Review: It’s a Wonderful Knife

Director:  Tyler MacIntyre

Stars:  Jane Widdop, Katharine Isabelle, Jess McLeod

Hot (or should that be cold?) on the heels of Eli Roth’s festive slasher Thanksgiving comes this year’s yuletide offering over on Shudder; Tyler MacIntyre’s jovially-monikered It’s a Wonderful Knife, and from the off it feels like the two pictures might have more in common than leftover turkey. Situated in the idyllic small town of Angel Falls, budding entrepreneur David Carruthers (Joel McHale) has stepped into the shoes of fallen local real estate magnate Henry Waters (Justin Long), rumbled the prior Christmas for cloaking up to kill an elderly holdout on a land deal.

David’s college-age daughter Winnie (Jane Widdop) loathes the holiday season thanks to the blood spilled the year before. Winnie is far more haunted and acidic than Widdop’s breakout Yellowjackets character Laura Lee, however, having been the one to ultimately sleigh (sorry) the manic Henry Waters. Murder – even in self-defence – is a lot to shoulder so young. It doesn’t help that her actions seem to have made her the black sheep of the family, though lesbian aunt Gale (horror royalty Katharine Isabelle) at least seems sympathetic. Things go from bad to worse when her jerk boyfriend Robbie (Jason Fernandes) is dumb enough to cheat on her at a party they’re both attending.

Taking its cue from the holiday favourite that inspired its title, Wonderful Knife sees Winnie wish her miserable life away, only to be presented with an alternate reality in which she never stopped Waters. Cue the potential for a slasherific return to the mayhem of the cold open, and a kind of riff on the same ground covered in popular streaming slasher Totally Killer from a couple months back. Instead of a flashback, however, we have a flash sideways to a world in which Angel Falls has been terrorised for an entire year and nobody recognises our confused and frustrated Winnie, least of all her own family.

MacIntyre wastes no time getting to the extravagant blood-letting, tipping that – like Roth’s film – this might be more an exercise in excess than suspense. Ultimately, unfortunately, it provides neither. Both movies also revolve around the fallout of a local businessman’s rampant largess. We’re in the midst of a wave of murder capitalism, folks. But where Roth presented a man turned into a local pariah for his misdeeds, Wonderful Knife‘s Henry Waters has become a goliath in the community. An axe-wielding, pint-sized Biff Tannen.

Tipped off early on in its A-universe, Winnie shares some of her aunt’s curiosity, inextricably drawn to local ‘weird girl’ Bernie (Jess McLeod) who becomes her ‘Clarence’ in the B-universe, positioning Wonderful Knife promisingly as a queer slasher. Bernie’s safe haven is the town’s rundown cinema, which also adds a welcome romantic centre to the movie. It’s a shame that the magic is undone by the need for so much exposition about a mystical aurora.

The killer’s shiny, featureless mask is rather chilling; one of the more effective recent efforts to come up with something distinctive. It’s a shame its potency is hoodwinked by such an early reveal, however. To those of us in the audience it loses that edge of mystery. The hooded white robe, however, carries a more unsavoury connotation. It’s hard not to think of the KKK whenever this slasher is darting about town.

Alas, alack, shiny and featureless is also how one comes to think of this offering at large. In spite of its (stolen) conceit (done far better in season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, just sayin’), It’s a Wonderful Knife is clean, capable, but lacking its own edge. Granted, its rampant anti-capitalist underpinning is stoked with an appreciable amount of fire and bile – especially given a mid-film reveal that riffs on the time-honoured tradition of subcontracting – but its all a little varnished, glossy and packaged, so its a shade disingenuous.

MacIntyre promises all kinds of gooey treats up front (stabbings with sharpened candy canes!), but doesn’t nearly deliver the goods later on once things have bedded down in Bizarro-world. Everything is tilted at; nothing feels committed to. Horror thrills become a distant afterthought. Throw in some clunky editing, and this isn’t so much a Christmas cracker as it is a novelty fast food menu item.

Shove it down and get back to the shopping.