Les Quatre Cents Farces du diable

A carriage pulled by a skeletal horse is making its way to hell. The man in the carriage has signed a deal with the devil and must face the music. The backgrounds and the carriage itself are great fun. Of course, it's really cruel and deals with that old time religion. I don't know what this guy did, but he ain't gonna like where he's going. There are some pretty solid pyrotechnics which make it fun.

The 400 Tricks of the Devil aka The Merry Frolics of Satan.

I guess I expected more out of this one from the title and some of the visuals are great but it's rather boring overall to me. We have the typical Melies-styled mechanically operated scenery which is neat to watch, the usual camera tricks where it appears people and furniture is to large for the trunks they are going into and out of and the fun imp frolics but this one seemed to be too long and drawn out in most of the scenes - for me it needed a bit faster paced scenes.

Worth watching in-spite of my mediocre review.

6/10

Two men are in a carriage being pulled by a skeletal horse. Satan comes along and begins messing with them...pushing the carriage into a volcano and then tossing it into space (this version of space looks much like it did in the director's earlier effort, "Le Voyage Dans la Lune" (1902). Then, the men fall out of the carriage and fall to Earth--crashing through the ceiling of some mansion and ruining the dining room. Soon Satan arrives and pulls one of them into Hell, where imps and pretty girls run about the place. Soon, they attach the guy to a rotisserie and roast him...and the film ends.

This is an enjoyable but disjoint and occasionally confusing film. And, as usual, the director, Georges Méliès, plays the Devil. It's clever and fun....and similar to a few of his other films. Worth seeing but far from a must-see picture.

This Georges Méliès film is another imaginative fantasy. It's effects-driven, not story-based. The visuals are everything. What plot there is merely serves as a structure to base the visual wizardry around. It features a couple of travellers who are persecuted by the devil. They are taken on a carriage ride through the cosmos led by a skeletal horse.

It's quite common material for a film from the 1900's. For some reason stories featuring Satan were common-place. Anyway, this one is very nice to look at. The ride through outer space is hypnotic and dream-like with an array of intergalactic attractions passing the stagecoach by. The colour tinting of course helps a lot. It's very effectively used here and is quite explosive in the scene with the volcano with an eruption of deep red. It's a trip worth taking.

Merry Frolics Of Satan, The (1906)

*** (out of 4)

aka Les Quatre cents farces du diable

Entertaining 14-minute film from the French master has two gentlemen being haunted by Satan as they travel from one hotel to the next. Before long Satan throws them into a special carriage and takes them on a trip to Hell. The actual story here really doesn't mean too much because the real highlight here are all the special effects and various tricks that pop up. This here, thanks in large part to the title, remains one of Melies most popular films and it's understandable as there's a lot of fun to be had here. As with many of his longer movies, this one here features some narration and it's also hand colored, which is a big plus. The colors look great and they are used with quite a bit of imagination. Some of the best stuff in the film deals with Satan, painted red of course, popping out of various places and scaring the men. Another major plus is when we actually get to Hell and various other demons take form.