Kicked off my festive movie season last night by watching
It's a Wonderful Knife on Shudder. A teenage girl, Winnie, and her brother are attacked on Xmas Eve by the masked killer stalking her small town who has already murdered her best friend. In the ensuing fight Winnie manages to kill the killer, who turns out to be a sleazy local real estate mogul (Justin Long), who's been trying to buy up half the town. But a year later Winnie's life seems to be going downhill - she's still not over the loss of her best friend, has failed to get into her dream college and her boyfriend has cheated on her and dumped her for another of her friends - and in a moment of self-pity she wishes she were never born... only to find herself instantly flung into a nightmare parallel reality where no one knows her, her brother is dead and her family fracturing, the killer is still killing and Long now owns almost the entire town and is even Mayor.
This fun 2023 festive slasher flick does for
It's a Wonderful Life what
Happy Death Day did for
Groundhog Day. This has got mixed reviews but I had fun with it. It even has the same trope as
Happy Death Day of a virtual stranger being the only one to believe the lead girl and becoming her main ally/confidante/potential romantic interest, only here it's a girl, Bernie, a lonely and isolated girl who's been outcast and declared a weirdo by her school for no particular reason. The relationship between the two girls gives the movie a bit more heart than I was expecting, even when I wasn't entirely sure I wasn't reading too much into it (I do see lesbians everywhere
) but, as it turned out, I wasn't. (There was just something about Winnie's utterly blase physical affection and Bernie's awkwardly nervous reaction to it that gave me a bit of a Sky and Lana vibe lol) and this carries the movie through some of its flaws (like the weird bit in the climax that out-of-nowhere implies Long has supernatural powers over the townsfolk). It's a feel good festive slasher lol and I enjoyed it for that. If it gets a Blu I will probably buy it.
