Too much of everything

How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

French filmmaker Georges Méliès was definitely the most important of the early pioneers of cinema. While he wasn't precisely the inventor of motion pictures; he was the one who saw the potential of the new invention as a storytelling device. A stage magician, Méliès became an early master of special effects, and his short movies were filled with the most diverse and inventive catalog of tricks, gimmicks and techniques to create real magic on the screen. Of course, imitators would soon appear, and the best of them was without a doubt American director Edwin S. Porter, who working for Edison, made the first American films able to compete with Méliès' "Cinemagic". "Uncle Josh's Nightmare" was Porter's fifth movie, a 2 minutes short devised to mimic one of Méliès' first and most famous discoveries: disappearing objects.In this movie, Uncle Josh (Charles Manley) is attempting to get some sleep, but right after he jumps to bed, strange things begin to happen to him. A demon (actor unknown, but very probably the same actor who played Mephistopheles in Porter's "The Mystic Swing") appears, and is decided to bother Uncle Josh using his many magic tricks. Uncle Josh tries to stop the annoying fiend but his attempts to catch him prove useless due to the demon's ability to disappear. Finally, Uncle Josh catches him, and after an amusing fight, he manages to lock the demon inside a box. But the box won't be enough to stop this devil, and Uncle Josh's nightmare will get a bit worse after the devil escapes from the box.Like most of Porter's early movies, this short is first and foremost, a novelty film made to impress audiences and to show off Porter's progress with camera tricks. While finally in this movie there is more of a plot than in the rest of Porter's early works, the special effects are the main attraction of the movie and everything revolves around the disappearing acts. Shot in one stage disguised as a bedroom, a thing that's worth to point out is the dynamism of the film: there is always movement on the screen. This looks like a big step ahead for Porter, as it shows his progress in editing and camera tricks. Interestingly, Uncle Josh would become one of the first "franchises" in cinema, as this character would appear in three more movies (probably directed by Porter and performed by Manley too), where his supernatural adventures would be the background for interesting displays of special effects.Of course, it still pales and comparison with Méliès' works of the same year, but by watching this modest early short one can't deny that Porter was a fast learner, and that he would make up his lack of originality with technical progress. Even when "Uncle Josh's Nightmare" has some good effects, what truly made Méliès' movies better than Porter was not only his superior tricks, but his care for putting them in interesting plots, something that Porter was at this stage still unable to do. While not a bad movie, "Uncle Josh's Nightmare" is probably more valuable for its historical importance in both Porter's career and cinema's history, than for its artistic merit or entertainment value. 5/10

This chaotic but fairly funny feature was a pioneering effort in its camera effects. One of the first special effect devices that film-makers learned was the stop-action technique of creating visual illusions, and this movie is pretty much devoted to experimenting with that idea. The editing is quite choppy, and the camera effects here are not going to look smooth or impressive now, of course, but this was one of the earliest films to use them. If you can make allowance for the rudimentary technique, it's amusing enough.The actual story is pretty simple, starting out with "Uncle Josh's Nightmare" about a battle with a demon. Mostly of it is just unrefined slapstick, and it would have looked a lot better with even slightly more refined technique, but it does well enough given its limitations. The 'Uncle Josh' character was popular enough that he was re-used in a couple of other films by the same production company.

The first example I knowof where one certain character comes back in multiple sequels. Edison's "Uncle Josh" character certainly had a bad time of it but his misadventures make for comedic films that are still enjoyable to-day a century later. In this one Uncle Josh simply wants a good nights sleep but of course he gets none. His nightshirt has a life of its own and jumps around the room, his bed vamishes into thin air only to reappear in another corner; and then someone who might be The Devil himself pops up to insure there is no rest for the weary! Okay so the special effects were inspired by the films of Georges Melies. In fact this whole short looks similar to the Melies film THE INN WHERE NO MAN RESTS but it is still fun. Josh would be back again in two more films.

There isn't much to this piece of early cinema. It is basically a novelty film that employs stop-motion editing to have objects appear or disappear from the scene. In many instances, the editing is so obvious that one can't help but laugh. However, it is this quality that makes this film slightly entertaining to watch, if only to see how far cinema has advanced in the last 100+ years.