Totally Killer (2023)

Recap of Totally Killer (2024)

The movie begins with the narrator recalling an awful event that took place 35 years ago in a town called North Vernon. Back in October 1987, a girl named Tiffany was brutally murdered in her garage on the night of her 16th birthday party. Merely two days later, another girl, Marissa, was found dead at her family cabin in the woods.

Then, on Halloween night, a third victim named Heather was also brutally killed in the parking lot of an amusement park. It turns out all three victims were sixteen years old and had been stabbed sixteen times, so the killer was named the “Sweet 16 Killer.” It is then revealed that the killer never murdered anyone after that, and their identity was never discovered.

Ever since then, the killer’s mask has become very famous, and every Halloween, people dress up as the Sweet 16 Killer. In the present day, we’re introduced to a local man named Chris Dubasage, who hosts a podcast about these incidents. Every Halloween, he conducts a tour of the murder sites for visitors.

It almost appears that he has nothing else going on in his life besides this true-crime event. In the following scene, we see a teenage girl named Jamie, who is getting ready to head out for a Halloween concert. Moments later, her mother, Pam, shows up and forbids her from going outside.

It turns out that Pam was close friends with the three girls who were murdered in 1987. So, even after 35 years, she is still scared of the killer. However, Jamie insists on going, claiming that she is good at self-defense. Her father, Blake, observes the two arguing and offers to drive Jamie to the concert, just as he notices someone messaging his wife, and Pam claims it’s just a mom group chat.

Later on, Blake brings Jamie to her best friend Amelia’s house. There, Amelia’s mother, Lauren, is also present, and it’s revealed that she is an old classmate of both Pam and Blake. Lauren complains that her boss does not allow her to rest even on Halloween and leaves for work. After this, Blake accompanies the girls to the concert. Meanwhile, Pam is alone at home when a masked man appears on her doorstep.

She believes it is just another person in costume and offers him candy. However, as soon as she notices a knife in his hand, she immediately closes the door. She quickly calls the cops, but the man bursts through the door and attacks her. Surprisingly, she puts up a good fight, as she has been preparing for this day since she was sixteen years old.

After a while, Pam pulls out a knife and threatens the killer, saying that the cops could arrive at any time. This makes him hesitate, so he decides to leave. But just as Pam exhales a sigh of relief, he suddenly appears from behind and strikes her. He then continues to stab her exactly sixteen times until she passes away.

After her mother’s death, Jamie is deeply shocked and devastated, while Chris, the true-crime enthusiast, is broadcasting live outside the house. The following day at school, the police arrive and ask Jamie where her father was when the murder took place.

They speculate that Blake may have been involved because Pam and Chris often texted one another, and maybe they were having an affair. However, Jamie quickly shuts down the suspicion, claiming that her father could never do such a thing and blaming the police for failing to catch the killer 35 years ago.

After school, Jamie heads to a science fair, where Amelia is busy with a makeshift time-traveling machine. Amelia shares that her mother, Lauren, had previously worked on a time-travel project but never finished it. Now, using her mother’s old notes, she is determined to build a functional time machine.

She wants to test whether they can travel back in time to prevent the killer’s actions, and Jamie adds that her mom would still be alive if they could stop him. To do so, Amelia has set the date to October 27, 1987, when the first murder took place. Later in the evening, Jamie watches Chris’s killing podcast, but her dad tells her to stop listening to him, since the man always turns tragic murders into entertainment—especially the one from 35 years ago.

The next day, Jamie meets Chris at a café. She directly asks him if he and her mom were having an affair, but he denies it. He clarifies that Pam was deeply invested in solving the serial killer case; therefore, they used to text each other. He also reveals that Pam had received a note with a death threat from the killer after the last murder 35 years ago, stating that she would be the next victim.

Later that day, an upset Jamie returns to the science fair to meet Amelia. Suddenly, the killer shows up and starts attacking Jamie, but she manages to run and hide. In an attempt to save herself, she accidentally enters the time machine—also known as the photo booth—and tries to turn it on.

Unfortunately, the killer follows her, and when he attempts to stab her, he accidentally plunges the knife into the photo booth stall’s control panel. This generates extra electricity, instantly activating the time machine. Luckily, before the killer can reach her, the machine works, and Jamie is transported back to 1987—exactly to the day of the first murder.

Initially, she is frightened to realize that she is, in fact, 35 years in the past. However, when she understands that she can save her mother, she becomes determined to stop the killing spree. Following this, Jamie places an “Out of Order” sign on the time machine booth and approaches a random woman nearby. She asks about her mother, Pam, and the woman informs her that Pam is at school.

Without wasting time, Jamie heads to the town’s school, where her mother is a student. There, she introduces herself as an exchange student from Canada and is immediately admitted by the lazy clerk. Later, in gym class, Jamie is shocked to see the three girls who were murdered: Tiffany, Marissa, and Heather.

When training begins, she struggles to locate her teenage mother, and to her surprise, the calm and patient woman she remembers is very different from what she imagined. After class, Jamie discovers that her mother acts superior to everyone else and is a complete bully. She also learns about Tiffany’s birthday party that evening—the same night Tiffany is supposed to die.

Jamie tries to convince the girls to cancel the party, claiming it’s lame, but they don’t listen to her. Frustrated, she goes to the local police for help, warning them that a murder is going to happen at Tiffany’s house. However, the cops laugh and claim that there has never been a murder in their town. With no other option, Jamie starts searching around the school and asks the lazy clerk about Amelia’s mother, Lauren.

She then enters Amelia’s mother’s class and finds Lauren there, though she is a bit confused by Jamie. After finding her, Jamie tells Lauren about the time machine that her daughter will invent in the future and explains the entire situation. She also informs Lauren about the upcoming murders and the details written in her notebook.

Surprisingly, Lauren believes her, because no one else knows about the secret notebook or her plan to build a time machine. Jamie adds that she wants to stop the killer from murdering people—including her mother—and that the only way for her to return to the future is with Wi-Fi. Since Wi-Fi doesn’t exist in 1987, she needs Lauren’s expertise to find an alternative solution.

The scene then shifts to 2023, where we see Blake frantically searching for Jamie and speaking with the police. Just then, Amelia walks up to them and reveals that Jamie used her time machine to travel into the past. Naturally, no one believes her, but Chris is intrigued by what she says. Meanwhile, in 1987, Lauren and Jamie attend Tiffany’s evening birthday party in an attempt to prevent the murder.

At the party, Jamie meets a teenager named Doug, who is constantly bullied and will later become her principal. There, Jamie notices an attractive guy and is immediately smitten. However, she is shocked when she discovers that the guy is none other than her father, Blake. She also learns that Tiffany and Blake are in a relationship and that her parents, Blake and Pam, have not started dating yet.

After that, Jamie does her best to keep the three girls safe, but they don’t seem to want her help and instead continue making fun of her. Moments later, Tiffany takes a boy upstairs for some fun. She soon excuses herself to the bathroom, but when she returns, the boy is gone. She hears noises coming from the closet and decides to wait for him to come out. Suddenly, the killer emerges from the closet and walks toward her before brutally stabbing her. 

uring the loud party, Jamie frantically searches for Tiffany in an effort to protect her. Unfortunately, she arrives too late, as Tiffany’s body is soon discovered in her parents’ bedroom. Although terrified, Jamie realizes that she can change things in the past. In the original timeline, Tiffany was found dead in the garage, but in this altered timeline, she is discovered in her parents’ bedroom.

Afterward, Jamie and Lauren walk Pam home because they don’t want her to be alone with a killer on the loose. When Pam asks how Jamie knew about the murder, Jamie claims she’s psychic and can predict who will be killed. The three decide to stay together for the night, and Jamie asks Pam if she knows anyone who might hate them enough to want them dead. Pam admits that many people could be the killer, since she and her friends have bullied a lot of people.

Back in 2023, Amelia is working on her time machine, determined to figure it out and bring Jamie back. Suddenly, Chris arrives and expresses interest in examining the time machine. As they talk, Chris realizes that he has been remembering the case incorrectly. The murder of Tiffany actually took place in the bedroom, not the garage, as he originally believed.

It turns out that Jamie’s actions in the past are causing ripple effects in the time continuum. Finally, Amelia and Chris examine a photograph from 1987 and notice that Jamie has indeed traveled back in time. Back in the past, Jamie tries to prevent the group from going to the cabin where the next murder will take place. She convinces Marissa that they should go to the city instead.

Marissa suggests going to her parents’ condo, and Jamie agrees. Later, a teacher assigns Jamie to partner with Damon, an odd and frequently bullied boy. Jamie notices strange drawings in Damon’s notebook. After school, Marissa and the girls pick Jamie up and head toward Marissa’s parents’ condo. When they arrive, Jamie is horrified to realize that it isn’t a condo at all, but the same creepy cabin in the woods where Marissa originally died.

Jamie desperately tries to convince them to leave, but the other guys arrive, and they decide to party at the cabin. Worried, Jamie attempts to set safety rules inside the cabin, but no one listens to her. Later that evening, one of the guys calls Jamie a party pooper and locks her outside. Desperate to get back in, she searches for another way and discovers a window. Peering inside, she sees Heather lying unconscious on a bed.

Meanwhile, Marissa and another guy step outside together. It is revealed that the killer is already inside the cabin. He emerges from the closet and slowly approaches Heather while turning the radio up loud. Heather wakes up just in time to escape the room, but the killer catches her, throws her down the stairs, and moves to kill her. This alters the order of deaths, and instead of Marissa, Heather becomes the victim.

The remaining friends band together to fight the killer, but he overpowers them, though they survive. After the killer flees the cabin, the teens go to the police station to report the murder. Jamie attempts to help by giving the police the killer’s blood for DNA testing, but the officers don’t even know what DNA is. At school, Jamie talks to Damon and realizes he is just a normal, nerdy boy with no connection to the killer.

Doug then shows up and tells them to get inside the classroom. After the incident, Jamie and the group begin planning how to catch the killer. They decide to use Marissa as bait, since Jamie knows she is supposed to be the final victim in 1987. This time, however, they plan to capture the killer the moment he appears. Meanwhile, Lauren needs enough power to activate the time machine.

She begins working on converting a popular attraction into a makeshift time device for Jamie’s return to the future, while, in the present day, Chris helps Amelia repair their machine. The movie then cuts to Halloween night, where Marissa walks through the amusement park as the killer secretly follows her. She enters a haunted house attraction, where the rest of the group waits anxiously for the killer to appear.

Soon enough, the killer arrives, leading to a confrontation with Jamie and the others. They all huddle into one room, where the group struggles to fight the killer, until Jamie finally manages to stab him. Just as the killer is about to stab Jamie, one of her friends sneaks up from behind and fatally stabs him. They unmask the killer, only to discover that he is their own classmate, Doug.

It is then revealed that, a year earlier, a student named Trish tragically died in a car accident. Shockingly, the bullies—including Tiffany, Marissa, and Heather—were responsible for her death. They had nicknamed her “Fat Trish” because of her physique. One evening, the three girls invited Trish to a sleepover at Tiffany’s house and planned to get her drunk to make her talk about her rumored affair with their coach.

They continued pressuring her to drink, even when she began to cry and was clearly distressed by the situation. Eventually, Trish left the house while intoxicated and ended up getting into a fatal car accident. What the girls didn’t know was that Trish was in a relationship with Doug, who was left completely devastated by her death. In order to avenge the girl he loved, Doug put on a mask and began killing the bullies.

Hearing all of this, Jamie becomes furious with her mother, Pam, for being so cruel in the past. However, Pam explains that she wasn’t at the sleepover because she had fought with Tiffany beforehand. She insists that she would never do something so terrible, and Marissa confirms that Pam was not involved. Jamie is now confused as to why Doug, the killer, would leave Pam a threatening note—and eventually kill her in 2023.

Before they can process this revelation, a second killer appears behind Marissa and murders her. This killer then pursues Jamie, killing Chris’s father along the way while he is live on television. Eventually, they reach the time machine, which is finally working. Lauren explains to Jamie that once the ride begins, she must stay inside it; otherwise, she will be slammed against the wall and killed by the force.

Unfortunately, while they are talking, the killer arrives and attacks them. Jamie urges Lauren to leave immediately, which she does, and Jamie activates the machine. Suddenly, Pam arrives to help her daughter, and a violent struggle breaks out. As the machine begins spinning rapidly, Jamie, Pam, and the killer are pinned against the wall by centrifugal force.

However, the killer understands the laws of physics and manages to move across the wall toward Pam. He stabs her once, and Jamie pushes her mother out of the ride just as the killer’s mask is torn off by the force. The killer is revealed to be Chris—from 2023. Chris admits that he never knew Doug was the original killer.

He explains that he murdered Pam to keep the Sweet 16 Killer legend alive after 35 years. He also sent Jamie a fake warning note to generate more content for his podcast and increase his fame. Chris confesses that he was tired of living in his father’s shadow, since his father was far more successful and respected, so he murdered him as well.

Chris then attacks Jamie, and the two engage in a brutal fight. Fortunately, Jamie gains the upper hand and shoots him with a nail gun. She then kicks him into the spinning machine, killing him. After this, Jamie returns to the present. She arrives on the day before Halloween in 2023 and is relieved to find that Pam is still alive and married to Blake.

Meanwhile, Lauren remembers everything that happened in the past and tells Jamie that this timeline is different from the one she came from. Because of this, Lauren has written a book documenting every change that has occurred. Suddenly, a man greets Jamie and walks into the house. Lauren explains that, in this timeline, Jamie’s parents got together earlier than before.

As a result, Jamie now has a 34-year-old brother named Jamie, and her own name has changed to Colette. Additionally, Lauren is now a bioengineer, and Amelia is still Jamie’s best friend. Lastly, in this timeline, Chris has been living in a monastery in India, traumatized by witnessing his father’s death on live television—without realizing that it was himself from another timeline.

Plot summary of Totally Killer (2023)