It's a Wonderful Knife

 It's a Wonderful Knife is a slasher variant on Frank Capra's cornball classic It's a Wonderful Life; It's a mildly clever conceit, and there's no reason why it wouldn't work; It's got precedents in other recent slasher-splicing exercises like Happy Death day or Freaky.

 Well, this time it didn't work. Not even fucking close. TLDR: Don't bother with this one, it's not worth it.

  A killer in an Angel getup stalks the streets of Angel Falls on Christmas night. His killing spree is cut short pretty quickly, though: local teen Winnie (Jane Widdop) manages to electrocute him after just three deaths, one of them her best friend. The unmasked slasher turns out to be local real estate mogul Henry Waters (Justin Long), who was killing off people whose properties were hampering his plans for some sort of urban renewal scheme.

 Cut to one year later, and Winnie is still traumatized by the events. It doesn't help that her previously seemingly well-adjusted family have all turned into the most absolutely insensitive pricks in the meanwhile, being as unwittingly hurtful towards Winnie as possible because, well, Winnie needs to hit rock bottom to move on to the next plot point. Also, because this movie fucking sucks. I mean, seriously, check this out: For christmas, she gets a horrible pink jogging suit, and her brother gets a pickup truck. That's the level of material we're working with here.

 So at a party later that night (where she finds that her boyfriend - who invited her to the party! is fucking one of her friends in the laundry room, and had been cheating on her for the whole year), Winnie goes out and wishes she had never been born.

 Cue some crappy looking aurora borealis effects, and suddenly she's in a parallel reality where she never existed and immediately gets jumped by the angel.
 Because she never stopped him, Henry is now the mayor and has been busy turning the town into a complete shithole - as well as murdering people willy nilly. This is communicated with such subtle means as Winnie returning to the party she had been to earlier, and finding out that in this reality instead of pop music they're playing heavy metal, and her friends are smoking crack. Oh, and there's swearwords in the christmas songs. Because the script for this movie is just that fucking basic.

 From there on Winnie needs to convince someone, anyone - no one recognizes her, of course - that the mayor is the killer... and stop him somehow. Nothing interesting continues to happen; There's a late development that threatens with being unpredictable, but it's resolved in such a comically underwhelming fashion that it doesn't even register.

 The script for this was written by Michael Kennedy, who previously had written Freaky. That wasn't that great, but it had at least some imaginative kills and clever lines. No such luck here; zero imagination, cleverness, or, well, effort. Everything is unremittingly basic and transparently manipulative. Tyler MacIntyre's direction fails to pick up the slack - it's entirely workmanlike, and the cinematography looks flat and without any atmosphere. Some nice panoramic shots, though.

 I struggle to find anything good to say about this. The fist fifteen minutes are fun, if extremely disposable; there's a couple of bloody kills, though they're pretty forgettable, and they at least make the effort of being holiday themed (someone gets perforated by a sharpened candy cane, the killer gets electrocuted with christmas lights, and christmas presents are used to avert knife wounds). Oh, and the killer's outfit is cool
 The acting is pretty poor, but that's just down to the material they're working with. Justin Long and Joel McHale are pros, and at least seem to be having fun. Poor McHale gets saddled with exposition like "One year ago my son was killed; now I have zero children!" with some emotion, which is next to miraculous. He also gets the one bit of good writing in the whole movie, a short monologue that at least tries to justify the film's existence.

 Which... is a pretty hard sell. The protagonist in It's a Wonderful Life discovers that despite his not realizing it, his life had meaning, that the fact that he was a good human being was not in vain. Here, Winnie finds out that maybe it's a good thing that she stopped a murderer. I mean - what the ever loving FUCK. It's seriously never really developed beyond that, just slightly muddled. Maybe the filmmakers hate Capra's movie and think they're parodying it?

 No, that'd be giving it too much credit. This movie fucking reeks; It's a lazy, cynical piece of crap that has no interest in any of the elements it's juggling, of the genre it's working with or the source material it's transposing. Just a shitty, uninspired bid to waste our time, content to just spew hackneyed sitcom-quality developments in the least imaginative possible way.

 Stay the hell away from it.

 

Becky

 One way to make me perk right up: reference the Into the Void opening credits in your movie's opening credits*. Do it on a notebook with animated teen doodles, as Becky does, and we're in business.

 Becky Hopper (Lulu Wilson) is a sullen thirteen-year old girl who's still mourning her mother a year after bereavement. She's a troubled girl, introduced as she's bullied at school and seemingly implied to be somewhere in the spectrum on some of the early scenes. She's bright and pretty funny, but you can imagine how hard it would be to live with someone as a parent.

 Pity her dad, then, for trying to move on. He takes Becky on holiday to a beloved lakeside cabin, and spoils everything by inviting his new girlfriend Kayla (Amanda Brugel) over... and telling his daughter he intends to re-marry. It goes as well as you'd expect.

 After Becky's run away to her hiding spot to brood, a murderous neo-nazi gang freshly escaped from prison and led by one Dominick (Kevin James) takes over the cabin looking for a key they'd hidden before they were put away. A key (marked with a proto-germanic symbol) that, of course, Becky has found and taken for herself.
 Kind of a Die Hard situation, then, with a (record scratch) thirteen-year-old girl wearing a cute woven animal hood in the McLane role. And it works brilliantly! Mostly because the character of Becky reminded me more of a latter-day Liam Neeson action role more than a Bruce Willis one, but on the opposite end of the unlikely-age spectrum.

 It's a stew of genres and influences: an indie drama frequently checking in on Becky's memories of her mother, a thriller with some very effective, tense scenes, a sprinkling of extremely bloody action. Home Alone and the aforementioned Neeson vehicles are a reference point, and it invokes the ghost of a slasher movie with its bloodlust and music (a cheeky, lively Friday the 13th-ish mix of music and breathy panting). I think my favorite thing about it is that despite having a rich seam of bloody gallows humor, the film plays all of its elements dead straight.

 The premise may be silly, but it's mostly rendered plausible by the way the script (by Nick Morris and Ruckus & Lane Skye) grounds its elements. The protagonist's shift from terrified teen to deranged killer feels earned, and the progression of events makes sense. The action is brutal and takes into account Becky's physical disadvantage at all times; She does spring back a little too quickly after being brutally manhandled, and also ignores a convenient gun at one point, but that's well within genre conventions.

 There are a few instances of overt humor here and there (the most obvious a rambo-2-referencing 'suiting up' montage that involves a star-shaped mirror) but that's pretty rare; most laughs come instead from how extreme things get.

 The filmmaking is great, with the cinematographer (Greta Zoula), editor (Alan Canant)  and directors (Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion) staging some elaborate scenes that cut between, say, the thugs escaping and some fragments of Becky's school life, or getting creative when Becky and Dominick talk over walkie-talkies. The film gets more traditional as it progresses, but things are always cleanly staged. The music (by Nima Fakhrara) is a good mix between ambiental Indie music and crazy mix of vocals and instrumental weirdness.

 And while all the actors are good in this, both Lulu Wilson and Kevin James do an excellent job with their characters; Wilson really sells both Becky's pain and her psycho determination, and James displays the sort of cult-leader charisma you'd expect out of his Manson-like character. The guy's deluded enough that he thinks he can win Becky over with a "we are not so different, you and I" spiel near the end.
 I also really liked his second in command Apex (Robert Maillet), who has a significant role as the lone thug with a little humanity. 

 Cap it off with some extreme levels of gore - wet, chunky, and detailed, more so than most horror movies (the FX crew clearly pulled out medical reference texts for this one), and we've got something special on our hands. It's a simple movie, but a wildly, viciously entertaining one.

*: Or maybe they're more indebted to Spiderverse, but I choose to think otherwise.