My notes on It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023)
Christopher Landon’s Happy Death Day established a weird trend for remaking feelgood fantasy classics (in that case, Groundhog Day) as slasher movies. I’m not sure how much mileage there is in the form – Landon’s Freaky (from Freaky Friday/Vice Versa) was a bit slack though the non-Landon Totally Killer (from Back to the Future) was a lot of smart fun. Here, director Tyler MacIntyre (Tragedy Girls, Patchwork) and writer Michael Kennedy (of Freaky, as it happens) put Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life through the blender with Halloween.
The format requires a slasher movie final girl as protagonist, and here it’s Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop) – who not only kills the white-robed Angel Falls stabber the Angel but unmasks him as Henry Waters, the permatanned and weird-dentition businessman who is out to transform the idyllic small town into a hellhole. One year on, Winnie’s miserable because her Dad (Joel McHale) – who has profited from the death of his horrible boss – gives her ’a lesbian tracksuit’ and her football star brother (Aiden Howard) a truck … her BF (Jason Fernandes) is cheating on her with the town mean girl (Zenia Marshall) … and the town doesn’t even want to process the big news about what Henry was up to (strictly, he’s not even a slasher – the two people he killed were in the way of his big crass development). So she wishes on the magic aurora borealis she’d never been born … and finds herself in an Angel Falls where the slasher has killed 25 people and Henry is Mayor and (in a late development) mind-controlling the populace to worship his maniacal evil. Winnie’s ‘Clarence’ is ‘Weirdo’ (Jess McLeod), the town shy girl who actually believes her story (possibly because she runs a cinema which shows Christmas movies, though oddly not the excerpted-in-so-many-other-films IAWL), and this continues the queering trend of previous films in this cycle by being a lesbian rom-com on top of a slasher film (the killer’s look, based on a Christmas tree angel, is nicely creepy) and a state-of-the-nation tract which can’t afford to make actual realworld political points (see also: Founders’ Day, Thanksgiving).
It hasn’t got the budget to show us a real Potterville version of Angel Falls (the town sign is altered to Demon Falls) … kids at the fun Christmas party are all smoking crack and Ward has his name on all the small businesses once owned by murder victims, but we only see a CGI version of his mall in the distance (possibly because Back to the Future II covered what this town ought to look like). Of course, the fact that small towns like Bedford Falls are thin on the ground these days means there’s little frisson in a fairly mundane communtiy getting a bit worse in the alternate universe. There’s one good reveal, which opens up a can of worms about a key supporting character in both realities, but the climax is strangely sidelined by the out-of-nowhere mind control bit, though Long – continuing his toxicity streak from Barbarian and House of Darkness – is a hoot as an infomercial version of Harlan Potter for the 2020s. It may be that it’s a strange fit because Capra’s film was already darker than jolly – almost all of these fantasy classics have a nightmare edge – and a conventional teen-kill runaround feels almost cosy after George Bailey’s lapse into despair.
With Katharine Isabelle as gay aunt ‘Gale Prescott’, Cassandra Naud (of Influencer), William B. Davis, Sean Depner (funny as the villain’s resentful dimwit brother) and Erin Boyes as Mom (a drunken slut in the other world). One thing to remember – however you feel about the processes of this cycle, it has to be acknowledged that it’s a massively more rewarding way of putting together a fun horror film than the hateful schlock of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.
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