Posted by Totally Killer was released on Amazon Prime Video in October 2023 as a comedy-horror project that would involve viewers in the mystery. And it definitely met its expectations: the plot brings us to the 80s, with the many hilarious differences between the modern world and life years ago highlighted by the time travel. But there is a killer on the loose, and he’s still active in the present. How does Jamie stop him? Who is the killer initially, and why did he target the girls? The ending is quite exciting and deserves to be explained: let’s analyze everything together.
You can watch the official trailer for Totally Killer here on Youtube.
Totally Killer plot & ending explained: who is the killer, why?
The plot of Totally Killer revolves around a serial killer who murdered three teenagers in the 80s: he never got caught, so in the present, nobody knows who the killer is. But he strikes again 35 years later, murdering Pam. Jamie, Pam’s daughter, will time travel back to the 80s, discover who the killer is and stop him. But in Totally Killer, the ending adds more elements that must be explained.
The best way to understand the plot and the ending of Totally Killer is by first realizing how things went in the 80s without the changes brought by Jamie’s time travel. The “Sweet Sixteen Killer” murdered three teenagers in the 80s, Tiffany, Heather, and Marisa. Originally, who is the killer in Totally Killer, and why did he do it? We discover that the killer initially is only one: Doug, a boy who targeted the three girls because they caused her girlfriend’s death. Tiffany, Heather, and Marisa bullied a girl, Fat Trish, up to the point that they allowed her to get drunk and then let her drive back home. She will die in a car accident, and Doug, her boyfriend, will get his revenge on Tiffany, Heather, and Marisa by killing them.
What the ending of Totally Killer has explained is that there was only one killer in the 80s, Doug, and his motive was to kill those three girls because they caused his girlfriend’s death. Pam was never meant to die because she wasn’t involved in what they did to Fat Trish. Why does Pam die 35 years later? That’s related to Chris Dubersage, son of the local newsreader Norm Dubusage: in the future, Chris will become the biggest expert about the Sweet Sixteen Killer and build a career upon him. But it’s hard to keep the interest high after many years and only three deaths. So he will secretly leave a threatening note in Pam’s drawer so she will believe she’s a target too. The truth is that the note wasn’t left by the real killer: it was Chris the one who wrote it, to keep the killer story alive.
After Jamie time travels to the 80s, her genius friend Amelia tries to build a second time machine to rescue her, and Chris pretends to help her. But his intention is evil: he wants to go back in time and continue the terror of the serial killer so that, in the present, more people will be interested in him. And that’s what happens: Chris time travels to the 80s, kills his own father on live television (he secretly hated him), and enters the horror dollhouse, trying to kill Pam and the others. In the Quantum Drop, he plans to kill Pam and Jamie and return to the present, where he will continue building his career around the killer.
This needs to be clearly explained in the plot and the ending of Totally Killer: back in time, there was no second killer. The second killer is just Chris, who comes from the future to make the killer’s story bigger. But Jamie succeeds in stopping him in the Quantum Drop, changing history. When Jamie returns to the present, things are a little different: her name is Collette, and she’s her parents’ second daughter. The parents, Pam and Blake, got together earlier in the new timeline and had a son before her, now called “Jamie.” And Laureen, Amelia’s mother, is the one who explains to Collette/Jamie, just back from the past, how life is now. In the book she hands over to Collette/Jamie, the last page is dedicated to Chris: in this timeline, he’s a troubled man marked by his father’s horrible death; he doesn’t know who killed him, and he’s trying to find inner peace somewhere in the world.
Overall, Totally Killer is a pleasant movie that makes you smile and keeps the mystery hidden until its ending, adding to all the complications related to time travel: an exciting vision for people of all ages.
