It's a Wonderful Knife

It's hard not to compare slasher comedy It's a Wonderful Knife with the recent Netflix time travel slasher comedy Totally Killer. Both feature a high schooler with a sharp sense of humor (Kiernan Shipka there, Jane Widdop here), who find themselves in a horror spin on a classic movie (Back to the Future/It's a Wonderful Life) of which they are very aware, and yet for all the detached postmodern trimmings they know they must fix a mangled timeline before they are erased from reality. Only that, in the case of Winnie Caruthers (Widdop), she's already gone. After she accidentally kills the Angel killer who has been haunting her town, and reveals him to be real estate tycoon Henry Waters (Long), depression hits, and rejection from art school drives her to recite the aged-old teen declaration that I Wish I Had Never Been Born!

With a magical MacGuffin, she's dumped into a new world where she never stopped the slayings, and the body count just keeps rising. Armed with her 'real world' knowledge, Winnie has a little edge over the oblivious residents. It's a smart little concept, but with an execution that doesn't really go much further than the punny witticism of the title.

Long derails his recent train of fascinating horror performances in sleeper smash Barbarian and Neil LaButte's Dracula riff House of Darkness with a series of bizarre choices that turn Waters into a spray-tanned buffoon. Far more interesting (as is always to be expected by now) is Joel McHale as Winnie's devoted dad who suffers the worst of all the survivors in this Winnieless world. He adds an essential layer of compassion that really connects Knife to Life, reaching beyond the joke to something that's both drily, wryly funny and catches what it was that Frank Capra was talking about: that one person changes many lives without believing they've done anything.

But It's a Wonderful Knife wobbles around the conceit of the original, landing Winnie with her own Clarence in the form of town outcast Bernie (McLeod), known to everyone at school as Weirdo, so they can exchange snippy dialogue. Clunky horror in-jokes, like a heavy-handed Scream nod in the name of Winnie's aunt (Isabelle), feel labored, and it's all plagued by the same unevenness that afflicted director Tyler MacIntyre's Tragedy Girls: The gore and the comedy are well-executed, but the timing is off. Then scriptwriter Michael Kennedy (responsible for the much more successfully in-on-the-joke Freaky) tries to wrap everything up with a neat but ultimately overstretched bow. As early Christmas presents go, It's a Wonderful Knife isn't one you'll regift or take back to the store, but it might end up next to that chafing dish you never use.