IT'S A WONDERFUL KNIFE - Mark Reviews Movies

It's a Wonderful Knife, RLJE Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 9, 2023

A decent pun does not a movie make, yet here's It's a Wonderful Knife, a horror comedy that can't even bother to acknowledge its obvious inspiration. Maybe that's for the best. It's a pretty good standard that filmmakers should never directly remind an audience of a better movie over the course of their bad one.

As such, this review will follow suit, because do you really need to be told which movie screenwriter Michael Kennedy is referencing in this half-hearted parody? This one is about a teenage girl who, a year after a murder spree perpetrated by a killer wearing a mask and wielding a knife, wonders if the world would be a better place if she had never been born. There's no angel to guide her on her existential crisis of a journey, but the little town is called Angel Falls, which gets two pieces of homage out of the way.

Why does this movie so often feel as if it is checking off existing ideas instead of finding its own identity? There are the few references to the film that inspired it, of course, including name-checking two of the major characters at one point. For the most part, though, this is little more than a generic slasher story, which just happens to possess a gimmick that Kennedy and director Tyler MacIntyre don't care about too much beyond the obvious joke of transforming the concept of a beloved holiday film into a violent horror movie.

Our soon-to-be existence-questioning protagonist is Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop), a teenage photography enthusiast, who lives in Angel Falls and thinks this Christmas will be like any other. Well, there is the issue of local business magnate Henry Waters (Justin Long, wearing fake chompers), who is buying up all of the property he can in town for his various plans. The big scheme is a massive one-stop shopping center, and the only holdout is Winnie's best friend's grandfather, with the murder of both of them setting the plot in motion and nothing else (It's a little disconcerting that Winnie's pain or just the basic fact of her long-time best friend's violent murder is forgotten once the plot is resolved).

Winnie stops the masked man's killings in their tracks, and to the surprise of no one, it turns out that Henry was the murderer. A year later, she's still dealing with the grief and guilt of her best friend's death, while everyone else—including her parents (played by Joel McHale and Erin Boyes), older brother (played by Aiden Howard), and aunt (played by Katharine Isabelle)—just wants her to forget and move on like the rest of the town has.

The teen wonders about a world without her under the aurora borealis and is magically transported to an alternative present where she was never born. Winnie learns her lesson pretty quickly, though, because the masked killer is still on the loose and murdering people with regular frequency. Nobody believes it could be Henry, because no one knows who she is and he's the mayor who has brought prosperity to the town.

It's kind of a clever premise, but the movie's humor pretty much ends there, while its internal logic seems to be made up with each new scene. Some people, like school outsider Bernie (Jess McLeod) and the aunt, believe Winnie's unlikely story to some degree, although nobody seems able to even fathom the idea that the creepy, greedy, and clearly corrupt Henry could be a serial killer. In fact, no one in town seems upset about a serial killer roaming and murdering freely for a year now.

There's a bit of an explanation for that by the movie's climax, or at least there seems to be one, if a cult-like gathering in the town square is enough of any kind of explanation. It's not, really, and a fairly inexplicable twist that toys with our knowledge of the killer's identity only solidifies the feeling that the plotting, characters, and thematic concerns matter little in the face of such a gimmicky premise.

Mostly, the movie is about its horror and suspense scenes, which are somewhat aided by the unsettling, angelic costuming of the killer but don't have much else going for them. They're routine for the most part, and the one with some style, which is set in changing levels of darkness briefly illuminated by a camera flash, turns out to be, non-shockingly, too visually unintelligible to work. If anything, It's a Wonderful Knife serves as a good reminder that even a decent pun is still a bad joke.

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