The Magic Christmas Tree

I watched the Rifftrax version of this and laughed all the way through it. I did notice the demonic tone, but Bill, Mike and Kevin kept it at bay by making fun of the fat kid, the parents and even the tree itself. If you want to see it, watch the Rifftrax version. I was shocked to see a film made in the early 60s with three little boys as friends and one of them was BLACK, not something to be expected at that time when schools were not yet integrated, but if you are watching a demonic Christmas Tress turning little kids into Satanic minions on the night of Christ's birth, not accepting the three as friends seems, to me, as stupid as refusing to swallow an aspirin after one has just swallowed a door knob.

THE MAGIC Christmas TREE is one of the worst kiddie movies ever made. Obviously made with NO budget, the acting is atrocious - the guy who plays the father has a scene where he tries to start the family lawn mower and this "bit" goes on FOREVER - he pulls the chord - nothing - he pulls the chord - nothing - but they always add absurd sound effects with each pull! Circus horns, whatever, etc.....this disaster isn't quite as good/bad as Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny but it sure is close. The scene where the little boy is lost in the woods and confronted by a giant "woodsman" is one of the creepiest things I've ever seen - it unintentionally is more uncomfortable than Ned Beatty's scenes in Deliverance. Obviously this thing was made for nothing and probably shown at schools and churches and such. Man, the only good performance in the whole thing is given by Ichabod, an actual tortoise who is shown eating clover (LOTS of clover - they obviously show this a lot only because they hoped to "pad" the running time of the movie.)

That is, in fact, an actual line of dialogue from the film, and it gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect. In other words...low, low budget; elementary school-level acting; post-synched dialogue (a la Coleman Francis); and a plot that seems like it was made up as they went along. For those of us who love movies that are so excruciatingly awful that they go full circle into the territory of unintentionally surreal brilliance, then this is totally for you.

The "wacky" lawnmower-starting scene goes on FOREVER. I kept waiting for the dad to run over Ichabod, the tortoise.

I can totally imagine seeing this projected in 16mm on a white-painted brick wall back when I was in grade school at Green Lake Elementary.

It's like a kids' film directed by the people at Centron. This is one of those weird, institutional-feeling movies that would seem to be perfect fodder for the MST3K guys. But really, it's sufficiently goofy enough on its own to provide an hour's worth of perverse amusement.

If you can track down a copy I highly recommend it. I use it every year to torture my family.

Whenever I have seen lists of the supposed worst films ever made, many small movies with limited releases never have a chance of making it simply because no one ever got much of a chance to see it in the first place. In other words, it's dreck that slipped between the cracks...a good way to describe "Magic Christmas Tree" actually.

The story is VERY slow and the plot unfolds at glacial speed. A kid helps and old witch and she gives him a reward...some magic tree that grants wishes. But the kid is a bit of a sociopath and he wishes for some bad things...but the worst is his kidnapping Santa...or at least a mall Santa from a very run down and shady neighborhood. Can Santa shed himself of the kid? And, does anyone really care? And, does anyone notice that the movie seems like a really bad ripoff of "The Wizard of Oz"-especially at the end?

The movie appears to have been made with a Super 8 movie camera and all the actors were non-professionals. Their performances are so bad...but you can't blame them since they aren't actors and the script writer was probably a lemur. I'm actually being kind, as I am not sure if they even had a writer.

By the way, one of the very worst Christmas films of all time (aside from this one) also came out in 1964, the incredibly wretched "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians". After watching both, I'd say "Magic Christmas Tree" is less annoying but a much worse film overall. The only film that approaches (and perhaps surpasses) the awfulness of "The Magic Christmas Tree" is 1972's "Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny".

You know a film's going to be good when it starts with a three-minute bologna sandwich exchange.

Truly bizarre, essentially plotless '60s family flick that should've been a 10-minute short, but is instead padded out by endless scenes of newspaper reading, lawnmower starting, and pointless dialogue read by a boy with the most over-the-top, '50s-educational-film voice in the world ("WOW, GOSH, GEEZ!"). After about half an hour of actually nothing happening, the boy gets his magic Christmas tree which will grant him three wishes, but the boy has NO IDEAS. He has had a magic ring for TWO MONTHS and can't think of a single thing that he wants. Just awesome.

The whole thing looks and feels like it was improvised completely on the spot. Aware of its own pointlessness, it randomly becomes a morality play for five minutes (a morality play with a random forest giant, no less!) before wrapping things up as haphazardly as they started. MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE is as delirious and disastrous as they come and is probably at least partially responsible for the higher suicide rates during the Christmas season.

Best line: "I guess I'll have to find another selfish boy to be my slave!"