Bad Christmas horror movies have become as ubiquitous as bad Christmas rom-coms … OK, maybe not quite that ubiquitous. But the genre is beginning to operate like a factory. Among the least inspired entries is 2023’s “It’s a Wonderful Knife,” which can’t manage to drum up even the meanness of “Violent Night” or the attempt at stupid humor of “Jack Frost.”
Director Tyler MacIntyre’s glossy yet empty film lacks any kind of spirit, as Michael Kennedy (“Freaky”) seemingly wrote it in a day, if not mere hours. The premise, as the titular play-on-words suggests, is that small-town teen Winnie (Jane Widdop) wishes she’d never been born, then realizes the world is worse without her … but meanwhile, it’s also a slasher movie.
It’s rather amazing that “Knife” isn’t effective even on those terms. Utterly lacking in suspense or creativity of gore, the film finds a white-robed-and-masked killer easily slaughtering whoever he wants to. Until 87 minutes (the short run time is the film’s biggest strength) are up and the script decides it won’t be easy for him anymore.
“It’s a Wonderful Knife” (2023)
Director: Tyler MacIntyre
Writer: Michael Kennedy
Stars: Jane Widdop, Joel McHale, Justin Long
Writer Kennedy throws scenes at the wall in three alternating tones: bad slasher movie, bad feel-good movie, and (in only one scene) bad parody.
Stocking full of coal
In this scene (which has to be read as parody to explain why it exists), the killer lies at the bottom of the stairs after a fall, and three women are scared that they have to step over him. The film forgets that Winnie and her new friend Bernie (Jess McLeod) and her aunt Gale (Katherine Isabelle) have already been established as brave. In fact, Winnie has already killed the guy and saved the town in the timeline she’s been bumped out of.
The sequence manages to be more infuriating than the moment in “Scream 2” when the girl has to climb over the unconscious Ghostface to get out of the car. One thing in “Knife’s” favor, in a vacuum, is that the three times Winnie has an opportunity to remove the mask – because the killer is dead or incapacitated – she actually does! The downside: The killer is who you’d expect, as the movie can’t be bothered to work on two layers simultaneously.
Widdop and McLeod make their characters likeable by sheer force of will; I’m convinced they could sell good material, even without any examples here. And Justin Long is precisely on point as the orange-spray-tanned corporate magnate aiming to take over the town; but all the same, I get no pleasure from watching him.
Every actor in “Knife” (including “X-Files” legend William B. Davis) is better than the material, so my knee-jerk reaction is to say “I hope they got hefty paychecks” (especially Davis; geez, I hope he’s doing OK). But if they did, that means movies like this are good business. And we need them to be bad business so we don’t get more Christmases with the cranked-out horror crap.
“It’s a Wonderful Knife” makes the point of its source material – “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Carol” before that – in an inadvertently meta way: Try to dodge the corporate and materialistic junk.