Released: 1st December
Seen: 18th December
Without a doubt, the best new trend in horror has been slasher movies taking classic comedies with supernatural elements and twisting them into corny fun slasher movies. This trend started when Happy Death Day took on Groundhog Day, then Freaky repeated it with Freaky Friday and Totally Killer used Back to the Future as its main inspiration. It’s a trend that feels like it’s going to go on for a while, upcoming horror films like Time Cut (which also sounds like it’s using Back to the Future as a jumping-off point) show that there is a lot of potential fun to be had with this new trend… enter It’s A Wonderful Knife which is possibly the most basic version of this concept yet which proves that it can work even when being phoned in.
It’s a Wonderful Knife is just taking the basic plot of It’s A Wonderful Life (Obviously, you guessed that from the title) except in this version of the story the central character is Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop) who ends up witnessing a brutal massacre being done by a masked figure known as the White Angel. Winnie manages to stop the killer and, in the process, reveals that the White Angel is actually local legend Henry Waters (Justin Long). Cut to a year later and the trauma from the massacre is still hitting Winnie hard, causing her to become distant from her family and not notice her boyfriend has been cheating on her.
In a moment of despair, she goes onto a bridge and does what you expect someone to do in a film referencing It’s A Wonderful Life, she wishes she was never born. Naturally, this comes true and turns out that if she wasn’t born, the White Angel never got stopped and so not only has the town basically accepted semi-regular murder as a fact of life but Henry Waters has basically turned into a dictator ruling the town, with a few apprentices to continue murdering people whenever he feels like it. So Winnie must now convince people that Henry Waters is the killer and save the town again.
As far as slasher movie plots go, “Final girl wishes she was never born and thus no one actually killed the killer” is an intriguing one that offers a chance for a lot of fun to be had. Bonus points for finding a way to set a slasher film around Christmas which means a lot of shots of dark red blood splattering over snow, a shot that always looks intense and effective no matter how often you might see it. Indeed, the structure of this film leans into a lot of those interesting ideas, exploring what would be different if Winnie was never born and taking that to an illogical extreme.
Things like the killer still being on the loose is a fun idea, the scenes with Winnie’s family coping with a different kind of grief (specifically brought on because one of the extra victims in this new timeline is Winnie’s brother, AKA the only child of this timeline’s Carruthers family) create some interesting tension that the film kind of touches on throughout and seeing how far the murder spree has gone to changing the town has some fun ideas in it. The problem is that some of these are just ill-thought-out or explained in a way that makes no sense, specifically throwing in cult behavior and mind control in a story that doesn’t need them.
That mind control element is there basically to allow the film to have a surprise reveal of who is the killer in the new timeline, which is not something It’s A Wonderful Knife needs. Honestly, the film would be better if we spent the entire film knowing flat out that it was Henry Waters underneath the angel outfit, there’s no need for a mystery here when the magical plot is enough. A surprise killer reveal worked for Happy Death Day or Totally Killer because that reveal completed the story arc but this film tells you it was Henry Waters before the title card pops up, the mystery is not about who is doing it but about how to stop it happening.
It’s A Wonderful Knife shares another pretty major element with its Freaky and Happy Death Day cousins in that It’s A Wonderful Knife is gloriously queer. There are gays and lesbians and bisexual couples galore, the acting is campy and there’s an undeniable queer sensibility to it all. That feels like it’s a staple of this specific trend and it’s kind of nice to see this movie just going all in on it without a second thought. It’s nice to see this stuff put in a film where it’s just a casual part of the story, and sure this means that some gay characters get pretty brutally murdered but because others survive it never feels like it’s falling into the Bury Your Gays trope.
What the film does fall into is sadly taking itself just a bit too seriously. For a big over-the-top horror film that’s playing with one of the classics in cinema, it wants to really spend a lot of the time dealing with the trauma element. Sure, that’s an interesting thing to touch on and it’s kind of cool when a horror film takes the time to acknowledge that the events it’s portraying would be insanely traumatic to anyone but also this is a film based on a pretty well-known classic that features a guy in a white angel outfit stabbing people, it should be a lot more fun than this. Instead, there are just several moments of long drawn-out trauma dumping and it distracts from the silly fun moments that we came here for. I didn’t need to have the dad give a deep talk about how he lost his only kid, let me go back and enjoy Justin Long chewing scenery!
It’s A Wonderful Knife is the absolute bare minimum one can expect from this kind of film, and to its credit it’s still enjoyable which can give us some hope that this will be a long-running phase of the horror genre. Sure, it’s a little dour at times and doesn’t have anywhere near as much fun with its silly idea as it should, but what’s there is still a good enough time that it could be a decent addition to the annual alternative Christmas film list. It’s fine, but could’ve been a lot sharper.
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