Knife to meet you.

I was kinda on the fence about It’s A Wonderful Knife, and then I noticed the screen time was 87 minutes and I said “fire that bitch up.” I probably should’ve waited until I got out of my nephew’s pre-school Christmas pageant before shouting it, but you live and learn and get your ass beat by school security. Let’s talk about the movie instead.

It’s A Wonderful Knife is a title that begs the question; how has this not been done before? And the answer is it was. The title was used in a 2005 episode of Neighbours and the title of an 11 minute short film from 2014 where a woman exacts revenge on Santa because she blames him for her sad existence. It was also the title of two podcast episodes and who cares. Directed by Tyler MacIntyre best known for one segment he directed on V/H/S 99 and a vestigial writer role for Five Nights at Freddy’s, the movie is a modern day slasher homage to the classic film It’s A Wonderful Life. Go figure.

The movie stars Jane Widdop as Winnie Caruthers, a girl growing up in the town of Angel Falls. Fitting. The town is under the spell of a real estate tycoon Henry Waters (Justin Long) and his brother Buck (Sean Depner), and to top it off her dad is Joel McHale. Tragedy strikes one Christmas eve when a serial killer called The Angel shows up and starts murdering people in a manner very similar to the Ghostface killer from Scream. He kills Winnie’s best friend and almost kills her brother Jimmy (Aiden Howard) before Winnie manages to kill him herself. Wow, killer dies in the first ten minutes huh?

Well the killer ends up being none other than Justin Long himself, and unfortunately his death is only the start of Winnie’s misery. Flash forward a year later and Winnie finds her life in shambles. Depressed and alone in a world desperate to move on from the murders a year ago, Winnie makes a wish upon a star that she was never born. And she gets it, transporting to a world where she was in-fact never born. She still exists, but nobody knows her. Just go with it, the logic doesn’t have to be perfect.

Realizing she now lives in a world where Henry never died and was instead free to continue his murder spree, Winnie has to set things right and maybe even learn a bit about herself in the process. But can she? Probably, it’s a movie after all. It’s A Wonderful Knife is a modern movie, by which I mean it’s really really gay. It was written by Michael Kennedy who you know from How About Notflix-recommended Freaky which was also really really gay.

Crybabies beware. Also they definitely go in on the Scream style since Katharine Isabelle plays the lonely nerd whose name happens to be Gale Prescott. Actually the costume of the angel killer itself is a nod to the original design of the Ghostface killer.

It’s nice to see a cast of good characters whose actors don’t have Wikipedia pages. Joel McHale has become a staple of mine in cheesy slasher movies and I actually think the guy has acting chops despite his characters being mostly the same exact person. Justin Long meanwhile is the perfect actor to play the greasy, slimy, scumbag and he does a great job playing the role. Must be from all the time he spent around Kevin Smith. Everything about Long’s character is perfect for this because it doesn’t fit in with him. The obviously fake teeth, the obviously fake tan, the fake voice, the hair, everything just makes the audience squirm whenever he’s talking on screen.

Jess McLeod plays Bernie Simon, the weirdo at the school so weird they nicknamed her Weirdo. Man there’s a lot of Canadians in this film. Where was this filmed anyway? Vancouver? Well, at least it’s not Quebec. How come nobody stops the killer with piping hot poutine? Speaking of which, if you’re ever in Vancouver stop in at La Belle on Davie St for their poutine. This is not a sponsored ad.

In terms of quality, this movie is exactly what I would want out of a film called It’s A Wonderful Knife. The production quality is in the upper tier with actors who know what they’re doing, some of which have been acting as long as I’ve been alive, and overall it’s a neatly wrapped story with a decent setup and payoff. The movie doesn’t go as far as I would have liked with the killing and it’s over way too fast, occasionally veering into the absurd creative stand before coming back to the angel just stabbing people a lot.

It’s also great seeing the town change and the actors as well. Angel Falls is a desolate shithole in the alternate world and everyone reacts how you’d expect in a town where the people are trapped, the mayor is an asshole, and a murderer kills people every few weeks with seemingly no real attempt at stopping him. It has its emotional moments of genuine character development and did I mention all the gay smooching? There’s a lot of it. Too much? Impossible. Not nearly enough gay smooching I say.

Rating: A-