Tonight I watched Totally Killer, the lastest "let's take a premise from an 80's comedy film and make it a slasher horror comedy instead" movie, with this one being Back to the Future But There's a Slasher in It. It was pretty good, but it got me thinking that, fun as these novelties are, they could really use something to shake up the formula before it gets old. Specifically, I think they need to invert it, at least once. Instead of a comedy premise getting a horror twist, let's give an 80's horror premise a teen comedy twist instead.
I want a movie that starts with a Friday the 13th knockoff premise - a hulking undead murderer rises from the grave to terrorize some college kids. But, through a series of slapstick shenanigans, he keeps getting disarmed while going for the kill, and the incredibly drunk coeds he's trying to menace are so hammered that they end up embracing him and bringing him along on their various 80's teenage dramedy hijinks. Cars are raced, parties are crashed, and this hulking murder monster is stumbling along without a clue as to what he can do while everyone drags him into more and more comedic goofball stunts. And every time he thinks he can find a weapon and start killing, some dumb bullshit pratfall occurs and leaves him disarmed again.
And, not to crib too much from the wizard novels I've written, I think to give the plot structure we should exploit the fact that these Jason Voorhees-type slashers often have abusive parents in their backstory, because hey, guess what the protagonists of 80's teenage dramedies also have? Imagine the poor lumbering brute stomping into a college library just to see his would-be victims crying their eyes out as they Breakfast Club monologue about their home lives, and he has a full on Grinch moment as he realizes that maybe he and these sex-crazed teens... aren't so different after all.
And at the end of the movie he kills the dean of the college and faces no consequences, because that's only a slight exaggeration of what usually happens to the authority figures in these movies anyway.
