It’s A Wonderful Knife

I think it is safe to say that most movies don’t set out to be bad. I say ‘most’ because some of them out there have the direct intention to fall into the ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ category. Even though a lot of these ideas sound like million-dollar ones for sure, sometimes, well… Take It’s A Wonderful Knife, or how it is being served,  It’s A Wonderful Life on a Scream platter, which quite honestly sounds like a great marriage. However, half of all marriages in America end in divorce, and after watching this, I wished these two had never met.

Life in Angel Falls is pretty much like it is in every other medium-sized town. For siblings Winnie (Jane Widdop) and Jimmy (Aiden Howard), everything is running pretty good, even if they lose their father, David (Joel McHale), every Christmas Eve to his very needy boss. That boss is Henry Waters (Justin Long), and he sorta owns the whole town, but that is not enough as his next development has just one person in the way. Well, that guy is out of the way when a killer dressed all in white shows up and kills him and also his granddaughter. Winnie and Jimmy just happen to be there, and when Jimmy almost meets his end, Winnie saves him and kills the killer. Things, though, don’t go well for Winnie, and a year later after becoming upset, she wishes that she was never born. Well, be careful what you wish for, as Winnie wakes up in an Angel Falls where she never existed, and the town is being terrorized without her. Now Winnie has to figure out how to exist once again, and with the help of the town’s weirdo, Bernie (Jess McLoud), she hopes to make that happen.

Written by Michael Kennedy, who last brought us the fun Freaky, here with a fun idea, as he pretty much makes It’s A Wonderful Life, but with a knife. Knowing that tells you what the plot is, but this concept, I think, could really work, it just doesn’t here. For me, the problem lies with the direction, as it feels like Tyler Macintyre makes It’s A Wonderful Knife too gimmicky. With that said, this just could be a movie not for me, but even if that was the case, it doesn’t make up for its many flaws.

It’s A Wonderful Knife had some of the ingredients to become a holiday horror classic but is weighed down by what it does wrong. From its conventional and paint-by-numbers story, to characters you have no attachment or connection to, it misses its target more than it connects. Long is always a great addition to any movie, but everyone else delivers lackluster performances. When you add that to a killer that is kinda cool-looking but mostly forgettable and kills that have little imagination, you end up with something that never becomes what it’s striving to be. I am going to give the team behind It’s A Wonderful Knife an ‘A’ for effort, but for the finished product, it has to be an incomplete.