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Fresh and Exciting

Beautiful, moving film.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Once again, Satan and the gang are up to something. There is a large cauldron, fire under it, and three women are forced to go into the cauldron. I don't know if they are already in hell, or have been brought there. Anyway, usually the devil gets his due. I'm not sure what happens with the women. It would seem that they are destroyed and come up as ghosts. The devils seem to think they've done a fine job.

"The Infernal Caldron" is not among the French film pioneer's best works in my opinion. It runs for 1.5 minutes and basically shows us the devil cooking all kinds of stuff including a woman. This has to be one of the earliest supernatural fantasy films, even if Méliès liked the subject of the Devil in his works. The only somewhat interesting thing I found were the effects and the strong contrast between the protagonists in terms of their blue and red color. I don't know why another devil arrives at the scene or why he jumps into the pot in the end, but the story is certainly not this film's biggest strength. A bit surprising to see this among Méliès most famous works. Not even the colors can save this one I guess. Worth a watch for silent film enthusiasts, but not for everybody else.

Georges Méliès directed this short macabre film about two demons throwing people into a boiling pot of water. Not only does the film contain all the visual trickery that is associated with the director but it also has the added bonus of being hand coloured. This adds a nice extra dimension to the look. The green demons and the red flames are particularly memorable. The best effect in the film is the image of the spirits rising into the air from the bubbling cauldron. They are nice spooky and ghostly apparitions. The film is too short to really work as a horror picture. The horror film needed more time to work on the viewers emotions than these ancient short films allowed. Still it's most definitely one of the earliest macabre films in existence, and is well worth seeing, as it will possibly take you more time to read this review than it would be to actually watch this fascinating old movie.

Melies' typically lively imagination is once again evident here as he treats us to a macabre little scene in which a couple of demons capture unfortunate souls and bundle them into the eponymous cauldron only to then summon their spirits. The film is hand-coloured and is still in remarkably good condition, and Melies' trademark special effects are up to his usual standard - in fact they can stand comparison with the special effects in movies made 70 years later. There's not much plot, but then plot was never the most important thing to Melies - he was more concerned with visualising his incredible imagination on the screen. This one is a real treat.