It's A Wonderful Knife

As the title of this movie implies, it’s a confluence of two genres which I feel like have been rising in popularity, although I personally haven’t seen many. On the one hand, you have Christmas horror movies: Violent Night, Krampus, The Advent Calendar, Red Snow, and more. On the other, you have movies which take some classic story and make it horror. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, or even the recent Totally Killer, in which a character describes their own situation in terms of Back to the Future. Maybe it’s just that more have broken through in recent years, and their number isn’t that large. But it does seem fitting culturally: we tend to be skeptical of (or even ridicule) earnestness, which results in a tendency towards taking the piss out of earnestness and traditions. And from our modern perspective, what time was more earnest than the late 40s and 50s? What tradition is more entrenched than Christmas?

The title tells you roughly what to expect. On Christmas Eve of her junior year of high school, Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop) goes to a party, where she witnesses the brutal murder of her best friend Cara (Hana Huggins). When the killer turns towards her and her star football player brother Jimmy (Aiden Howard), she manages to electrocute the masked assailant to death, revealing it was the unsettling, development-obsessed town mayor, Henry Waters (Justin Long). A year later, everyone seems intent on forgetting the whole incident and pretending it didn’t happen. They treat Winnie as a bummer for being unable to move on from her best friend’s murder. So she wanders out to the pier, and while staring at the Northern Lights, exclaims that everyone would be better off if she hadn’t been born. The aurora flashes and swirls and disappears, her wish is granted, and now she must deal with the repercussions.

The movie takes a bit to get going, as it first has to establish everything about this town so its changes will make any sense. It’s got to establish the teen couples, the outcasts, Winnie’s relation to them, and Jimmy’s incredibly special place in everyone’s hearts. We need to experience just how creepy and intense and phony Henry Waters is. And of course, we’ve got to meet her family, most notably her dad David (Joel McHale), who works for Waters, and thus often has to work Christmas Eve, but retains his Christmas cheer regardless. He’s Bob Cratchit to Waters’ Ebenezer Scrooge, because the movie is also cribbing from A Christmas Carol.

Once we get to the wish, and it became clear they were lifting the most famous part of It’s A Wonderful Life and not just its title, I was actually somewhat intrigued. It’s not a bad premise: what are all the effects of a town being terrorized by a killer since the one who was “supposed” to kill him was never born? They take it in some somewhat unexpected directions, but ones that make sense. The writers put a little bit of thought into some of the more far reaching impacts. And they even give us a slight twist on the moral of the story, which manages to add to the original without disrupting it. Good on them!

But that’s about all the thought they put in. While the overall plot follows well-know beats, that the individual scenes and beats are so predictable and obvious is unfortunate. What makes it worse is we’re way ahead of our protagonists. Who’s murder fodder, what’s driving the killings, who’s going to team up, and so on. We figure out what she has to do to end this nightmare long before she does, which also telegraphs a couple fake outs. The kills are incredibly boring and contain no tension, and the killer’s costume is very lazy and stupid. It allows him to move around more easily than your traditional slasher monster, but the robe and mask just look goofy instead of menacing. Yes, this is a horror-comedy, so silly is fine in general, but it creates an odd tone when the murders are played seriously but it’s just a dude in a dumb costume.

The most confounding part is how they play its connection to It’s A Wonderful Life. While I find it annoying for movie characters to fail to connect their circumstances to famous films, it’s standard. But around two-thirds of the way in, Bernie (Jessica McLeod) proclaims Winnie to be George Bailey, and Winnie proclaims Bernie to be Clarence. So they both know the movie! Given the magic of the aurora and that framework, we shouldn’t have had to sit through more than twenty minutes of Winnie stubbornly refusing to understand why no one knows who she is.

Just about none of the humor landed for me. At least, not the deliberate jokes. Far more often, it was the stupidity of some of the dialog or insanity of something the characters did. While I’m sure some of that was intentional (filmmakers aren’t dumb: they know people can enjoy bad movies), the whole movie already feels inelegant and clunky, so beats which push that twenty or thirty percent further feel like an accident.

The biggest exception to all this was Bernie. Jessica McLeod was a tremendous bright spot in this snoozefest. Winnie was exasperated and desperate and annoying (which I put more on the writers, although Widdop didn’t help themself much). But despite (because of?) being given some insane dialog and character details and motivations, McLeod sells her role beautifully. Something about her vibe fits the tone of this movie better than anyone else in it, even enabling her to land some cringeworthy jokes. I was quite delighted they gave her a romantic arc; it felt so natural that I even found myself cheering for her and her crush to kiss. She’s somewhat of a recognizable archetype, but imbued with an inner life that I can only attribute to McLeod.

I’ve also gotta call out Justin Long as Henry Waters. Good on the makeup department: I kept oscillating between recognizing him and being convinced they’d only gotten a lookalike. His performance was suitably weird and creepy as the wannabe authoritarian mayor of a small town. He just had this strange way of speaking and awkward facial expressions which sold him as a great (if thin) villain.

Listen, this is a bad movie. In so, so many ways. It incompetently assembles tropes, the only prominent Black character is the first to die, and at ninety minutes it feels way too long. It’s trying to wear too many hats: entire characters and plot threads that serve no purpose and eventually vanish, important elements arise super late, and bananas exposition comes out of nowhere. That being said, it manages a few charming elements, and it did have its moments. The plot beats and screenplay needed another few passes, and they needed to be a bit more creative with the violence and the visuals. But if you’re a fan of schlocky, cheesy horror fare that feels like it was made by The CW (and that’s definitely A Thing), then you’ll have a lot of fun with this.