In the past few years, it has become a phenomenon to take popular films with recognizable gimmicks and twist them into slasher movies. Writer and director Christopher Landon popularized it with his films Happy Death Day, which played off of Groundhog Day, and Freaky, which took the concept from Freaky Friday and gave it a horror coating. Just a month earlier, the Amazon original Totally Killer used Back to the Future as the basis for its slasher story. Now, the beloved Christmas film, It’s a Wonderful Life received the same treatment with the new slasher film, It’s a Wonderful Knife. 

Synopsis

It’s a Wonderful Knife follows high schooler Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop), who discovers the town’s mayor, Henry Waters (Justin Long), is a masked killer and ends up saving her town on Christmas Eve. Now, a year later, she finds herself wishing she was never born, whereby she becomes transported to another reality where she never existed. Here, she finds that without her existence, no one ever stopped the masked killer and the murder spree continued. Discovering how much worse everyone’s life is without her, she tries to once again stop the killer and find a way back to her reality. 

A Sincere Heart

Since it parodies It’s a Wonderful Life, the movie naturally has a heart-warming element. The theme of how one person influences other lives without ever knowing it added a heartfelt component that isn’t necessarily present in other slasher films. It helped add a cheerfulness to the movie, which ultimately left it leaning in a positive direction rather than being dreary like most films in the genre.

Despite the jolly nature of the movie, the story is predictable and monotonous. Although the masked killer’s identity is revealed in the opening scene, the movie tries to add in other twists and turns that aren’t surprising. Being a slasher, there isn’t a need for there to be shocking revelations outside of who lives and dies by the time the credits roll. But when the film attempts to incorporate moments of big revelations and fails, it adds another frustrating component to an already tedious story.

Kill-worthy Characters

Slasher films are typically stuffed with characters who are purely there to be walking body bags. Audiences don’t have any attachment to them, as they serve no purpose other than to be brutally killed by the villain so the main characters aren’t taken too soon. Great slasher films can have characters who are well-developed and distinct and who leave an impact on viewers, even if they are on screen for a brief period of time. Unfortunately, the entire cast of characters fit primarily in the walking body bags category. Most, if not all, of the secondary cast is one-noted and unlikable, making their deaths all the more ineffective.

Similar to the secondary character, the protagonist, Winnie, comes off as tiresome and dull. Jane Widdop did her best with the material, but the character was lacking a spark that would make her more intriguing. Her relationship and chemistry with another character named Bernie Simon (Jessica McLeod) also felt a little hollow. The relationship between the two is uninteresting, and how they eventually come together to form a friendship feels clunky.