A current trend in slasher films is having beloved concepts go on murderous rampages. Films Winnie the Pooh: Blood and The Mean One feature characters like Winnie the Pooh and not-The Grinch-but-totally-The Grinch becoming brutal killers. Into this comes It’s A Wonderful Knife. The film is a slasher take, on you guessed it, Frank Capra’s beloved classic It’s A Wonderful Life. In lesser hands, this film would join those others as a cynical and immediately forgettable film. However, thanks to a fun script and a game cast, It’s A Wonderful Knife gets to be more than a violent and ironic take on a beloved Christmas classic.
If you’ve seen It’s A Wonderful Life, you can easily guess the premise of this. Despite the good they do, teenager Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop) wishes they never existed. In doing so, they enter a world where the world is a lot worse off without them. Only this time, not being born means Winnie failed to stop the killer known as The Angel. So now, that killer has spent the last year on the loose. Certainly George Bailey never worried if his lack of existence meant a murderous rampage never took place.
That premise is as absurd as it sounds and there’s plenty of logic holes. However, the film has a secret weapon in screenwriter Michael Kennedy. Kennedy co-wrote the script for Freaky with Christopher Landon, who also directed the film. A slasher film take on Freaky Friday, it worked because of Kennedy and Landon’s script willingness to fully commit to the idea of a teenage girl swapping bodies with a slasher. Kennedy brings in the most familiar elements of It’s a Wonderful Life and puts a comedic slasher film spin on them. Turning the Mr. Potter figure, played by the man with Hollywood’s most punchable face Justin Long, into a guy willing to murder is a lot of fun. And much like Freaky, the script for It’s a Wonderful Knife is very queer friendly. There’s sympathetic lesbian aunts (one of whom is horror great Katherine Isabelle!) and Winnie’s brother is a gay football hero. The gag with the rainbow Christmas tree ornament (“You’re going to have to hang that up every year now”) is a fun nod to parents that are overly supportive of their queer kids.
The most inventive idea in the script though isn’t the murderous take on Frank Capra’s classic. The film explores what happens to the final girl after she survives and how that affects them. It’s something that audiences never really experience even in slasher sequels, where characters seemingly have to relieve their previous experiences. Widdop’s Winnie wrestles with the horrors of the previous Christmas. Sure, she saved the town and her brother from a lunatic, but she also lost her best friend and killed a guy in self defense. These experiences genuinely haunt her and only her. In the grand scheme of things it seems absurd to want to erase your existence. But for a lonely teen grappling with trauma, maybe not being born sounds like a good thing.
As fun as the script is, director Tyler MacIntyre veers the film more towards the comedy than the horror, not necessarily finding a good balance between the two. That’s not saying there aren’t well-staged kills or that it’s poorly directed. He shoots the opening scenes like a Hallmark movie that very quickly goes off the rails. He has fun staging the kills and puts in some fun gruesome violence. The Angel, for instance, kills a stoned teen as a strobe light goes off and ending in front of a window where the party ignores the murder is a highlight. But a lot of the deaths come across as campy more than horrifying. The ridiculous face on Justin Long’s killer Henry Waters as he dies at the beginning of the film works in that scene because his character is absurd. When another character, key to the film, comically stumbles into a movie theater after being stabbed later is funny, but the acting undercuts that’s character’s importance to the film.
Speaking of acting, there’s Justin Long’s performance in this film. His performance isn’t out of step with the film but his character seems more over the top than everything else. Long portrays Waters as a man with a ridiculous haircut. He speaks in a bizarre, high pitched Southern accent that comes and goes. He’s nominally the villain but he’s not very threatening in any way. Watching his performance, it’s hard to determine if Long thinks Waters is a parody of a conservative politician like Matt Gaetz. There’s a part where his character just starts killing people in front of a crowd nonplussed by the violence. It’s a pointed piece of social commentary on fascist leadership. Yet it’s performed by a guy, who even for a conservative, seems unlikely to be taken seriously or elected to public office.
In the end though, It’s a Wonderful Knife is a fun addition to the Christmas slasher subgenre. Its source material is simply a launching pad for a fun concept even if it doesn’t fully combine both its naughty and nice sides. Tyler MacIntyre and Michael Kennedy clearly enjoy both horror and Christmas films. What they’ve created is a fun diversion for folks simply seeking a bloody good Christmas time.
It’s a Wonderful Knife is currently streaming on Shudder.
