SANTA VISITS THE MAGIC LAND OF MOTHER GOOSE (1967) * ½

If you thought Barry Mahon’s Christmas-themed kid’s movies were bad, wait till you get a load of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Santa Visits the Magic Land of Mother Goose!  Lewis basically sat a camera down and filmed a children’s stage, fantasy, and magic show and called it a movie.  That “film” was released as The Magic Land of Mother Goose, but when Christmas rolled around, Lewis added bookend scenes of Santa in there to sucker the kids into seeing it again.  

Santa reads a book of Mother Goose nursery rhymes and falls asleep.  He then dreams about a high school-level stage production where Mother Goose’s characters come out of a giant book.  First, Old King Cole struts out.  He has a bit of trouble with the uncooperative Raggedy Ann and calls on his buddy Merlin to perform a series of magic tricks to set her ass straight.  More and more characters float in and out until the Wicked Witch bursts onto the scene and freezes everyone.  Except for Merlin, who puts her in a box and, in the film’s lone badass scene, burns her alive on stage!  Eventually, Mother Goose appears to wrangle the characters back into the book. 

The magic tricks are standard stuff, save for the great burning witch gag (which includes a close-up of her skeleton’s smoldering crotch).  The scenes of Merlin making a handkerchief dance, levitating Sleeping Beauty, and cutting Jack Sprat in half eat up a lot of screen time.  At least they’re more tolerable than the amateur hour high school theater-level performances by the storybook characters.  (The magic trick sequences also serve as kind of a warm-up to Lewis’s classic, The Wizard of Gore.)

Lewis is mostly known for his gore films, but he also did biker, sexploitation, and hicksploitation movies too.  Incredibly enough, as bad as Santa Visits the Magic Land of Mother Goose is, it’s far from his worst.  The burning witch scene alone saves it from being a One Star flick.  Also, the stuff with the freaky bargain bin Raggedy Ann doll is pure nightmare fuel.  So, if you are a Lewis completist, have a soft spot for chintzy ‘60s kid’s movies, or like to see vintage filmed magic acts, you might want to pay a visit to this magic land too.

AKA:  The Magic Land of Mother Goose.