The comedic slasher 'It's a Wonderful Knife' is being released, which of course has nothing to do with the famous franchise, but it's exactly the kind of movie that can unite fans of Ghostface and 'Love Actually'. About the film's unexpected merits a...

On Christmas Eve in the Canadian town of Angel Falls – yet another clone of Woodsboro and Haddonfield – a serial killer appears, brutally murdering a sweet elderly man (even bringing in William B. Davis from 'The X-Files') and a couple of teenagers, before being killed by local overachiever Winnie (the very lively Jane Widdop from ). It then turns out the killer was the town's mayor, Henry Waters – an obvious parody of Trump (a great role for Justin Long , the brother from the first 'Jeepers Creepers').

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A year later, Winnie can't cope with the pain of losing her best friend who died then; with having killed a person; and especially with everyone, including her parents, not caring about any of it. Unable to bear the surrounding benevolent indifference any longer, Winnie says she wishes she had never been born. Her wish comes true, which is hardly surprising for a film whose cheerful original title 'It's a Wonderful Knife' references the classic Christmas melodrama 'It's a Wonderful Life'. 

The subsequent plot is a sometimes amusing, sometimes less so attempt to basically marry Frank Capra with Wes Craven, to make a New Year's movie disguised as a slasher. The heroine must realize that the world is still somewhat better with her in it, and also reassess the school hierarchy – the cool classmates, as usual, aren't so cool, while the outcast girl everyone calls Freak is actually much more interesting and humane than the rest. She is played by probably the best of the young actors in the film, Jess McLeod. 

The fact that a movie with a killer on all posters turned out to be a Christmas melodrama isn't exactly shocking. Even this year, there was already , which added slasher elements to 'Back to the Future', and a couple of years ago, 'Happy Death Day' (which shares screenwriter Michael Kennedy with this film) was a big hit, inserting a killer into 'Groundhog Day'. The main question in the case of inbreeding a slasher with any other genre is whether the implant took, whether the blood types matched, whether the hybrid is viable. With reservations, but generally, yes. Of course, 'It's a Wonderful Knife' doesn't shine with originality, isn't particularly hilarious, and certainly isn't scary, but it's a fairly lively film, it has breath and – even more surprisingly – it has a heart.

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Winnie's odyssey through her hometown in an alternate universe where she never existed doesn't reveal anything new to viewers, but it's executed quite cheerfully, and about half an hour before the finale, the film suddenly reassembles itself and turns into a gritty movie about fighting dictatorship. For a couple of minutes, screenwriter Kennedy delves into the schizophrenic depths of the Oedipus complex (literally!), and then it suddenly turns out that the main evil is not the masked killer, but that learned indifference, the willingness to obey even the worst authority. And capitalism, of course. Can't do without it.

There are many horror films about dictatorship in the world, but this seems to be the first slasher on such an unexpected topic. Unlike many of its predecessors, which served more as manifestos of puritanical villages (sex before marriage is punishable, promiscuous city teens die under axe blows), 'It's a Wonderful Knife' is a fairly meaningful, obviously anti-Trump film about the importance of political participation and that dictatorship should be fought and tyrants overthrown, even if life doesn't become much better afterward, even if finding oneself in a world where you are not controlled is generally harder than when there is a ruler telling you where to go and what to do.

Naturally, like any low-budget genre film, 'It's a Wonderful Knife' is, to put it mildly, uneven, speeding up and slowing down quite arbitrarily, struggling to find the right tone in serious moments (sometimes not finding it at all), and overall, before the unexpected final third, there are fairly average first two thirds. The film also hasn't escaped the birth defect of modern slashers (though who has, certainly not 'Totally Killer'): there are practically no elaborate kills necessary for the genre, even though the killer is quite decent and, so to speak, stylish. 

In a broader sense, abstracting from the props, the film suffers from a problem that is abnormal for a slasher but normal for a melodrama: it is better written and better acted than it is directed. In the eighties, no one allowed themselves such a thing, and there was no doubt about the firmness of the directors' hands. They didn't always know where to strike, and often missed, but a surgically precise miss is still more interesting than a sluggish waving of trembling hands, even if in the right direction. 

In this sense, like any night before Christmas, this one is an extra reminder of missed opportunities and undone deeds, but strangely, it's a touching reminder, heartfelt, charming in the spirit of the shadowy horror classics of the nineties. If you've been saving up strength all year to watch some new slasher, you might as well watch this one.