The Magic Land of Mother Goose (1966) User Reviews

The Godfather of Gore scares children

[BandSAboutMovies · 2/10 · 24 December 2020]

Happy holidays, everyone. To help celebrate, this is the first of two very horrifying holiday options for you to watch. Despite Santa being in the title of this movie, he only briefly appears, but that isn't why we watched this movie. No, we're here because this is another film in the career of Herschell Gordon Lewis that we had to check off.

Yes, parents that dropped their kids off at the theater for an all-day matinee in 1967 probably had no idea that just a few years earlier, the man they are trusting with the psyches of their children made Blood Feast.

So how did this even happen? Well, producer J. Edwin Baker was also a spook-show performer known as Dr. Silkini - his act was The Asylum of Horrors - and he hired Lewis to make a movie for his friend magician Roy Huston.

Huston plays Merlin, making this the second baffling holiday movie* I've seen where Santa joins forces with King Arthur's closest confidant. I have no idea why this is a thing, to be perfectly honest.

The film starts with Santa Claus chilling out on the day after Christmas by reading some Mother Goose, which puts him to sleep. This section is tacked on, of course, to the original film so that they could get more money out of it. It's also so shoddily made that we can audibly hear Lewis yell cut.

As for the movie itself, Old King Cole calls Merlin, a rag doll who is legally never referred to as Raggedy Anne (or Annabelle, for that matter), Prince Charming, Sleeping Beauty, Mother Goose and a ghost who they originally called Casper before an audio edit saved the production from a lawsuit onto the stage for singing, something resembling dancing and the kind of magic tricks that you could have bought from a mail order store to bore your friends with.

Do you remember - if you're a jerk like me - how much you hated up with people school assemblies? This is just like being stuck at one of those, with Lewis just plopping his cameras down and shooting whatever happened on stage.

There's so much hand work and goofy acting tics and a witch that gets set on fire and not Raggedy Ann is just horrifying and the real magic trick is that somehow the hour running time of this feels like a hundred years. But hey, it's Christmas and I have pledged to watch everything the Godfather of Gore ever did, so if you're going to hit the highs of She-Devils on Wheels and Two Thousand Maniacs! then you're going to suffer the valleys on the journey.

*The other is, of course, the Mexican mind melter known as Santa Claus.

Abandon all hope ye who watch this

[CobraMist · 2/10 · 12 March 2022]

If you thought that your appreciation of strange kiddie-matinees or HGL's well known films meant that you should watch this than I am so sorry for the huge disappointment you guaranteed to experience. Films from the above two camps both had some craft and skill put into them. People showed up and tried to make the films work, despite their limitations.

This though, is some kind of abhorrent, ungodly abomination that offers almost nothing of value. No one tried here to making some good or worthwhile. Someone found a disused stage at a children's school where only the worst children attended. The film makers aimed their camera at the stage and the world's worst thespians descended upon this god-forsaken place, beckoned by something that was beyond their understanding. Costumes were made from cheap and soiled garments, likely stolen from the local citizenry, and were combined into an obscene pastiche; a mockery of what modern society calls acceptable.

I don't have the strength to continue, haven just barely made it through this god awful wreck, but please take my advice and never watch it.

For fans of hardcore strangeness

[rufasff · 3 February 2000]

In 1967, gore/horror schlockmesister Hershall Gordon Lewis filmed a kid's stage show and tried to pass it off as a kiddie movie. One wonders if he made a buck off this thing, but you can't help thinking, looking at these hapless actors, that they could have been off protesting the war or listening to Blonde On Blonde.

Anyway, the stage show is totally absurd and uncinematic. The Actor playing King Cole does a manfull job of trying to hold the whole thing together, basicly ad-libbing much of his part as Merlin the Magician performs tricks using Mother Goose Characters with little motivation. The most striking thing here is the film's similarity to Lewis's nutball "The Wizard Of Gore". Call this "Wizard Of Gore Lite."

It's a terrible but one of a kind movie. At some point Christmas tie in inserts were included and the name was changed to "Santa Visits The Magic Land Of Mother Goose." This is what the Something Weird Video Version calls the film on the box, but it's version does not have the inserts. They make up for it by having a great selection of horrible kiddie movie trailers

Mommy, can we go home?

[galensaysyes · 1/10 · 16 March 2008]

I find it difficult to imagine that any audience could ever have sat all the way through this (I only got halfway) or that anyone would ever have put up a cent for its printing in the expectation of a return. It appears to be a movie of a terrible children's show by a terrible little-theatre company in some small town; but if any kids ever found their way to it, they must have been bored and creeped out at the same sitting. Since the person named as director is more notorious for his gore movies, one tends to apply a sinister subtext to the more bizarre sequences, e.g. the one with Raggedy Ann--so called, but looking more like the Corpse Bride--and a fascistic, sadistic Old King Cole who orders that the doll be tortured because she's not "merry" (indeed, to judge by appearances, clinically depressed) and she's forced into a box and sawed in half. The sawing is performed by an amateur kid magician whose tricks, unbelievably, are what the whole production is built around; hence "_Magic_ Land." Magic, my tuchus. The performers are so listless and the sets so tacky, it looks like a burlesque show with the strip numbers excised--which now I think of it does describe life in its dismaler aspect: so maybe the director is an unacknowledged master, after all.

Literally impossible to watch all the way through in one sitting

[lemon_magic · 1/10 · 19 March 2005]

Last year I joined a local group of "bad movie" buffs who called themselves the "Exposed Film Society" (Motto: "Wanna be a member? Wanna be a member?"...."No."). This film was my initiation test/rite of passage into their serried ranks, and what an initiation it was.

Once a month, with every new meeting, we would break out "The Magic Land Of Mother Goose" and attempt to watch a little further into it from our last stopping point. We'd normally manage to endure perhaps 15-20 minutes of brain-stopping inanity, dead air, and badly staged magic tricks before someone would start moaning (a la George C. Scott in "Hardcore"), "Turn it off. TURN IT OFF. TURN IT OFFFF!!!!" Then we'd put it away and try to cleanse our palates with something relatively watchable like "Hillbillies in a Haunted House" or "2+5 Mission Hydra". It took us 6 sessions to finish MLOMG, and we all agreed to lock the copy in a lead lined vault and tip toe away, never to speak of it again.

This film sits there on your head like a 300 lb hooker, sucking life out of your body like a black hole of anti-fun. It bears the same relation to entertainment and joy as a brick wall does to a speeding school bus full of children.

IMO, all bad film buffs should seek out a copy and watch it, even if it takes several months to get all the way through it. It is an experience like no other, and sets a standard for all awful grade Z films.

I'd Debate the Magic Land Part

[Michael_Elliott · 9 August 2015]

The Magic Land of Mother Goose (1967)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

From nudies to gore to children movies? Herschell Gordon Lewis will always be remembered for his films like TWO THOUSAND MANIACS and COLOR ME BLOOD RED but he also made a couple children movies including this one. This was apparently shot on a high school stage where various Mother Goose tales come to life. The characters that make an appearance include Merlin, Old King Cole, the Wicked Witch, Prince Charming and a very, very creepy Rag Doll.

THE MAGIC LAND OF MOTHER GOOSE probably would have worked better as a thirty minute show for television. Or, if it would have probably worked even better had I dropped a ton of acid and drank a few beers before watching it. The biggest problem with the film isn't its low-budget or the actual performances. It's just that none of it is all that interesting. Lewis keeps the camera back the majority of the time and everything is filmed in long takes. The lack of any real editing really kills the picture because it just makes the entire film look rather cheap and ugly. I'm sure some better editing could have made some of the jokes or magic tricks more interesting.