So a friend came to visit, and we watched some movies while she was here. Sadly, she was not converted to the way of truth and goodness (aka, subtitles off), but she did tolerate it without complaint, so hey.

First up was Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. This is the fourth movie in the series, and there are rather more than four movies in it, so the title may not be entirely accurate. The basic plot of it is that some horny teens go to Crystal Lake and then Jason kills a bunch of them, and if you think that’s a spoiler, I genuinely don’t know what to tell you.

But despite the obvious plot, I kinda like this one, because it’s got lots of weird notes to it. There’s a pair of twins, for no obvious reason. There’s a little kid who’s a professional-level movie makeup artist. And one of the horny teens turns out to be Crispin Glover (a fact that I was incredulously informed of when I said, unknowingly, “that guy’s giving real George McFly energy” — in my defense, he looked a lot different here!), and he does an absolutely amazing dork dance.

Not a brilliant movie, but it is legitimately enjoyable, and does well what it sets out to do.

Which is also not a bad description of Totally Killer. The premise here is that there was a “Sweet Sixteen” masked killer in this small town back in 1987, and now he’s back to finish the job for some reason, and yadda yadda there’s a time machine and a sixteen-year-old girl gets sent back to 1987 and needs to solve the mystery and stop the killer, while interacting with the teen versions of every adult she’s ever known, including her own parents.

So right upfront, let’s just say that as a time travel movie, it fails hard. It gives one speech’s worth of logic about how time travel is supposed to work here, but it doesn’t actually make sense, and I’m not convinced the movie follows its own rules with anything approaching consistency.

But as a slasher mystery comedy, I think it works better. The culture clash of modern teens with ’80s teens is fun (though I’m tbh skeptical at the idea that modern teens don’t have cliques and cruelty at all, and of course the ‘80s stuff is all done in broad strokes), trying to figure out the killer’s identity is interesting (I got it correct, albeit maybe by accusing every single character in the movie except for the guy that they were clearly setting up as the fake-out option), and there were some genuinely funny lines.

It’s got a bit of a TV movie vibe to it (it’s apparently an Amazon Prime Original, so checks out), and is overall a slight movie, but… it’s fun, and that’s pretty much what you’d hope for here.