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mst3kproject · 3 years

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Magic Christmas Tree

I thought I’d try something different this year and find a bad Hannukah movie, but everybody I asked had the same recommendation: Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights. I know for a fact that is a prohibitively awful film, because I know people who’ve watched parts of it (I have not to date met anyone who could sit through the whole thing), but it just doesn’t feel like an MST3K feature to me. Anyway, I have standards. My conclusion is that people need to make more Hannukah movies… and until that happens, I’m watching Magic Christmas Tree, which comes specially recommended by RiffTrax.

This is the only Christmas movie I’ve ever seen which starts with cheerful holiday music over footage of… Hallowe’en decorations. Obnoxious bully Mark and his two pushover friends decide to go investigate a supposedly-haunted house. Naturally the old lady who lives there is a witch, and in exchange for Mark rescuing her cat, she gives him a seed for a magical tree that will grant him three wishes. Two months later, with the tree fully grown, his first wish is to have magical powers for one hour – he uses them to torment unfortunate people who were already having to work on Christmas Eve. His second wish is to kidnap Santa Claus and extort unlimited presents from him, but that attracts the attention of the spirit of Greed, who intends to keep Mark as a slave forever! Good thing he’s still got that third wish.

God, I hate this movie. I’d say it’s the worst Christmas movie I’ve ever seen, but Elves exists, so instead I have to say it’s the worst Christmas movie that didn’t have any Nazis in it. It reminds me more than anything else of Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, in that it’s an absolute mess that seems to have been put together by people who have no idea what they’re doing. It spends most of its time on boring, annoying irrelevant bullshit, and then when it gets to the plot, that’s boring and annoying, too!

Magic Christmas Tree is only an hour long, but that’s twice as long as it needed to be. A plot summary makes it sound like most of the film will be dealing with Mark’s three wishes and how he uses them, but it’s half-over before we even get to that point. The time leading up to it is spent watching Mark follow the witch’s complicated instructions on how to grow and activate the tree, and his parents dealing with this unwanted thing appearing in the middle of their back yard. All of this is presented in excruciating detail. We watch Mark dig the entire hole to plant the seed in. We see his Dad struggle with the lawnmower at unbelievable length, while the Mom yacks about nothing on the phone with her friend Betty. The Dad tries to cut the tree down with no success. Mark has to say a set of magic words over and over and over.

It goes on so long, it passes the are you fucking kidding me? point and wanders into territory where you wonder if there’s something wrong with the disk and you’re playing the scene over and over. It actually starts to feel like it’s on purpose – especially when the slowness is repeatedly emphasized by shots of Mark’s pet tortoise, Ichabod, who seems to be eating his patch of clover far faster than anybody else is accomplishing anything. You’ll swear the movie is making fun of you.

The sound that accompanies all this is sometimes very peculiar. The old lady has exactly the voice you’d expect from a witch in a cheap kid’s movie, but Mark’s Mom sounds like she’s being dubbed by a twelve-year-old boy, possibly the same one who provided the voice for Mark himself. The tree speaks (oh, yes, it does) in the voice of a smarmy stereotypical gay man. Santa Claus sounds like he’s half-senile and wondering what’s for lunch.

The lawnmower makes some very strange noises indeed. I guess they’re meant to be cartoonish and funny. They’re definitely the former but they’re never the latter, possibly because they never sound remotely like a lawnmower. When Mark’s Dad is trying to get it started it sounds like the ghost of a consumptive horse, and three hours later when it actually gets going, it makes noises like a traffic jam in Whoville.

Besides sounding weird, the actors are just plain bad. The guy playing Santa Claus is half-asleep. We’re told that the tree’s magic means he’s trapped in the chair he’s sitting in, and I honestly do believe that actor could not have gotten up if he tried, no wishes necessary. The woman playing Mark’s Mom looks like she’s high as a kite and only barely keeping her grip on reality. Maybe that’s why they had to dub her. Mark’s Dad recites his lines like a guy on a game show reading his own life story off a teleprompter, and does his yard chores in a way that’s probably supposed to be pantomimey but is the opposite of entertaining. The Dad gets an inordinate amount of screen time, which I can only chalk up to the fact that he’s played by director Dick Parish.

The worst of the lot are, of course, the kids, who are predictably terrible 60’s child actors. They yell all their lines, with the volume and exaggerated emphasis you expect from a school play. It wears thin very, very quickly. The kid playing Mark is the worst of the lot, although I might just think that because he’s the one we spend the most time with. He’s a huge part of why this movie makes me so mad.

I think the best way to describe Mark as a character is to say that the first time I watched this movie I assumed his name was ‘Billy’, despite the fact that everybody kept calling him ‘Mark’. He just seems like the type of nasty little brat who’d be named ‘Billy’ in a bad 60’s Christmas movie. We meet him having lunch with his two friends by the playground, and learn that he’s a greedy little shit when he drives a hard bargain in a sandwich trade. Greedy-little-shit-itude continues to be his primary character trait and is, of course, the core of the movie’s lesson. His attempt to monopolize Santa Claus makes him such a greedy little shit that Greed himself takes an interest in him.

Greed is a huge hairy man who takes delight in kidnapping little boys. I think he’s supposed to look like a fairy tale giant. Watching him manhandle a child is an intensely uncomfortable experience.

I guess ‘don’t be greedy’ is a standard message for a children’s movie, and it seems like a particularly appropriate one for Christmas, which presents children with a great opportunity for avarice. What seems a little odd is that Mark never actually suffers any consequences for his selfishness, only the vague threat of them. There was a perfect opportunity for some of this when Mark kidnaps Santa Claus. Santa, after all, brings toys to good girls and boys… surely by this point, after his brief reign of terror with his magical powers, Mark has been naughty enough to deserve only coal. Apparently that’s not how it works, though. Mark just wanders off into the woods in search of small animals to shoot with his new rifle, runs into the giant, and immediately repents even though Greed is offering him all the toys and candy he wants.

What supposedly prompts Mark to become a better person is seeing how the world has responded to Santa Claus going missing. Curiously, there is very little emphasis on the children who are sad because they didn’t get any presents. Maybe somebody thought that would have made them seem greedy? Instead, the vision Greed presents to Mark is of the United States military mobilizing to locate Santa and bring him home, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians-style! So… I guess Mark becomes a better person because he’s afraid of what’s going to happen if the army finds Santa trapped in a chair in his house? I guess that is pretty terrifying.

Another thing that blunts the lesson is the fact that Mark is given his three wishes as a reward for a good deed. He got the witch’s cat down from the tree, so she offers him the magical seed and doesn’t let him refuse. What then was he supposed to use his three wishes for, if not to get stuff for himself? Was this intentionally a poisoned gift, because you shouldn’t accept things from witches? The witch insists that there are good witches as well as wicked ones, but she’s not exactly an unbiased source. The movie never tries to blame her, though. The situation is presented as Mark’s fault, and Mark’s alone.

Finally, at the end Mark wakes up and finds that of course the whole thing was a dream – there was no witch, no magic tree, and no Santa Claus. This is less annoying than it could have been because at least it’s not a surprise. Mark did hit his head when he fell out of the tree the cat was in, and the movie changed from black and white to colour. We’ve seen this before in The Wizard of Oz and we can guess where it’s going. The audience might assume that Mark will wake up and immediately take the opportunity to be generous instead of greedy, perhaps by giving his friend something to make up for the lunch trade. Instead, the woman who owns the cat (who is not actually a witch, but looks even more like one in this part of the film than she does wearing the Hallowe’en witch costume in Mark’s dream) offers him milk and cookies, and he delightedly accepts. This just gives the impression that he’s learned nothing.

Is there anything in this movie I didn’t hate? Well… among Mark’s school friends is a token black kid, who is not differentiated in any way from his peers. He talks like them, he dresses like them, and the writers did not use either his lunch or his Hallowe’en plans as a way to demarcate a class difference between him and the others. So yeah, the movie sucks, but the writers tried really hard not to be racist.

Happy fucking holidays. I want to say hooray for surviving 2020, but we’ve still got a week to go. That’s plenty of time for oh, I don’t know, an alien invasion, or a giant meteor, or the Yellowstone supervolcano, or zombies, or whatever. At this point, if most of us aren’t dead by this time next year, I’ll count that as a win.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #magic christmas tree #fuck this movie #holiday reviews #60s

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