What happens when you take a timeless classic, toss in a bunch of lesbians, and make the main antagonistic a knife-wielding killer?  Well, besides describing most modern Disney films, you get It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023).

I wanted It’s a Wonderful Knife to be good.  I wanted it so badly.  Most would scoff at the idea of taking a true classic like It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and turning it into a bloody slasher, but I love that kind of thing.  Sure, it’s rarely executed well—this flick is no exception—but I was hoping this one would be different.

Well, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  I was foolish to think this flick would be different, but like George Bailey, a man can dream, right?

It’s not all bad.  It really does capture something of the spirit of It’s a Wonderful Life, especially with the two possible outcomes for the town (Angel Falls in this film).  The world in which our heroine Winne Carruthers does not exist is just as bad as the one without George Bailey.  Indeed, it’s even worse—kids are murdered pretty much every two or three weeks, and a large portion of the town’s population is brainwashed and/or mind-controlled into acting as murders on behalf of the corrupt mayor (himself a serial killer!).

The killer’s outfit is pretty awesome, too.  They call him “The Angel,” and he wears an all-white cloak and hood, while donning a creepy white mask.  It’s like the Ghost of Christmas Future if he did more than point menacingly at a tombstone.

That’s about all I can say good about the film.  It ladles on all the tropes we’ve come to know and hate—gay couples; lesbian couples; weird teenagers who leave behind being straight to be gay; etc.  The film really goes overboard with the gay stuff, to the point of distraction:

• The heroine’s brother is gay (and makes out with a brown gay guy who is so effeminate, I thought he was a man)
• The heroine’s aunt is a lesbian (and dates a woman with a massive birthmark on her face—that’s not offensive, it was just annoying)
• The heroine leaves her boyfriend to date the weird girl (she transports back to the world in which she’s alive when she finally kisses the weird girl)
• I think there was another homosexual couple in there somewhere

To be clear, none of this gayness relates to the plot in anyway.  And, look, I know these relationships exist.  I’m not opposed—seriously, I am not!—to seeing a lesbian couple.  But, good Lord, this film beats you over the head with it so much, I’m surprised they didn’t release it in June!

One positive before I end this extremely politically incorrect review:  Justin Long—yes, Justin Long is still making movies—does a great turn as the town’s murderous and phony mayor, Henry Waters.  Long is only forty-five, but they do a good job of making him look older.  He really feels like the glad-handing, obsequious, yet ruthless small-town mayor that we know well from film and reality.

If you want to see two “mid” chicks running around an old movie theatre (why is the weird, closeted lesbian chick always an employee at a dying vintage movie house?) and improbably defeating more powerful foes, watch It’s a Wonderful Knife.  Otherwise, just watch the original and remember when we used to be a great nation that kept its bedroom antics at the bottom of the river in Bedford Falls.