‘It’s a Wonderful Knife’ Film Review: A Lump of Coal in Our Christmas Stocking

Ignited by the popularity of Blumhouse’s “Halloween” trilogy and the unending “Scream” series, slasher films have seen a resurgence. 2023 began with the sixth “Scream” film and has been inundated with slasher creepers such as “Dark Harvest”, “Totally Killer”, “Killer Book Club”, “The Conference” and “Unseen”. This year, even Winnie the Pooh got the stalking killer treatment. November brought fans of the genre Eli Roth’s rather excellent “Thanksgiving” and now the year ends with Tyler MacIntyre’s “It’s a Wonderful Knife”, a loose horror take on the Frank Capra classic.

While the year’s other slasher pictures were mostly creative fun, MacIntyre’s film starts off with promise and quickly devolves into 90 minutes of ridiculousness and mediocrity. “It’s a Wonderful Knife” is a picture made to please the modern generation of teens and twenty-somethings who need social issues dealt with in every corner of their entertainment. There are near constant “winks” to the current overly-PC climate that become tiresome. It seems the screenplay was checking off all the boxes to keep the younger generation happy, resulting in a kowtowing phoniness and lack of originality. Regardless of the brutality of the kills, this film is tame to its core.

The film begins well, as we are introduced to Henry Waters (Justin Long) and the town of Angel Falls. Waters is a slimy real estate agent who wants to purchase one of the town’s historic homes that is the last obstacle in his goal towards building a huge retail area. When the owner refuses to budge, he is murdered by a killer in a white robe and hood, wearing a featureless white mask. After the “White Angel” (as he is called) goes after some teens at a Christmas Eve party, high-schooler Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop) kills him and reveals the killer to be Waters.

The following year, after not getting into college, finding out her boyfriend is cheating, and losing her best friend to the killer, Winnie looks to the sky and wishes that she had never been born. This leads her to an alternate universe where the killer is back and the town has gone to hell. Teaming up with school outcast, Bernie (Jess McLeod), the two set out to stop the killer, save Angel Falls, and return Winnie to her proper time.

It is an interesting idea to use the Frank Capra classic as the basis for a horror film, but director MacIntyre and screenwriter Michael Kennedy blow it at almost every turn.

The ridiculousness begins the moment Winnie is thrust into the world where Waters runs Angel Falls. With the exception of his retail utopia, the town has fallen into moral disarray. The mom and pop stores that have become vacant makes sense, but the streets are littered with homelessness and violence and drugs. All of the sudden, the town has a crack problem. How? Why? In the scheme of things there is no need for this preposterous plot point.

In this timeline, Winnie’s brother is now dead, her mother is an alcoholic slut, and her father (the usually great Joel McHale) is a depressed mess. There is not enough time spent with Winnie’s family for the audience to care about their plight and there are so many characters thrust at the audience in the film’s first 30 minutes that it is impossible to care about anyone.

Jane Widdup does well as Winnie and the film’s atrocious dialogue is saved only by the sweet performance from Jess McLeod as Bernie and the always welcome presence of Katherine Isabelle as Winnie’s Aunt.

Justin Long has a bit of fun with his character. Using fake teeth and a voice that channels Dustin Hoffman’s work as Dorothy Michaels, Long is fun to watch, until he becomes entangled in the film’s web of preposterousness.

The screenplay quickly becomes a politically correct pastiche of slasher horror and comedy that insults fans of both and too-often plays to today’s self righteous climate. The tonal shifts are sloppy, the humor doesn’t work, and the horror scenes are haphazard at best. Director MacIntyre seems to fail at everything.

Coupled with Tiana P. Gordon’s phony production design, Nicholas Piatnik’s awful cinematography gives the whole film the look of a Hallmark Christmas production. Everything is over lit, the snow looks like foam, and the town has the glow of a cheap studio backlot set.

There isn’t even fun to be had with the killer. While the suit is white, with his flowing cloak and hood and “ghost-like” mask, this is basically Ghostface, right down to the aggressively relentless pursuits and multiple knife stabs. Throwing homage out the window, the killer’s appearance and actions constitute pure theft of the famous slasher created by Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson.

To be fair, slasher films were never meant to be comparable to Shakespeare. In their heyday of the 1980s, these films existed to give fans a bloody thrill ride where teens were stalked by a masked killer who killed them in creative ways. Many slasher films were fun and highlighted practical gore effects from talented makeup artists. There were certainly many bad ones, but the best of them had a creative spark that was memorable. “It’s a Wonderful Knife” tries to do something different, but fails to live up to any promise found in its premise and becomes an eye-rolling yawn and yet another nail in the coffin of horror films with an edge.