Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Boring, long, and too preachy.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

By 1909, Méliès's film company was ceasing production after exhaustively turning out a series of comedies and dramas which was becoming the new fad of filmmaking. The next year, 1910, he would stop production completely and resume in 1911, turning out his last few movies under the supervision of Pathé Frères.This is one of his last trick films, notable for being one out of ten of the movies which was rediscovered years later to be projected at the Gala Méliès in 1929, colorized specially for the event. Unfortunately, the colorized print vanished thereafter, and now is only available in a brief, 2-minute fragment. Méliès plays a magician once again, disguised in a wig but still the playful, energetic Frenchman from years before. First, he makes a woman appear who is dressed as a butterfly, and shooting a gun then creates another woman in a five pointed star. Tired, he falls asleep only to wake up discovering the star woman has turned into a huge, scary octopus creature and is about to capture the butterfly in her web. The octopus tentacles are obviously reused from Méliès's "Under the Seas" from two years before.The coloring job, while a little sloppy, looks very beautiful and uses some nice golds and reds. It also feels less of a magic show and more of a fantasy/horror. Even so, I'm guessing this is missing part of the beginning, and possibly more of the end, because the conclusion just doesn't feel complete. Maybe it was originally a dream film, and the magician only dreamed his creation turned into a octopus creature. Maybe it's sort of a variation on "Frankenstein". Who knows?

Whenever one encounters these fragments, it''s hard to evaluate them in totality. What we do see is very well done. The young woman who plays the butterfly is quite striking in appearance. The colors are vivid and the special effects are clean and sharp. Once again, Melies draws on his talents as a magician and presents a "show" to the audience. Obviously, he does things that could not have been done on a conventional stage. But that's why he became a director.

This is a slightly nightmarish short from Georges Méliès. In it a magician creates a butterfly woman and then a spider woman. This malignant being threatens to wreak havoc but is repelled in an explosion.Like others this one is colour tinted which definitely adds a lot to the aesthetic. It also has a much more macabre and creepy feel than other Méliès fantasy shorts although it is at heart still a magic show. It's quite bizarre really. The other commentators have mentioned that this is only a section of a larger film. No matter, what remains is like a fragment of a weird dream you can half remember.

It's hard to adequately vote for this one since it's only a two minute fragment--so I'll just skip the score for this one.The film is another magician film from director Georges Méliès and as usual he plays the lead. The magician has some pretty weird powers. First, he makes a giant butterfly lady appear. Then he creates some sort of abomination of nature that looks like it's part woman, part spider and part octopus--and the creature appears ready to run amok and the film ends.This is just weird. Yep, very weird. But the effects, for 1909, are decent and the color is really, really nice. Flicker Alley must have done a lot of work to bring out the original look to the film with its vibrant hand-stenciled cels. Interesting but incomplete.