Blechh Christmas
In the last few years, a number of films have emerged that have attempted to take the usual mad slasher gruesomeness and apply it to frameworks clearly inspired by well-known non-genre narratives, such as the Happy Death Day films (Groundhog Day and its many derivatives), Freaky (Freaky Friday and other body-switch stories) and the recent Totally Killer (Back to the Future). At the same time, there has also been an uptick in Yuletide-related fright films in which the red on display is not limited to Santa’s suit. It’s a Wonderful Knife attempts to fuse these two concepts together in a single holiday horror that clearly wants to be seen as an edgy alternative to the usual Christmas fare by taking the basic premise behind the 1947 Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life and throwing grisly slashings and stabbings into the mix. In this particular case, however, it feels as if so much energy went into coming up with the basic concept that there was nothing left to apply to the task of actually making it work.
The film is set in the quaint burg of Angel Falls, which is under the thrall of Henry Waters (Justin Long), a rich and egotistical developer whose plans to erect a massive shopping complex in the middle of the town are currently being stymied by a lone holdout. Among those not impressed by Waters is teenager Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop), whose father (Joel McHale) is employed by him and forced at his beck and call even on Christmas Eve. That night, she goes to a party that is visited by a mad killer disguised as a Christmas angel who slaughters a number of people, including her best friend, before Winnie herself kills the intruder, who turns out to be none other than Waters himself.
A year passes and when we see Winnie again, she is clearly not in a good place—she catches her boyfriend with another girl, her application to NYU is rejected and, worst of all, the entire town, including her own family, seems determined to simply forget about the events of the previous holiday and act if everything is okay. Fed up with it all, Winnie heads for the local bridge and wishes that she had never been born. As it turns out, the Aurora Borealis arrives at that moment (just go with it), her wish is granted and when she heads back to town, her friends and family have no idea who she is. She soon discovers that since she wasn’t there to stop the killings the previous year, they have continued and since Waters has become mayor and has installed his insipid son (Sean Depner) as sheriff, she can’t simply turn him in either without putting herself in danger. With the help of Bernie (Jess McLeod), a bullied classmate who has been doing her own investigation into the murders, Winnie determines that the only way to save the town and get sent back to her own reality is to once again kill Waters.
What people tend to forget about the actual It’s a Wonderful Life is that the stuff involving despondent hero George Bailey making his wish to have never been born and bearing horrified witness to the results only constitutes the last quarter of that film’s running time (a sequence so grueling that it earns the film a place on the list of all-time holiday-related horror films)—a good thing because a conceit like that could only go on for so long before becoming potentially tedious. Alas, screenwriter Michael Kennedy (who previously penned Freaky) apparently did not realize this and so most of his story deals with the aftermath of Winnie’s wish and yes, it does become repetitive after a while in ways that not even the frequent gory kill can quite overcome. In the cases of the Happy Death Day films and Freaky, they managed to avoid this by throwing in enough additional intriguing ideas so that they would not run out of steam once the novelty of the concept dimmed. Here, there is very little of that and what there is—such as some ham-handed satire in the form of Waters and his doltish son serving as obvious stand-ins for a certain boorish land developer-turned-politician and his idiot offspring and a weird third-act turn that I will not reveal—is so befuddling that the entire thing runs out of steam long before its not-exactly-surprising conclusion.
The only aspects of It’s a Wonderful Knife that do kind of work are the performances by Widdop and McLeod. The two are both real finds and the relationship that develops between their characters is so engaging that I found myself wishing that the film could just kind of forget about the body count and the ticking time clock regarding the fast-disappearing Aurora Borealis and spend more time with them instead. (It is in their scenes together that the film comes closest to resembling director Tyler MacIntyre’s previous feature, the inspired slasher riff Tragedy Girls.) Beyond that, the film is ultimately little more than a concept that might have made for an inspired half-hour episode of some horror anthology series but which, as a feature clocking in at three time that length, simply cannot cut it in the end.