With Christmas just around the corner, I thought it only appropriate that I spend some time talking about such beloved holiday classics as It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, A Christmas Story… oh, who am I kidding?! Instead, I’m going to spend each day over the next week providing a brief spotlight on some of the weirdest Christmas movies ever made. The ones where the filmmakers were clearly drinking some heavily spiked eggnog while they made it and deserve a gigantic lump of coal in their stocking for what they’ve done! For starters, I’m going to showcase a very obscure, ultra-low budget 1964 oddity called The Magic Christmas Tree, which tells the story of a boy who uses the powers of a magic ring to grow a talking Christmas tree that grants him three wishes. I’ve never actually seen this one, but those lucky few who’ve experienced it say that it’s the worst Christmas movie of all time by a landslide (and when you see some of the other selections I feature this week, that’s REALLY saying something!).
The movie originally caught my eye on one of the 42nd Street Forever DVDs, which feature some of the strangest trailers of all time, and The Magic Christmas Tree is apparently screened every Christmas at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas. And in spite of what that poster would have you believe, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is nowhere to be found in this film! The most amusing part of the trailer is when the announcer says: “You’ll want to see the happy witch… the greedy giant… the runaway lawnmower!”. Well, the happy witch and the greedy giant got me intrigued, but they had me at “runaway lawnmower”! In fact, whenever a big Hollywood movie flops at the box office, I can only attribute it to one thing: not enough runaway lawnmowers in the trailer! Anyway, for a much more hilarious and in-depth review of The Magic Christmas Tree, you can click here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO0YznDkBN4