It's a Wonderful Knife (R)
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This came out in 2023. I watched it in 2025, on Krampusnacht. As the title suggests, the plot is inspired by It's a Wonderful Life, and for much of the movie I couldn't help but wonder whether or not that movie existed within the universe of this movie. I certainly would have expected someone to comment on it a lot sooner than they did, but they did eventually reference characters from that movie. So that's nice. Not sure what else to say aside from that, except that I just really liked the story and everything.

It begins one Christmas in the town of Angel Falls, where a businessman named Henry Waters (Justin Long) has been buying up lots of property in order to build a new mega-shopping center. He and one of his employees, David Carruthers (Joel McHale) try to convince the lone holdout, Roger Evans (William B. Davis, best known to me from The X-Files), to sell his home. But Roger refuses, as he intends to pass the house on to his granddaughter, Cara, someday. So, Henry and David leave, but later that night, a masked slasher shows up at Roger's door, and kills him. Subsequently, the slasher (who comes to be called "the Angel", because of how he's dressed) kills Cara. He then tries to kill David's son, Jimmy, but is stopped by Jimmy's sister (and Cara's best friend), Winnie. She electrocutes the Angel, and removes his mask. Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be Henry Waters.

A year later, as Christmas approaches once again, David is now the head of Henry's company. He celebrates the holiday with his family, including his wife, Winnie and Jimmy, their aunt, and her wife. Everyone's supposed to open one gift on Christmas Eve, and Winnie is not happy about the pink jogging suit her dad gives her. She's even more upset when she finds out he got Jimmy a new truck. But mostly, she's still mourning Cara, and is upset that her family wants her to just move on from the events of a year ago. She goes to a Christmas party at the home of her boyfriend, Robbie, where she catches him cheating on her with a mean girl named Darla. Winnie goes to a bridge, where she looks up at aurora lights, and decides it would be better if she'd never been born. And here is where the "It's a Wonderful Life" plot kicks in, because Winnie soon finds that no one in town knows who she is. What's more, because she wasn't around to stop him, the Angel is still regularly killing people, and had succeeded in killing Jimmy the previous year. Henry is now the mayor of Angel Falls. His narcissistic brother, Buck, is now the town's sheriff, and doesn't seem terribly concerned about the Angel.

Winnie spends the rest of the movie trying to get back to her own reality, with the help of a local outcast girl named Bernie, whom everyone calls "Weirdo". Bernie is the only one who believes Winnie is from an alternate timeline, and also believes it has something to do with the aurora. They believe Winnie must kill the Angel (again) in order to return to her own reality. And... I don't want to spoil any more of the story, but there are some major plot points I'm leaving out. I'll just say that Winnie does eventually return to her reality, and everything ends happily.

I feel like the story could have easily failed to work at all. It could have been a really bad movie. But in my opinion, it was actually a really good movie. I liked Winnie and Bernie, and the other characters all worked well for the roles they had in the story. There is one plot point about Bernie which I think felt a bit detached from the rest of the story, but I still think it worked well. It's pretty important, and it ties in to the whole "It's a Wonderful Life" parallels, in a way. I guess I should say that the horror aspect of the movie mostly wasn't as scary as it should have been. You could think of the movie as a comedy-horror, but I don't, really. Some parts of it were kind of amusing, I guess, but I took the alternate timeline part of the plot too seriously to call it a comedy. It wasn't perfect, but I thought that aspect of the story worked pretty well.