{"id":7541,"date":"2024-10-27T14:00:48","date_gmt":"2024-10-27T18:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=7541"},"modified":"2024-10-27T14:00:48","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T18:00:48","slug":"its-a-wonderful-knife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/10\/27\/its-a-wonderful-knife\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s a Wonderful Knife"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"It\u2019s a Wonderful Knife <\/strong>(2023)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RLJE Films\/Horror-Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 87 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (bloody violence, drug use, language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Tyler MacIntyre\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Michael Kennedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Russ Howard III\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Nicholas Piatnik\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: November 10, 2023 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Jane Widdop, Joel McHale, Justin Long, Jess McLeod, Katharine Isabelle, Aiden Howard, Erin Boyes, Sean Depner, Zenia Marshall, Jason Fernandes, Hana Huggins, Kiki Faye, William B. Davis, Dimitri Vegas, Cassandra Naud, Sydney Scotia, Thomas Nicholson, Oscar Chark, Grace Vukovic, Brandon Ironside.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $811,818 (US)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: ***<\/p>\n

\u00a0It\u2019s never been a closely guarded secret. I don\u2019t care who knows it. I can\u2019t stand the beloved Christmas classic It\u2019s a Wonderful Life. I find it boring, depressing and totally corny. I\u2019m the guy in the room who tries to lead a \u201cjump\u201d chant when Jimmy Stewart is standing on the bridge. I tried watching it a few times to no avail. I cannot for the life of me get into it. I gave up after the third attempt because I really don\u2019t want my COD to be listed as sentimentality OD. It\u2019s the same reason I won\u2019t watch the 500 new Christmas movies dropped by Hallmark every year.<\/p>\n

\u00a0What would I do to make It\u2019s a Wonderful Life more palatable? That\u2019s easy. I\u2019d add a serial killer. Think about it. What if instead of saving the family business from financial ruin by a greedy a**hole, George Bailey had to save Bedford Falls from a homicidal maniac? In the words of two brilliant 90s philosophers, \u201cThat would be cool. Huh huh!\u201d It would appear that director Tyler MacIntyre (\u201cThe Gawkers\u201d from the horror anthology V\/H\/S\/99) is of the same mind. His reimagines Frank Capra\u2019s mawkish drama as It\u2019s a Wonderful Knife<\/strong>, a semi-comical holiday-themed horror-thriller in which a teenage girl contemplates her existence after killing a psycho one fateful Christmas Eve.<\/p>\n

\u00a0It\u2019s Christmas Eve and Winnie Carruthers (Widdop, Yellowjackets) is miserable. The year before, her best friend was brutally murdered along with two others by a crazed killer in an angel costume. He came after her too, but she got the upper hand and electrocuted him, killing him. The culprit turns out to be Henry Waters (Long, Barbarian), a prominent businessman planning to turn the small, quaint town of Angel Falls into a high-end shopping center which would effectively put all of the small businesses in town out of business. When the last holdout, her bff\u2019s grandfather (Davis, aka \u201cThe Smoking Man\u201d from The X-Files), still refuses to sell his home, Waters kills him and his granddaughter. Henry, cloaked in hubris and arrogance, didn\u2019t count on being taken down by a teenage girl.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Now you\u2019d think that everybody would be grateful to Winnie for saving their town, homes and lives from this murderous megalomaniac. They\u2019re not. Nobody even acknowledges her heroic deed, not even her own family who can\u2019t see that she\u2019s suffering from PTSD. Get over it, they say, it\u2019s been a year. You\u2019d think they\u2019d be just a little appreciative seeing that Waters\u2019 death and disgrace made Winnie\u2019s father David (McHale, Community) the new town BMOC. That would be a big N-O. They continue to marginalize her and her feelings. That\u2019s not all that\u2019s troubling her. An aspiring photographer, she\u2019s just been rejected by her college of choice. Also, she discovers her boyfriend cheating on her at a teen Christmas party. He\u2019s been at it for a year and she never noticed. That\u2019s enough to drive anybody to consider ending it all.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Like George Bailey before her, Winnie stands on a bridge and wishes she was never born. I guess she never heard what Oscar Wilde said about wishing. In the blink of an eye, she finds herself in an alternate version of Angel Falls run by the no longer late Henry Waters, now the town mayor. Since Winnie was never born to begin with, there was nobody around to stop him from taking over the town which has become a hellhole. It also means the killings continued to the tune of 26 victims in the past year. Like her cinematic predecessor, nobody she knows recognizes her, not even her own family which has fallen apart without her.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Winnie needs to fix what she\u2019s done in order to get back to where she belongs. Obviously, the only way to do this is to re-kill Waters. She gets help from town outcast Bernie [aka \u201cWeirdo\u201d] (McLeod, One of Us Is Lying), the only one who believes her story. Together, they devise a plan to kill the killer so Winnie can go home again.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I imagine most if not all horror movies are going to pale in comparison to Eli Roth\u2019s Thanksgiving, a super-duper gorefest with some of the best kill scenes I\u2019ve seen in years. It\u2019s a Wonderful Knife<\/strong>, which has a body count of 14, has plenty of slash and splatter. It doesn\u2019t exactly wallow in blood, but the makers don\u2019t skimp on it either. The disappointing part is that there\u2019s only one truly memorable kill scene. Somebody gets impaled through the back of the head with a big candy cane ornament. The rest are your standard stabbings, hackings, impalings and dismemberments. A little more creativity in this area would have served the movie well I think.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Justin Long camps it up hilariously as the Henry Potter character who shares a trait or two in common with any given Scream killer. As an actor, he doesn\u2019t appear to take himself too seriously and it works in his favor. He\u2019s a real hoot in It\u2019s a Wonderful Knife<\/strong>. I might even say it\u2019s the role he was born to play. As the heroine, Widdop is pretty good. I\u2019m probably going to get hell for saying this, but I liked her better in the George\/Georgia Bailey role than Jimmy Stewart. He got on my nerves with all that dopey, drippy nonsense about lassoing the moon for Donna Reed. Widdop has the better love story and this is where the film really distinguishes itself.<\/p>\n

\u00a0What I haven\u2019t yet told you is that It\u2019s a Wonderful Knife<\/strong> is also a queer love story, the couple in question being Winnie and Bernie. It felt more real to me than George and Mary. They\u2019re actually cute together once they let their guards down and get closer. The credit for this goes to screenwriter Michael Kennedy who got the studio to let him add this to the story. BTW, they\u2019re not the only gay characters in the film. I\u2019m glad to see the LGBTQ+ community represented so prominently. I don\u2019t normally go for \u201cwoke\u201d, but it gives It\u2019s a Wonderful Knife <\/strong>a noticeably sharper edge.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I very much enjoyed It\u2019s a Wonderful Knife<\/strong>. It\u2019s one of those rare horror movies that live up to the coolness of its title. It has a couple of nifty \u201cBOO!\u201d moments and some great makeup effects. It\u2019s fun to watch whether or not you\u2019re a fan of the film that inspired it. It\u2019s a cool take on the so-called classic. I\u2019m adding it to my list of Christmas movie annuals.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a Wonderful Knife (2023)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RLJE Films\/Horror-Comedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 87 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (bloody violence, drug use, language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Tyler MacIntyre\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Michael Kennedy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Russ Howard III\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Nicholas Piatnik\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: November 10, 2023 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Jane Widdop, Joel McHale, Justin Long, Jess McLeod, Katharine Isabelle, Aiden Howard, Erin Boyes, Sean Depner, Zenia Marshall, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7571,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-holiday-movies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Its-a-Wonderful-Knife-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7541"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7573,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7541\/revisions\/7573"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}