It’s a Wonderful Knife

Grade: B

A clever thing It’s a Wonderful Knife does is introduce characters in the beginning that we may assume will be primary ones, only to have the screenplay put an abrupt end to those possibilities. Meanwhile, a couple of supporting ones end up being the main players. We also learn the identity of the slasher early on, letting us know that the movie’s not really about that anyway. I’d compare this film’s level of scariness to Totally Killer and Five Nights at Freddy’s (for which Knife’s director Tyler MacIntyre has a writing credit) – which was the perfect amount for me.

We begin in the idyllic town of Angel Falls. The first shot is a beauty, as are many others. It’s Christmas Eve, and Winnie Carruthers has saved the town from a killer. Her rescue didn’t come soon enough for some people. A year later, still reeling from the trauma and guilt, under an aurora borealis sky, she wonders what life would have been like if she’d never been born, and is transported to a reality where that very thing is the case. She’s still in Angel Falls, but she’s suddenly an extra person who nobody knows. After seeing a couple of movies where this is touched on, I’m beginning to wonder if homeless people are former time-travelers who went to the past and broke up their parents before they could have them, and returned to a reality based on that. Or they wished they’d never been conceived, Wonderful Life/Knife style.

In this alternate universe, the incredibly slimy Henry Waters has succeeded in winning the mayoral election. He’s played effectively by Justin Long, from Barbarian. I almost want to meet him just to see if he’s a nice guy who people like. He must be, if he works this much. As Winnie wasn’t there to stop the killer, this person is still on the loose. It’s a race against time. She has to set things right before the end of the next aurora borealis, or else she’ll be stuck in this new timeline.

Jane Widdop is delightful as Winnie. She is significantly fairer-skinned than most everyone else, which helps emphasize her outlier status when she’s jumped realities. As her father, Joel McHale (Robin Williams’s son in A Merry Friggin’ Christmas) gets to have some levels. It’s nice to see Katharine Isabelle (one of my favorites from Freddy vs Jason) again after 20 years. Jess McLeod is great as Bernie, an outcast who nobody bothers to converse with or be nice to except for Winnie – and she provides us with the film’s most beautiful plot point, which is brought up just enough without being dwelled on too much. I wondered why people continually ran UPSTAIRS away from a murderer, or why someone in a cloak with a face mask could see better in the dark than literally everyone else, but the film seems playfully self-aware of these tropes.

It’s a Wonderful Knife is campy fun with no shortage of creativity. Not every idea works, but none of it is uninteresting. I settled on the lower of the two grades I was debating between, which is my roundabout way of telling you that I maybe sorta kinda liked it a little better than the letter you see above. I’ve never seen It’s a Wonderful Life. If I ever do, I’ll be able to catch so many references, and exclaim “Oh yeah! They totally got that from It’s a Wonderful Knife!”

Grade: B