It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023) - Movie Review

What do you get when a filmmaker decides to do a mashup of Scream and It’s a Wonderful Life?

A real piece of shit.

Let’s discuss.

It’s a Wonderful Knife is a 2023 horror/comedy?/slasher brought to us by director Tyler Macintyre and writer Michael Kennedy. You may recognize those names from two serviceable if not extremely flawed films, 2020’a Freaky and 2023’s Five Nights at Freddy’s.

When you get a creative team that’s biggest success is mediocrity, most often you get a fun average horror picture. In this case though, the product falls far short of mediocrity.

This movie sucks.

The film focuses on Winnie Carruthers, the lone daughter of a rich family. Her parents are sitcom sterotypes that favor their eldest son, even though he’s gay. Winnie is always second best in their eyes and she knows it. But when her life is shattered in the brutal murder spree of the town’s mayor in which her best friend is killed in front of her, and she is forced to kill the villain, she wishes she was never born. When she wakes the next day, she’s in a world where she never existed and the serial killer was never stopped. The bodies have piled up in the dozens and no one is the wiser. So Winnie recruits the school reject and set out to stop the murderous angel from taking more lives.

It was hard to summarize this mess of a film. I can’t lie.

This is one of the worst movies I watched in 2023. The first 30 minutes of the film are a really good slasher short. However, when we get to the It’s a Wonderful Life mashup, the film falls apart.

Let’s just start with the villain played by Justin Long. His big hair, fake teeth, and really bad blue contacts are an obvious homage to Donald Trump. I for one am tired of Trump in all his forms in media. I’d love to watch a movie where modern politics don’t date the film. He’s a stereotypical villain with no layers and absolutely no qualities to make him feel real or actually threatening.

It doesn’t help that the lead of the film, played by Jane Widdop is completely unlikable. She’s a total bitch. I get that’s supposed to be her starting point and she will grow and become a more likable character, but that doesn’t happen.

The movie has an amazing cast including the awesome Katherine Isabelle, Joel Mchale, Zenia Marshall, and the smoking man William B. Davis.

And they’re all wasted.

None of the film’s characters are written in a three-dimensional way. They’re all cardboard cutouts.

This movie is an unentertaining mess that makes 87 minutes feel like 3 hours. If you want to punish yourself, it’s streaming on Shudder exclusively.

Now then, time to rant.

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This script makes no sense. There’s so many plot holes and continuity errors. It’s just a mess of a film.

What’s really weird is that pretty much all the characters are either gay or turn gay by the end of the movie. It’s an odd thing, but one that the women I watched the film with both found strange as well. The straight male characters are all villains except for one and he’s painted as a cheating a-hole.

Winnie’s aunts are gay, her brother is gay, and at the end of the movie—she turns gay. It’s really weird and it just doesn’t add anything to the plot and in fact makes the relationship between the two protagonists really make 0 sense overall through the course of the film. Why make Bernie and Winnie gay, when the bond they formed was built up as sisterhood—which in many ways is a much stronger bond.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a strong supporter of the LGBT+ community, and I have 2 gay aunts, but making almost all of the protagonists start gay and turn gay feels extremely weird and just doesn’t mesh with the film as a whole.

And then there’s the third act where the film loses all sense of reason and logic.

Winnie’s father is revealed to be the killer, even though he knows the real killer that killed his son is his boss, but he decides to kill for him anyway.

The Donald Trump character played by Justin Long develops magical powers of mind control and telekinesis in the final 10 minutes of the film. It’s completely out of the blue and makes 0 sense. It’s like they got halfway through the script and decided to snort a few lines.

It’s such a waste of a talented cast.