Director – Tyler MacIntyre, Screenplay – Michael Kennedy, Producers – Daniel Bekerman, Seth Caplan & Michael Kennedy, Photography – Nicholas Piatnik, Music – Russ Howard III, Visual Effects – Superchill, Special Effects Supervisor – Kyle Moore, Makeup Effects – Nikki DeLong, Production Design – Tiana P. Gordon. Production Company – Divide-Conquer Productions/Fourth Culture Films.
Cast
Jane Widdop (Winnie Carruthers), Jess McLeod (Bernie Simon), Joel McHale (David Carruthers), Justin Long (Henry Waters), Katherine Isabelle (Gale Prescott), Sean Depner (Buck Waters), Aiden Howard (Jimmy Carruthers), Erin Boyes (Judy Carruthers), Zenia Marshall (Darla Berlin), Jason Fernandes (Robbie Olenger), Kiki Faye (Vicki Pepper), William B. Davis (Roger Evans), Hana Huggins (Cara Evans)
Plot
It is nearing Christmas in Angel Falls. Business magnate Henry Waters has been buying out all the small businesses to build his own mall but there are holdouts. Winnie Carruthers is shocked when a masked killer who has been targeting people around town attacks and kills her best friend Cara Evans. The killer attacks Winnie but she is able to kill and unmask them to reveal that the killer is Henry. One year later, Winnie is unhappy – she has stopped the killer but nobody seems to care. Standing watching the aurora, she idly wishes that she had never been born. She wakes to find herself in an alternate Angel Falls where she was never born and her family no longer recognise her. Without being stopped by her, Henry has taken over the town and is the mayor and has run amok and slaughtered dozens of victims. Winnie sets out to stop Henry and return back home to the Angel Falls she knows.
The Slasher Film has been with us since the 1980s. The 2000s brought a series of remakes of the originals, while around the same time filmmakers started to get clever and produced a witty series of parodies and deconstructions with the likes of Scream (1996), Cherry Falls (2000), Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006) and The Final Girls (2015). By the 2020s, in the search for novelty, we have started to see slasher films that have undergone weird conceptual mash-ups with other genres. The first of these was Happy Death Day (2017), a marriage between a slasher and the Groundhog Day (1993) timleoop premise; followed by Freaky (2020), a mashup between a slasher film and a bodyswap film, and Totally Killer (2023), a mashup between a slasher and Back to the Future (1985).
As evidenced by its title, It’s a Wonderful Knife is a mashup between a slasher and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). It’s a Wonderful Life is a classic where a depressed James Stewart wishes he had never been born and is then granted a vision by the angel Clarence of the nightmare that life in the town would be without him, where the businessman Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore) has the town under his iron grip.
It’s a Wonderful Knife drops any angels but is sufficiently meta-aware to have Jane Widdop wondering if others are her Clarence. The ruthless businessman is still present (now played by Justin Long) and is the killer behind the mask, eliminating people in order to consolidate his business empire. Rather than seeing people leading unhappy lives, the film now has them killed off due to Jane Widdop failing to stop the killer. This is all justified by some handwave about making a wish under the aurora lights.
Jane Widdop hides from the killer
It’s a Wonderful Knife was the third film from Tyler MacIntyre, who had previously made the horror film Patchwork (2015) and the splendidly nasty teen killers film Tragedy Girls (2017), as well as The Gawkers episode of V/H/S/99 (2022).
I anticipated It’s a Wonderful Knife on the basis of Tyler MacIntyre’s Tragedy Girls, which came with a pleasingly sarcastic bite, while The Gawkers was one of the standout episodes of the anthology it was released in. The disappointment that quickly sets in is that while Tragedy Girls was not afraid to dig a figurative or literal knife in, It’s a Wonderful Knife is exactly the bland sort of formulaic, routinely all-inclusive formula school drama that Tragedy Girls was puncturing. Furthermore, it is routinely by-the-numbers as a slasher film goes with no appreciable irony or deconstruction of the formula.
In reality, It’s a Wonderful Knife is a slasher film with a gimmick premise – no more than that, no less. It is not a premise that the script or Tyler MacIntyre approach in a particularly imaginative way. There is one surprise when the killer is unmasked in the alternate timeline and proves to be someone other than Justin Long, although the film never does much to explain why this is the case. It is all wrapped up where Jane Widdop returns to the world she previously hated and everything is magically different, people appreciative of her and even the BFF/girlfriend she made in Jess McLeod has come through with her and remembers the other timeline.
