It’s A Wonderful Knife

Directed by Tyler MacIntyre

I’ve made no secret over the years how much of a soft spot I have for slasher movies. I also have a huge soft spot for movies that are aggressively weird and out there, so how could I not go see a slasher movie that’s functionally a remake of the Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life? Somehow, somewhere, someone thought that it would be a good idea to reimagine this Christmas movie as a violent slasher film, and I have to admit that it is a great idea. We’ve all seen It’s A Wonderful Life, or have heard enough about it through cultural osmosis that we basically know what it is, and playing with that by making it about a particularly non-jolly topic could lead to some good jokes. This isn’t totally unexpected because the writer of this film also wrote Freaky, the slasher movie remake of Freaky Friday, but let’s tackle this one at a time and see if this truly is a wonderful knife.

Idyllic Angel Falls is getting ready for Christmas once again when a slasher all clad in white attacks a party being attended by high schooler Winnie and her popular brother. After the slasher almost kills her brother, Winnie turns the tables and fulfills her destiny as final girl, killing the slasher before he can kill again. But life isn’t so kind to Winnie afterward, and she finds herself trapped in a depression and unable to move on from the horrible events that have befallen her and the general unfairness of life. As you can probably guess, Winnie wishes she was never born and finds herself in a world where that’s the case – a world very different from the one she just left.

I’ve been pretty negative with my reviews lately so I’m going to try to be more positive this time and start with everything I liked about It’s A Wonderful Knife. For starters, I will say that the premise is a fun one. Whenever you have something so ingrained into pop culture like It’s A Wonderful Life, it’s interesting to see riffs and parodies and homages put their own spin on a piece or even totally refigure it from a different perspective. That’s helped by the cast which is pretty damn good; Justin Long, Joel McHale, and Jane Widdop are all fun in their own ways and manage to give a bit more depth to their characters. Also, it’s fun how unapologetically queer the movie is, that’s always welcome. Oh, the killer looks pretty neat! He’s got an all-white cape and mask thing going, like he’s riffing on Moon Knight almost and he has some decent kills. And I laughed quite a bit during the first act.

Alright, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get down to why It’s A Wonderful Knife sucked. You see everything up in that last paragraph that I liked? That’s not a movie. Those are pieces of a movie – ingredients in a recipe – and those ingredients need to be combined in a way that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts, something that It’s A Wonderful Knife has no interest in doing. The premise is good but everything after that is a completely beat-for-beat retelling of It’s A Wonderful Life with no surprises or twists or additional elements that would make this stand out. I walked into the movie thinking about what I imagined it could be like, and what I imagined was almost exactly what I saw. The lack of anything new was so incredibly disappointing that it basically ruined the movie all on its own.

Once Winnie gets transported back in time she realizes that the world is worse off without her, a plot element so dumbly obvious because she’s the one who killed the slasher villain! This isn’t the story of an ordinary person whose small acts of love and humanity have enriched the lives of others – it’s about how murders are bad and if people can murder without punishment then society suffers. Wow, you’re really challenging the audience with that one, It’s A Wonderful Knife. This could have maybe been melded into a humorous plot point if say, Winnie learned the completely wrong lesson from this, like how murder is fine so long as it’s the ‘right’ people being murdered. But it doesn’t do any of that because as soon as Winnie transfers to a her-less existence, all humor vanishes. If this meant it transitioned from comedy to horror, fine, but it didn’t, horror never replaced comedy, the comedy was replaced by nothing. I don’t like watching nothing.

That’s probably why this movie frustrated me so much. I enjoyed the first act, I could see a good movie in there somewhere desperately trying to get out but it was stifled by someone so in love with the premise that they refused to change anything to make it interesting. And this probably had nothing to do with the filmmakers, but why would you release a Christmas slasher movie at the beginning of November? The actual Thanksgiving slasher movie hasn’t come out yet, and there’s no way this movie is going to last until December. Wouldn’t it have been better to release it in early December as a bit of counter-programming to all the wholesome family releases? They were probably too scared to compete with them, which, after seeing this movie, makes sense. I will admit though that It’s A Wonderful Knife is a pretty great pun title, so they at least have that. Oh wait, what’s that? This was a Simpsons joke nearly a decade ago? Nothing to see here then, carry on.