Count: 6


A few crossover elements with stock slasher elements see this eyebrow-cocking rape revenge comedy included here.

A trio of college friends, now in their thirties, gather for their annual trip and, this year, venture into the woods stalked by a couple of hicks, who abduct them for sex slaves at the backwoods cabin they share with their domineering mother.

When one of the women dies after escaping, the remaining pair decide to return to the shack to unleash vengeance on the family, which includes TV-on-the-head, Draino down the throat, and suffocation by inflatable chair!

Little slashing occurs, exhibited only in the opening scene, where a couple of hippies are ambushed – look for the blood splatter that occurs before the weapon has even been swung.

Some amusing moments and the women’s revenge is great, it’s also unexpectedly well made, but nothing more than a passing curiosity. Curiously, several of the cast members go by different names outside of this production.

PLL: The Coincidencening

pretty little liars original sin 2022

PRETTY LITTLE LIARS: ORIGINAL SIN

3 Stars  2022/498m

“The past doesn’t lie.”

Created by: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Lindsay Calhoon Bring / Cast: Bailee Madison, Chandler Kinney, Zaria, Malia Pyles, Maia Reficco, Mallory Bechtel, Carson Rowland, Alex Aliono, Jordan Gonzalez, Derek Klena, Ben Cook, Sharon Leal, Elena Goode, Lea Salonga, Zakiya Young, Eric Johnson, Kate Jennings Grant.

Body Count: 9

Laughter Lines: “To paraphrase Heathers, our teen-angst has now has a body count.”


I watched precisely one episode of the original Pretty Little Liars series, realised it was going to drag out its one-note premise way past its welcome and find a way to screw you over to force multiple seasons.

Upon hearing that a (second?) spin-off series was opting for a straight-up revenge slasher tale over an I-can-do-it 10-episode season, I took a dip.

With title fonts clearly designed to conjure up memories of Friday the 13th, and screen prompts in the Halloween font, telling us what day we’re on, it’s clear from the off somebody involved was penning a love letter to the golden age of dead teenager stalk n’ slash.

pretty little liars original sin 2022

On New Year’s Eve 1999, a dishevelled teenage girl staggers into a rave, begging for help from a quintet of prissy prom queens, who tell her she’s on her own. As the clock is about to strike twelve, the girl leaps from the rafters to her death at their feet.

Leaping forward to 2022, all five women still live in the town of Millwood. All five women have one child apiece. All of these children are girls in the same grade. Of these kids, once-popular-but-now-pregnant Imogen had a major falling out with her best friend, Karen, who, when visiting one night to reclaim clothes Imogen borrowed, hands her mom a flyer for the 1999 NYE party that was taped to their door. The girls subsequently find Imogen’s mom has slashed her wrists in the bath and painted the letter ‘A’ in blood on the tiles.

A few months later, a more-pregnant Imogen is now living with Tabby and her mom (another member of the ’99 clique). They, along with ballerina Faran, be-ankle-monitored Noa, and shy nerd Mouse, receive detention for a series of strikes at Karen, who is the 1D bitch. The quintet become fast friends in their plot to take revenge against Karen, which starts a chain reaction of events that leads to the girl falling to her death during a school dance. Deja vu all over again.

pretty little liars original sin 2022

The five girls each find themselves tormented by texts from ‘A’, who swears them to silence. Imogen saw a masked loon push Karen to her death but the girl’s father is the local sheriff and blames the five of them for driving her to suicide. Her identical twin sister, Kelly, meanwhile, makes moves to step into Karen’s shoes, socially and… uh… ballerina-ally.

Mucho Nancy Drewing occurs – road trips to an institution, exploring old houses, befriending a guy who lives on an abandoned train… Despite leaving the gate with bloody intentions, the body count soon grinds to a halt after a scant three murders, despite there being a buffet of asshole jocks to pick from, the moms, various staff members at the school… A side-mystery around two rapes comes into play, which the girls manage to use to defend themselves when the bully-hating killer comes-a-callin’.

Film geek Tabby talks in movie metaphors for most of her scenes, even presenting a class project on slasher movie conventions that goes into gender issues of the genre, which is interesting when she comes to making a flipped version of the Psycho shower scene, but given this speech and all her talk around the male gaze, to then forge ahead and adhere to so many cliches around women in horror displays the operational limitations – such as blaming the death of a girl on a group of girls, and them tormenting other girls on the back of it. Why couldn’t one of the kids been a boy? Why couldn’t a few of them be older or younger to mix it up a bit? Hell, just give us Handsome Little Liars, where a group of teen boys are hunted in payment for the death of another boy.

pretty little liars original sin 2022

Bailee Madison, who handled final girl duties in The Strangers: Prey at Night, as Imogen, gets to scrap with the killer at the end in a good-but-is-it-too-late fight scene that highlights how sorely lacking this level of action horror has been over the preceding nine episodes. In this sense, the propositions of the first episode feel like broken promises, especially as things end with the door thrown wide open for another round, though not before an all-too-cosy scene in which all of the remaining principle characters sit around and count their blessings, getting back together, going to rehab, moving back from the city. Hallmark has a lot to answer for.

An okay show, wrapped up too swiftly, but it settled for merely flirting with slasher movie conventions rather than fully embracing them.

Below Duck

wreck 2022

WRECK

3.5 Stars  2022/272m

Director: Chris Baugh / Writers: Ryan J. Brown & Ibrahim Salawu / Cast: Oscar Kennedy, Thaddea Graham, Harriet Webb, Louis Boyer, Peter Claffey, Anthony Rickman, Warren James Dunning, Miya Ocego, Alice Nokes, Amber Grappy, James Phoon, Ali Hardiman, Ramanique Ahluwalia, Donald Sage Mackay.

Body Count: 5

Laughter Lines: “The fraternisation clause – you penis flytraps have blown it.”


A few years back my parents reached the age where they traded in package holidays for cruises, and so I’ve been regaled by many-a-tale of room upgrades, rough seas, singers I assumed had died years ago, and what sounds like a median patron age of 69. Hearing this, I wondered how it would be if a psycho blew a fuse and decided to start hunting victims aboard. And here we are! Steer carefully around some spoilers!

A spectacular opening serves us the usual babe-in-peril scenario, with a young woman chased through a series of corridors by a maniac …dressed as a duck! Girls Nite Out eat your heart out. A rapid chase eventually shows our fleeing victim is aboard a huge floating hotel at sea. When cornered, rather than suffer being stabbed, she flips off the killer and throws herself overboard.

wreck 2022 duck killer

Some time later, her younger brother, Jamie Walsh (a thoughtfully named combo of Ms Curtis and Elm Street 2‘s Jesse) signs up as a sort of all-jobs lackie, taking the identity of lovelorn Cormac who, unknown to Jamie, has also decided to come along, to win back his girlfriend Rosie. While Jamie works shit jobs and befriends sarcastic Vivian, he looks for clues as to Pippa’s disappearance, knowing there’s more to it than the official explanation offered by the cruise line.

When his initial suspect also meets the business end of the duck’s knife and is thrown into a pool, Jamie confides in Vivian his true reason for being there and the two play detective, with some help from cabin-bound Cormac, and fellow crewmember Olly.

wreck 2022 thaddea graham oscar kennedy

After the slasher-heavy first episode (of six), Wreck sets a new course for a while, focusing in on the drug racket aboard the ship, with employees smuggling and dealing to colleagues and guests alike. Jamie suspects one of the officers but keeps getting stonewalled. Meanwhile, Vivian falls into an awkward relationship with first class rich girl, Lily.

Crew disappearances continue, explained away by the no-nonsense chief officer, Karen, who has no problem threatening jobs when the questions get too close to a possible cover up. Come the penultimate episode, the duck has all but been forgotten and Wreck becomes a kind of Hostel-at-sea, as it transpires first class guests have, as part of their package, the ability to pick and choose a low-rung crewmember to hunt in a number of scenarios in hidden parts of the ship – the officers and purser all oversee it, the low-hanging fruit in the crew are purely expendable.

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Despite this swerve from slasher shenanigans, Wreck‘s most appealing elements lie in character and witty dialogue, both of which are top drawer, with a pair of LGBTQ leads, where their sexualities are largely incidental in the grand scheme of things, allowing for Vivian to quip “A lesbian with a powertool – how original!” during a climactic fight scene.

The body count remains low and things end with a find-out-in-the-second-series revelation that, honestly, I saw coming to an extent, but it also saddles the whole thing with a slight sense of incompletion… but I’d love to spend more time in the company of these characters so it’s not worth getting irked by.

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