THE HAUNTED CASTLE (1896)
aka Le manoir du diable
Article 3164 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-11-2010
Posting Date: 4-13-2010
Directed by Georges Melies
Featuring Jeanne d’Alcy and Georges Melies
Country: France
What it is: The first horror movie

Two travelers arrive at an ancient castle and find themselves tormented by Mephistopheles.

The first horror movie? The claim is pretty good; unlike many of Melies’s films, he doesn’t appear to be trying for laughs here. It’s a simple, straightforward compendium of basic Melies tricks, with items and people vanishing, reappearing and transforming in front of your eyes. It must have been a real sensation in its day, and is certainly important historically.

AN HALLUCINATED ALCHEMIST (1897)
aka L’hallucination de l’alchimiste
Article 3163 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-10-2010
Posting Date: 4-12-2010
Directed by Georges Melies
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Trick short

An alchemist has a nightmare in which visions appear in a giant retort.

I got a strong sense of deja vu from watching this early Melies short (which, thanks to a recent collection of his works, has been rescued from my Lost list), but that’s because some of the ideas here would pop up in later shorts of his as well; in particular, this one reminds me of THE MYSTERIOUS RETORT. Still, the hand-colored print I watched was beautiful to look at, and, even at this late date of time, some of the effects are actually quite good. Still, this is one of Melies’s more minor shorts.

ADDENDUM: It has come to my attention that the movie I watched here has been mistitled; it is not the title given above, but is actually just a shorter version of THE MYSTERIOUS RETORT. In short, this review is for the wrong movie. I’ll let it stand here as a monument to the fact that mistakes will always be made.

THE HAUNTED HOUSE (1929)
Animated short
Article 3159 by Dave Sindelar
viewing Date: 2-5-2010
Posting Date: 4-8-2010
Directed by Ub Iwerks
Featuring the voice of Walt Disney
Country: USA
What is is: Animated comic horror

Mickey Mouse is forced to seek shelter in a spooky house during a storm. There he is terrorized by skeletons who force him to play the organ.

I found this cartoon on one of Disney’s tin box collections; this one covers Mickey Mouse’s black and white cartoons. Rather than appearing in the main menu, it is consigned to the “From the Vault” section because it indulges in some racist stereotyping; at one point, Mickey is in total darkness, and all you can see is the white around his face, and he breaks into a few calls of “Mammy!” I’m glad the company chose to present the cartoon uncut, albeit in a section of the DVD where a child would be less likely to stumble across it; it would have been easy to just remove the offending section (which must run no more than three seconds) without compromising the whole cartoon (though some of the others on the set might well prove more difficult).

In the opening section of the DVD, Leonard Maltin talks about the reasons for the popularity of Mickey Mouse in particular amongst the cartoon characters of the era. Part of it may be due to the fact that Mickey was the star of the first talking cartoon. Maltin suggests it may have been his similarity to Chaplin in some regards. My own belief is because he was the central character of the studio when they were in the animation vanguard, while many of the other animation studios of the same era were mostly using cartoons with clear imitations of Mickey. This type of imitation just reinforces things; when you watch a cartoon featuring an imitation of a famous character, you rarely find yourself more impressed by the imitation than the original.

The cartoon itself is plotless, but quite tight. It mostly consists of skeleton dancing gags. You’ve seen this sort of thing before, but the presentation is tighter and more streamlined. Some of the humor is a bit on the bawdy side, including an obsession with chamber pots, the discovery a male and female skeleton in bed together, and an outhouse gag, but these are also common for the time. It’s a fairly fun Mickey Mouse cartoon.

HUIS CLOS (1954)
aka No Exit
Article 3155 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-1-2010
Posting Date: 4-4-2010
Directed by Jacqueline Audry
Featuring Arletty, Franck Villard, Gaby Sylvia
Country: France
What it is: A vision of hell

Three people go to hell, where they share a room together. They soon discover that hell has no demons or torturers of their own, and that it is they themselves that will perform those functions on each other.

This movie was based on a one-act play by Jean-Paul Sartre, and it is the source of a famous four-word phrase (in English, that is) that announces its theme. I knew before watching the copy I came by that it was going to be in French with German subtitles, and that it was going to be heavy with talk and light with action, but since the play is well-known, I managed to read about half of it before I watched the movie, so I was better prepared for it than some others. Since the play was only a one-act, has only four characters (the fourth is a valet that pops up to make sure the guests are (un)comfortable), the movie opens things up by giving us a sequence before the characters enter the room, where they spend time in the lobby of hell and learn such things as the uselessness of bribery. It also gives them a window in the room out of which they can see events taking place in the world of the living after their deaths; in the play, they only see visions, while here, we see them too. The theme (and for those of you not familiar with the phrase, it is “Hell is other people.”) is handled convincingly; we all know people we would hate to be trapped in a room with for eternity, and the presence of three gives the opportunity for shifting temporary allegiances where two characters can gang up on the third, but no victory is ever permanent and all will get the chance to be victimized. The title’s meaning is simple enough and the meaning becomes significant by the end of the movie. It’s interesting, but it does get a little tiresome; after all, there’s a reason the play was only a one-act.