Good afternoon, House of Madness residents:
Do you ever look at your life and wish you had something different? Perhaps you feel your life is so boring and monotonous, that you simply wish you could wake up and be another person altogether? Would you be a movie star, a sports legend, or would you be content just being someone else entirely, as long as it's not you? Well, if you're Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop), sometimes the saying rings true, and you truly don't know what you've got until it's gone.
It's the Christmas season in Angel Falls, and other than a town mayor (Justin Long) that puts the 'douche' in 'douchebag', everything runs as it should in a quaint little town. That is, until a masked lunatic starts roaming the streets and begins slaughtering the inhabitants one by one. There's just one thing the masked lunatic didn't bank on when he began his killing spree: Winnie Carruthers. After disposing of the killer and saving her brother Jimmy's (Aiden Howard) life, Winnie reflects upon the life of her own, and decides the world would be better off without her, so she wishes she'd never been born. Angel Falls is a magic place where anything can happen, and dreams can come true, so we aren't surprised to see Winnie wake up the next day and find her wish had been granted, and she's now a stranger among her family and peers. "But if she wished she had never been born, wouldn't that make her non-existent, and the second half of the film rather senseless?" Don't ask stupid questions.
When Winnie awakes the following day, something seems off, and the town she just saved has a completely different feel to it. It doesn't take long for Winnie to learn her family has no idea who she is, and her friends claim to have never seen her before, and if that wasn't bad enough, the evil mayor has the entire town in a trance, and the town she saved has gone to shit. Oh yeah, and since she never existed, she wasn't able to save Jimmy, so he's as dead as the life she once had, and there's still a killer running amuck spreading Christmas destruction through the streets. The only way Winnie will be able to get her old life back is by once again killing the masked lunatic, and following up the carnage with yet another wish, asking for things to go back to the way they were; sounds simple, right?
When it comes to holiday films involving wishes or magic, it's easier for us to turn off our brains while accepting the silliness for what it is and nothing more, because we're in the holiday spirit, so fuck it, anything goes. Unfortunately for "It's a Wonderful Knife", the concept is executed in such a silly fashion that it doesn't hold water, and not only that, but it's just not as fun when you identify the killer right off the rip. Sure, there's some gory fun to be had and the body count is respectable, but at the end of the day it's just another slasher film that doesn't leave a lasting impression; when the credits rolled, I'd already started to dismiss what I'd just seen, and moved on to the next film on my list. "IAWK" won't be making its way into my regular rotation of Christmas cheer moving forward, as that's a list reserved for true Christmas magic, and this film just doesn't have any.
Madness Meter: 4.8/10
NB
