It goes without saying that I like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and I enjoy the whole twist of implanting the formula in to a horror setting. The fact is though that “It’s a Wonderful Knife” is so much more concerned with being a dark bittersweet Christmas fantasy, rather than diving head first in to the horror framework. For a movie that advertises itself as a slasher movie and whodunit, there’s a lot of surprisingly low stakes, and not much suspense at all. The writers frame the movie as a whodunit with the killers’ identities being revealed almost immediately, all the while the slashings all take a back seat for a majority of the movie.
Winnie’s life is less than wonderful one year after saving her town from a psychotic killer on Christmas Eve. When she wishes she was never born, she finds herself magically transported to a nightmarish parallel universe. With the murderous maniac now back, she must team up with a misfit to identify the culprit and get back to her own reality.
Once Winnie ends up in an alternate reality where she never actually existed, “It’s a Wonderful Knife” pushes the angelic knife wielding maniac far in to the background for a good fifteen minutes. Surely, once the kills are set off, MacIntyre allows us a glance at some good splatter, and violence, but that’s all pretty much secondary. “It’s a Wonderful Knife” is primarily a take on Frank Capra’s Christmas classic, but with a whole premise surrounding a mystery, and small town dynamics, and secrets behind closed doors, et al. And there’s a slasher somewhere in the mix. The cast, for what it’s worth, are all very good in their respective roles.
I especially loved Jane Widdup and Jessica McLeod as central protagonists Winnie and Bernie, both of whom are friends with an uneasy bond that carries over in to the alternate reality. Nevertheless, MacIntyre sets a lot of the focus on a Christmas movie with seeds of a horror movie, never quite mixing the holiday and horror themes as well as contemporary genre gems like “Krampus” or “Anna and the Apocalypse.” Your mileage with Tyler MacIntyre’s “It’s a Wonderful Knife” may vary wildly depending on what kind of movie you’re expecting. If you want a Christmas movie with horror themes, then you’ll leave it generally pleased. But if you’re going in to it expecting a full blown horror film with Christmas themes, then you might be about as disappointed as I was.
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