Merlin: if he’s in a movie, it’s almost certainly going to be terrible.

What’s the reason for this lack of quality? Is it the character’s complex and tragic backstory? The difficulty of capturing the emotional arc of someone cursed to age in reverse? The fact that he’s in the public domain, so any idiot with a camera can slap him onto two unrelated movies he was never actually part of as a frame story? You know what, it’s probably the last one.

Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders tells the heartwarming tale of Merlin and his wife who run a small town antique store. It’s very much like a Hallmark movie, but with slightly more hexes, death, and eternal damnation. We’ll hear the tale of a small town newspaper critic who evidently wields Ozymandias-like power over the local economy. And there’s also a father who buys his son a toy monkey and regrets it immediately because it’s one of those damn wind-up toys that makes noise. Oh, it’s also trying to kill him and everyone he loves.

Tying them all together is the all-powerful, doddering wizard Merlin. His shop may be more full of Unholy Jinxes than Mystical Wonders, but frankly, it’s like the 78th most egregious thing this movie got wrong, so we’ll let it slide. Please join Mike, Kevin, Bill for Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders.

Written by: Mike Nelson, Conor Lastowka, and Sean Thomason

Contributing writers: Jason Miller and Zach Shatzer