The period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s was a golden age for dreadful Christmas films made for children. Younger viewers were having their brains rotted by the likes of Santa Claus (1959), The Magic Land of Mother Goose (1967), Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1972) and The Christmas Martian (1972) and it’s a miracle that the festive season survived this hideous onslaught of bilge. When people bang on about the mythical “war of Christmas” they probably need to take a look at these cinematic assaults before getting worked up over things that aren’t actually happening… Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny felt like scraping the bottom of this particular rancid barrel but Richard C. Parish’s appalling Magic Christmas Tree gives it a very good run for its money.

At just an hour in length, it’s mercifully brief but Parish and his screenwriter Harold Vaughn Taylor have so little story at hand that it’s still padded to the hilt with wholly extraneous material. Take the opening scene. We meet three young boys, our hero Mark (Chris Kroesen) and his friends Dave (Bill Willingham) and Tommy (Billy Schaffner) who have a lengthy and very far from riveting discussion about the contents of their sandwiches. This doesn’t distract us from noticing that although the opening titles had been in colour, these scenes are in black and white and that, despite the title, it’s actually all playing out at Halloween. Mark challenges the others to visit a supposedly haunted house where Mark helps the elderly Miss Finch (Valerie Hobbs) to rescue her cat Lucifer who is stuck in a tree. He falls out of the tree and when he comes too, the world is in faded colour (shades of The Wizard of Oz (1939)) and that Miss Finch is a witch (looking, unsurprisingly, like Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West) who gives him a magic ring for his troubles.

We now leap forwards, not to Christmas, but to Thanksgiving and Mark plants a seed that he finds hidden in the ring under the turkey wishbone and a magic tree starts to grow. Finally on Christmas Eve, the tree is fully grown but still goes unnoticed by Mark’s dim-witted father (played, very badly, by Parish himself) who runs into it while trying to mow the lawn. This is another fine example of the paucity of actual content in the script – the lawnmowing scene was presumably intended as the film’s slapstick comedy highlight (dad has trouble starting it, it eventually gets going amid a cacophony of “comedy” sound effects and dad crashes it into the tree) but it just drags on… and on… and on. And all the while, mum (Darlene Lohnes) is on the phone to a friend having a one-sided conversation that ads precisely nothing to the plot.

Finally, after half an hour of this nonsense, what passes for the plot heaves itself wearily into view. Left alone on Christmas Eve while mum, dad and his sister (Dianne Johnson) – who plays no part in the film whatsoever other than to just be there in the background – head of in search of a Christmas tree, Mark’s own magic Christmas tree (a tatty looking thing, barely dressed for the season) transports itself into the family front room and starts to talk to Mark, telling him that if he says three magic words he’ll get three wishes. Mark has known this was coming since Halloween, yet his choice of wishes suggest that he hasn’t given theme a seconds thought since. First, he is granted extraordinary powers over everyone in town which he uses to cause a lengthy chase through town involving custard pies, vintage fire engines, runaway trucks, shaky camerawork and bemused bystanders trying to work out what was going on.

For his second wish, the increasingly obnoxious Mark wants to have Santa Claus all to himself and a particularly portly Santa (Howard Blevins) finds himself stuck in a chair in Mark’s house. Mark is the suddenly transported to a forest where he meets the hulking Greed (Robert ‘Big Buck’ Maffei), a giant mountain man with a very disquieting interest in young children (“you’re my little boy now!” he tells Mark, later turning straight to audience to threaten to find another “slave,” cackling, pointing at the camera and wondering “maybe you?”) Eventually Mark comes to his sense and uses his third and final wish to revert everything back to the way it was the night before and we realise that we’ve been watching another variation on A Christmas Carol, with three wishes instead of three ghosts. Mark is a spoiled brat throughout, but he’s supposed to be – he’s Scrooge. A suitably chastened Mark finds redemption when he’s returned to his drab, monochrome suburban life while ethe magic Christmas tree joins a full colour forest of pines and delivers a final line (“there’s a little bit of magic in every Christmas tree”) in an entirely different voice to the one it had earlier in the film…

Magic Christmas Tree is painfully bad, strictly amateur hour stuff, guaranteed to stomp to death any last vestiges of Christmas spirit you may have. One might feel inclined to cut it some slack as it was clearly the handiwork of amateurs with more enthusiasm than talent, but it’s so appalling that mustering any goodwill for it takes more work than it deserves. It was the only film that Parish ever made, further lending credence to the idea that it was an amateur production – who he was, where he came from and where he went are all mysteries. Most of the cast were similarly unheard of before or since, though Maffei had some credits playing giants and other heavies in things like Atlantis the Lost Continent (1961), Lost on Space (1965-1968) and Star Trek (1966-1969). With its muddled story, terrible acting and wall-to-wall music that sounds like it’s made up of library cues, but is credited to one Victor Kirk, Magic Christmas Tree is a joyless, slog that will test the patience of even the most ardent of bad movie lover. It’s hardly any wonder that young people later in the 1960s turned to drugs – they needed something to expunge the memory of things like this.