YMMV / Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders

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• Accidental Innuendo: The way Grandpa Borgnine phrases that the female psychic is "sensitive in that area" is rather disturbing.
• Angst? What Angst?: After getting pulled down through the floorboards into the basement, followed by seeing her partner aged into an ancient man who then undergoes a Painful Transformation into a baby, Madeline walks out of the basement cradling the baby in a perfectly contented manner, not seeming at all bothered any of the strange things she's just witnessed.
• Ass Pull: As a result of omitting scenes from The Devil's Gift, David surviving being crushed by a falling tree, as well as Merlin showing up just as the monkey was going to kill the family.
  Crow: [as Billy] Oh, come on, Grampa Borgnine, no wonder you never sold this turkey!
• Audience-Alienating Premise: As the MST3K episode repeatedly points out, the film doesn't know whether it wants to be a kid's fantasy movie or a horror film (not helped by the fact that the second half is lifted directly from an actual horror film). Thus, the film comes off as too frightening for kids and too juvenile for the adults.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: David's son playing with the monkey, wearing googly eye glasses and singing "Rock and Roll Martian" over and over. As noted in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode guide, all the writers were just fascinated by this scene: "It seems like such a pure 'kid' moment; how did they ever get it on film?"
• Esoteric Happy Ending: There really wasn't a good way to put a happy ending on that first bit, so they just had Ernest Borgnine insist to his grandson that it was a happy ending when the Jerkass with an infertile wife became her baby.
• Funny Moments: This exchange between Grandpa Borgnine and his grandson:
  Child: The monkey killed the dog?
  Borgnine: I told you, it's a bad toy.
  Child: What happens next? Does it kill Michael?
  Borgnine: Well, now you're getting ahead of me.
• Glurge: So, you have Ernest Borgnine telling stories to his adorable grandson about funny old Merlin just wants to bring magic back to the world, as he tells the wide-eyed kid watching the puppets. Then the lady who can't have kids comes in and gets all teary-eyed as she tells random strangers about her husband's infertility issues. THEN Merlin loans his book to the mean old husband, to teach him a lesson about believing in magic. Said husband then burns a cat to death with his fire breath. Hooray!
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The rise of sites like Yelp has made giving a store a bad review a pretty effective threat.
  • Hmmm, a bunch of mysterious deaths that look like accidents but in fact were set up by a malevolent force. Are we talking The Devil's Gift or Final Destination?
• Memetic Mutation / Narm: Most likely due to Mystery Science Theater 3000
  • "You're weeelllllcoooooome."
  • ROCK N' ROLL MARTIAN!
  • "MY GOD, DAVID!"
• Narm Charm: The way Dad tries to casually have the Cymbal-Banging Monkey end up in the trash. Acting Unnatural, indeed.
• Nightmare Fuel: This is a family film In Name Only.
  Crow: Remember to believe in magic...or I'll kill you.
  • The newspaper critic's slow dip into insanity as he gets older and older via abusing his magic in the first part, complete with a Slasher Smile to rival The Joker in horror, several of which are directed at the camera.
    • The disturbing way he reacts to finding a cure for his rapid aging needs human blood:
      Jonathan: (in the most disturbing manner possible) Oh, Madelyyyne...
  • Immediately after that, he brings his wife's bed down through the floor and forcibly takes her blood while she's trying to pull away in fear, while creepily saying he has "wonderful things in store" for them. And that's not even going into his Painful Transformation, which is so creepy most of it isn't even shown on camera.
  • And let's not forget the face of Satan himself, appearing in the mirror to taunt Jonathan.
• Padding: Several of the framing story segments serve little purpose other than extending the runtime of the film by having Borgnine explain the blindingly obvious to his grandson. The MST3K version cuts most of these out, and flows much better for it.
• Recycled Script: Most of the second half was taken from the earlier film The Devil's Gift, complete with the same footage and a few inconsequential scenes of Merlin edited in.
  • In-story the whole framing device is that this is a script the grandfather wrote and couldn't sell.
• Special Effect Failure: The first half of the film has horrible special effects. In particular, when Johnathan starts breathing fire, the source of the flames is clearly several inches away from his face. The "demonic" creature that he unwittingly turns his pet cat into ends up looking more like a raccoon. Johnathan's aging makeup is laughably bad as well (he has an open collar and they forgot to apply makeup below his neckline!).
  Mike Nelson: You know, Satan could have at least blended the edges of his bald wig a little better...
• Took the Bad Film Seriously:
  • The actor playing Merlin seems to be legitimately trying to bring a sense of mysticism and wonder to his performance.
  • Ernest Borgnine certainly doesn't seem to be under the impression that he's in a good movie, but he nevertheless acts as though he were, making Grandpa as lovable as possible in spite of his questionable storytelling.
• Uncertain Audience: Too scary to be a good kid's movie, too childish to be a good horror movie.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Merlin makes the exact same mistake that Pod People did: shoehorning a crappy horror movie into the package of a crappy kid's fantasy movie and then forgetting to take out the "horror" part.
• The Woobie: Michael. He doesn't have a mother, his birthday gift turns out to be an evil demonic toy that wants to kill him For the Evulz and kills his dog in a gruesome manner, he's nearly drowned by his dad's girlfriend in the uncut version of the film, almost gets run over by a car, and dies in the uncut version of the film. Considering all of this, it's probably a good thing the original ending was changed to let him and his dad live.

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