A fun Christmastime slasher that ultimately burns itself out in the home stretch, "It's a Wonderful Knife" finds down-in-the-dumps Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop) inadvertently wishing herself into an alternate reality where she didn't previously exist and where the white-costumed serial killer she helped thwart a year earlier is still at large, only there's more mystery to his identity than in Winnie's original reality. Partnering up with misfit Bernie (Jess McLeod), Winnie sets out to halt the bloodbath and return to her own reality. Along the way, we get some standard, if well-shot kills and another vintage Justin Long performance, although I'm personally not a massive fan of slasher movies that try to compensate for their lack of mystery with "novel" spins on the genre that don't quite scare or entertain like more classic efforts. With shades of "Happy Death Day", the recent "Totally Killer" and of course "It's a Wonderful Life", director Tyler MacIntyre's film keeps you reasonably well engaged for most of the duration, but unfortunately it's only ever headed to an anti-climax that makes you pine for the vastly more fulfilling last acts of a "Scream" or "Urban Legend". It's still a good movie with a very good final girl in the form of Jane Widdop, but it could have been more.
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