Review: It's a Wonderful Knife (2023)

It's a Wonderful Knife (2023)

Rated R for bloody violence, drug use and language

Score: 3 out of 5

It's a Wonderful Knife is the latest in the recent string of horror-comedies whose main gimmick is a retelling of the plot of a classic film in the form of a slasher movie. Happy Death Day was Groundhog Day as a slasher, Totally Killer and Time Cut were both Back to the Future as slashers, Freaky was Freaky Friday as a slasher, and this movie, written by the same guy who did Freaky and Time Cut, goes back a bit further and does the 1946 Frank Capra Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life as a slasher. Beyond just the obvious inspiration, it's also the slasher version of a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie, between its bucolic mountain town setting, a plot about a villainous land developer who wants to take over the town (only with, y'know, more stabbing), and the general aesthetics and tone of the film, which director Tyler MacIntyre manages to meld with slasher thrills surprisingly well. It's a shallow and often clumsy film that didn't really fully tap into many of the ideas it leaned into, perhaps taking a bit too much influence from Hallmark there, but as a lightweight, empty-calorie holiday horror-comedy, I was nothing if not amused for its brisk 87-minute runtime. If you're a horror fan who wants to have some fun around Christmas, give this one a spin.

Our protagonist Winnie Carruthers is a teenage girl who, last Christmas Eve, became the final girl in a holiday slaying when she stopped a masked murderer who turned out to be Henry Waters, the local businessman who employed her father David. Unfortunately, Henry still managed to kill three people before Winnie stopped him, including her best friend Cara. One year later, while David now runs Henry's company and the family seems to be doing better than ever, Winnie has fallen into a funk. She's still grieving Cara's death, her brother Jimmy is clearly the favorite in the family, and she's just found out that her boyfriend Robbie has been cheating on her with her friend Darla. Winnie finds herself wishing she'd never been born... and under the light of a strange aurora in the sky, her wish is granted. Now, she finds herself in a world where Henry's killing spree was never stopped, the killings having turned out to be part of a plot on his part to buy up various local businesses in order to build a massive development bearing his name and take over the town. Henry is now the mayor, his douchebag brother Buck is now the sheriff covering up the deaths (the last sheriff, you see, needed to go for Henry to carry out his plot), Jimmy and many other people Winnie cares about are dead on top of the initial three victims, and nobody knows who she is, not least of all her family, with David stuck working for the man who he knows killed his son in order to control him, her mother Judy a disheveled drunk carrying on an affair, and her aunt Gale grieving the death of her wife Karen. Together with a lonely outcast girl named Bernie who winds up serving as the Clarence to her George Bailey (and perhaps something more), Winnie must now stop the killer all over again if she wants a chance to go back to a home timeline where she didn't realize how good she had it until it was almost too late.

Beneath all the killing and bloodshed, this is fundamentally a movie that runs on pure, unadulterated Hallmark schmaltz. Angel Falls, at least the Bedford Falls version in the early scenes before Winnie's wish comes true and turns it into Pottersville, is presented in as idealized a manner as one would expect from Hallmark. There is romance in the air, both straight and queer, but it is as chaste as it comes. The protagonist Winnie looks and acts the part of a Hallmark heroine, while the villain Henry is a land developer overseeing a villainous gentrification scheme while hiding behind an aw-shucks demeanor. Make no mistake, this is still a parody of a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie, a film whose main hook is imagining what one of those would look like if you had a killer in an angel costume running around giving Lacey Chabert flashbacks to the Black Christmas remake she was in. But it's a parody made by people who, at the very least, have a clear affection for those films and understand why people enjoy them. Personally, they've never been my speed, and that extends to some of this film's faults in the storytelling department, which had a poorly-explained supernatural twist in the third act (though I think I figured out what happened there) and seemed to end with a neater, happier ending than it probably should've had. But when it came to pure vibes, director Tyler MacIntyre made a movie that felt really damn Christmasy, a candy-cane sweetness that came through even when it got violent. It was a tone that, beyond the holiday setting, felt like a slightly more comedic version of the Scream movies, a semi-serious pastiche that did have some funny jokes in there but otherwise took itself fairly seriously, and it was a tone that more or less worked for me. It's not particularly scary, but something tells me it really wasn't trying to be.

Rounding it out was a great cast, led by Jane Widdop as a final girl going through life after the trauma of a horror movie killing spree who suddenly has to do it all over again on hard mode. It's increasingly well-trod ground for modern slashers, but Widdop, who I've become a fan of thanks to Yellowjackets, sells it well, whether they're playing the cheerful girl in the prologue, the morose and bitter girl afterwards, or the scared survivor once Winnie's wish comes true. The interactions between Winnie and Bernie in particular turn out to be central to the film's sweeter side, and I bought the burgeoning friendship and eventual romance between the two of them thanks to Widdop and Jess McLeod's performances. Justin Long's villain Henry, meanwhile, also makes for a fun and deliciously hateable slimeball, from his "I'm the best, fuck the rest" ads to his vocal delivery going for a deliberately obnoxious affect that adds a level of smarminess and phony compassion to him. Every time that little bastard showed up on screen in the altered timeline, I wanted to wring his little neck, and I cheered when the final showdown came. The supporting cast, too, was great fun to watch, from Joel McHale as Winnie's traumatized father who knows what a terrible situation Henry has him in but feels powerless to stop him to Katharine Isabelle as Gale demonstrating that she's aged into "cool, boozy aunt" roles remarkably well. The body count was high, but the kills were generally fairly light, and some of them were better than others, with highlights including a slit throat and a giant candy cane through someone's head but lowlights include a mostly offscreen axe slaying and a kill in a movie theater that was lit up only with brief camera flashes where I could barely make out what was happening.

The Bottom Line

It's a Hallmark slasher movie, for better or worse. It has some of the flaws of its inspirations, and it's definitely not made for hardcore horror fans, but for my money, it's a nice movie to throw on around the fire during December, especially if you've already watched Krampus or Gremlins for the hundredth time and wanna pair it up with something similarly lighthearted.