1964 Christmas nightmare
Bad Movie Rating: 4/5 (Josh: 4/5; J.D.: 4/5)
Rating: 3/20
Plot: After encountering a witch and helping her get her cat out of a tree, a boy is given a magic seed that will grow into the titular Christmas tree, a tree so magical that no father has the ability to chop down. He's granted three wishes, and like all dumb children, he uses them unwisely.
Ripping off The Wizard of Oz's black-and-white bookends, this gives away the big plot twist that the whole thing was only a dream away unless the person watching this has never seen The Wizard of Oz or probably any other movie. This actually starts with Halloween decor, something that helps the suspected witch and haunted house nonsense make sense for a movie called The Magic Christmas Tree. Actually, it starts with three children having an extended conversation about the value of various sandwiches, the kind of dialogue that makes you wonder if the writer of this (Harold Vaughn Taylor, which I would assume is some fancy computer software that enables one to plug in a few key ideas and themes and then watch as it spits out a completed film script if this didn't come out in the mid-60s before that sort of thing existed) peaked way too early and then was just too mentally exhausted to sustain that level of genius.
Right away, you know you're in for a bit of trouble once you realize the bigger kid in the middle is not only likely the protagonist of the movie but a bit of a dick. He's played by Chris Kroesen who IMDb informs me is a Leo because there's really nothing else going on with this guy. This was his only movie, likely because people who make movies would rather not have actors who close their eyes each time they say their lines. He's "husky," at least if you use the word choice the witch uses to describe him, and he's a little too loud. My friend Josh said he was a worse actor than Judy Garland and "half as hot," but that's not the type of thing his wife would want me to put in here for people to read. His friends--a black kid and a white kid, both with sandwiches--are inconsequential, and all I really remember about them is that they can't walk uphill like normal human beings.
The witch is played by Valerie Hobbs, and she might overdo things a little. This was her only role, too. We're twenty minutes into the film by the time the kid has the accident you know he will, and it's still Halloween even though this is a Christmas movie that is only an hour long. Actually, since the whole thing is just one long dream, the entire Christmas movie takes place around Halloween. It's a Halloween and sandwich movie more than it is a Christmas movie, I guess.
Oh, I forgot to mention that this review would contain spoilers.
Bam! Color! And the magic seed is planted, and then the dad, who of course is played by the director Richard "Dick" Parish, does some comical yard work for another fifteen minutes or so. You almost feel like Parish was using this as an audition tape, showing the world his skills in slapstick and shenanigans. Parish didn't get any other movie work either, probably his decision because he was just too tired after trying to chop down a magic Christmas tree for a seemingly endless amount of time. That whole sequence was almost a one-man Shakespearean tragedy mixed with a Stooges gag with 1/3 the Stooges and 1/90 the talent. I felt bad for Parish's father character, and then I felt bad for myself for having to watch this whole thing.
Eventually, we get to the "Monkey's Paw"-esque wishes. Mark's first wish is not, as I would have wished, for a less-oppressive musical score to go along with all this crap. No, Mark demonstrates his complete lack of ambition by wishing for "an hour of power." Imagine that you're a however-year-old kid and you've just been granted an "hour of power." What might you do? Mark, because he's really dumb, spends his hour making a flower and vase disappear, changing it from night to day, making vehicles drive off without their owners, and then making a woman hit a guy in the face with a pie. It all leads to a truly bananas sequence where a guy is chasing his truck, a policeman is chasing his police car, and a firetruck is. . .well, I was never sure what was going on with the firetruck. At the same time, the guy who got hit in the face with the pie is chasing the woman who hit him. It's the stupidest kind of chaos imaginable.
Did I mention that the kid has a turtle for absolutely no reason? There's no reason for me to provide this information here, but I feel it's important to at least mention it.
The kid's second wish is to kidnap Santa Claus because as I mentioned, he's a bit of a dick. So now Santa is sitting powerless in his living room next to the talking Christmas tree. Oh, I didn't mention that the tree talked? It's magical, so of course it talks! That's actually a better explanation than the tree provides, by the way. Mark says something like "Christmas trees can't talk," and the answer the tree gives is "If trees can't talk, how am I answering you? Of course I can talk!"
Anyway, Santa Claus is stuck in a chair because Mark apparently always wanted an overweight bearded man in his living room. And that really goes nowhere. There's a threat that Christmas is going to be perpetually ruined for all boys and girls everywhere, I guess, but it really does seem like Mark and his parents are the only people on earth at this point. It seems as inconsequential as that black kid and what kind of sandwich he brought for his lunch.
Mark's then off in the wilderness with a B.B. gun where he runs into a giant who wants to make him his slave. And yes, that's as messed up as it sounds. The giant is the lone person in this cast who was in other movies is Robert "Big Buck" Maffei . He was a character actor in a 70's Lord of the Rings cartoon and also played Hercules, Mr. Jumbo, Andex the Giant, a Strongman, a giant cyclops, and a creature in a Star Trek TV episode. I'm sure he's proudest of playing "Big Guy in the Door Way" in Nice Dreams, a Cheech and Chong movie where they pretend to be ice cream vendors. That was his last movie, and I'm guessing it's because he lost his life a little like Brandon Lee did when a stoned Cheech or Chong ran over him in an ice cream truck, more than likely while he was standing in a doorway.
Mark makes his third wish--that the movie will end soon--and then that's pretty much it. This probably shouldn't be shown to children even though there's a valuable lesson in there about how you shouldn't be a dick, especially around Christmas.
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