It’s a Wonderful Knife, opening in theaters December 10th, stars Jane Widdop, Jess McLeod, Joel McHale, and Justin Long. The film follows teenager Winnie Carruthers, who after saving her hometown from a masked killer on Christmas Eve one year prior, finds that life isn’t at all what she expected. Her friends are dead, her boyfriend is cheating on her, and no one seems thankful for what she did for them. When she wishes she was never born, she finds herself in a version of her hometown where she never stopped the killer. Now, she must stop the killer once again to return to her own reality.

The lead performances here from Jane Widdop and Jess Mcleod are serviceable but nothing too special. Their performances in stressful moments are effective, but uplifting scenes feel overly sentimental in a way that was palpably cheesy. Joel Mchale gives a performance that isn’t anything particularly special but he is able to show off his range in a way that I’ve never seen before. I think this could be his first step in being offered more serious roles. Justin Long is undeniably the best performance here. He plays the killer (revealed in the trailer) with a mix of howdy-doody gusto and uneasy charm. After Jeepers Creeper (2001), Tusk (2014), Barbarian (2022), the new Goosebumps TV series, and now It’s a Wonderful Knife, Justin Long is really making a name for himself as a sort of modern-day “scream king.” His performance is really one of the primary reasons to see this film.

It’s a Wonderful Knife follows in the footsteps of recent films such as Freaky (2020) and Totally Killer (2023) in the sense that it takes the plot of a specific classic film and retools it into a horror version of that film. Freaky was a horror take on Freaky Friday (1976) while Totally Killer was a horror take on Back to the Future (1985). It’s a Wonderful Knife is clearly a horror take on the classic holiday film It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). In the first act, the film does an excellent job of establishing the holiday feel along with classic slasher elements. The film opens with a twenty minute streamlined slasher film that I thought was fun. It was very reminiscent of the 2009 Friday the 13th remake’s opening. We sort of get an entire slasher movie before the opening credits, and it really gets you into the swing of things. The second act is great in terms of establishing characters and the different struggles the protagonist has to face when navigating a world where know one knows she exists. Where the movie really falls apart is the third act. Unexplained plot conveniences appear out of nowhere, strange directorial choices in terms of the characters pop up, and just a general lack of logic creeps around every corner. Things just sort of happen in the third act for seemingly no explainable reason. I suspect the director wanted to end the film in a crowd-pleasing way, but it just feels unearned and frankly random.

Overall, the film is a fun addition to the holiday-horror sub-genre, but really falls flat in the home stretch. Justin Long is at the top of his game and there really is a true heart to the film that I wasn’t expecting. It effectively conveys It’s a Wonderful Life’s theme of appreciating your life no matter how bleak it may seem. Things change as long as you give them the time to. Overall this could have been a genre classic, but goes off the rails one too many times to give it a truly solid rating. Though, if you like slasher as well as holiday films, you may find this to be an effective two hours. C+