He_who_lurks I thought this short was very well done. It is one of the few silent films that still fascinates and intrigues today, as it is chock-full of special effects. Some of this Edwin S. Porter borrowed from Georges Melies, who made many dream films similar to this one. But I actually think Porter did a much better job here than Melies would've done and his effects are a step ahead.In this 5 minute short, a rarebit fiend (for those who don't know what that is, it's rabbit, so this guy is obsessed with cooked rabbit) gorges himself and not long after he's finished he starts hallucinating (he also had too much alcohol as well). The world spins around him (this is a simply amazing effect and looks excellent even today), and he cannot make his way home. A man helps him home where he gets in bed and starts to have terrible dreams. His bed flies through mid air above the city and he gets caught on a weather-vane. The effects all look amazing. The most well-known sequence of the movie would have to be the demons picking away at the guy's head.The whole thing is just weird and is very good for 1906. I mean, it sold 192 copies! Cool and something that is still watchable today.

MisterWhiplash 35 years before Dumbo showed what happens when you drink too much - hint, pink elephants appear and do some crazy s*** - there was this little 7 minute short, done only several years into when motion pictures where even a thing in the world. The premise is simple: a guy is eating and drinking his fill, and when I say drinking I mean the booze sort. When he stumbles out of the restaurant everything is topsy-turvy, literally. He can't stand straight and puts himself up against a pole, but the camera does an effect - a few, actually - to simulate like a pendulum the world swinging back and forth, and then there is a rear-screen or double-processing of the film so that there's another dimension behind our protagonist.He goes home to try and sleep it off, but this is where his troubles get worse in dream-time. I have to wonder if a lot of the early pioneering filmmakers saw this (it was co-directed by one of them, the Great Train Robbery's Edwin S Porter), since the idea of going up into the air in dreams - and in a bed, no less, which I seem to recall being in a number of animated/live-action kids movies over the years - and it's innovative. It's dazzling to see a man like this in a bed going up into the air, and it's terrifying too; there's a moment where the bed spins around over and over as if it won't ever stop (and one knows logically the person isn't in the bed, but the magic trick part of this is different).Apparently it was a big "hit" for whatever that means for 1906 with a whopping 192 copies being circulated. But no wonder; there wasn't really anything like this before, albeit it's of all things a *comic strip movie* (take THAT Marvel!) and how the directors put their subject through the surreal wringer is extraordinary. Is it all perfect, no, but for the period it caught my attention and brought me on a roller-coaster ride, in a manner of speaking. As far as nickelodeon attractions go, this is as good as you can get, and there's a moral to if it one thinks about, you know, drinking till you can't drink anymore is such a good idea.

cricket crockett . . . perhaps is the best way to describe Edwin S. Porter, the director of the Edison Manufacturing Company 6 minute, 27-second-long 1906 short DREAM OF A RAREBIT FIEND and Winsor McCay, the newspaper comic script cartoonist upon whose Jan. 28, 1905 strip for the New York EVENING TELEGRAM this film is based. At a time when Edison's competitors were churning out three flicks daily (not unlike Valley porn creators of the late 1900s) to meet a supply shortage ( = making more money), Porter dilly-dallied with this comparatively short piece for EIGHT WEEKS, as if he were fine-tuning the Mona Lisa's smile. The most original things the normally glib liars who typed out the Edison Film Catalogs could come up with in regard to their RAREBIT FIEND product--pegged at $70.50, pricey for its day--was calling Porter's film strip "humorously humorous and mysteriously mysterious" (how long would a character last on AMC's show MADMEN with such paucity of verbal gifting?). Similarly, McCay's original scripts featured scribbled dialog balloons, which were illegible when reproduced in the newspaper. The phrase which best sums up McCay and Porter's approach to mass entertainment: "I'm just gonna do what I want to do, hang the public!"

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx Let me start off by saying that I haven't seen the Melies movies from this period to compare it to. Given that caveat I must say I found this piece of film-making to be incredibly entertaining. On Image Entertainment's box-set of Unseen Cinema this short is included with its original soundtrack played by the Edison Military Band. This music must be the most crackpot, shamelessly joyful and subversive piece ever composed. I do not think the film would be the same without it.I must say I found it very exhilarating to watch a man in a white suit and top hat spooning rarebit into his maw and down his face, slurping his porter or ale in the same mouthful. It's a glorious act of hedonism and reminds me of similar outrageous acts when I was a child (far too sensible now, sigh). For other commenters to think that this would not make him paralytic and hallucinatory is astonishing naivety. The way that he tries to hold onto a lamppost after leaving the restaurant whilst the whole world gyrates about him is an excellent portrayal of drunkenness unmatched in the judgmental and sober modern era.Just when he thinks he's made it home safe and sound to bed (ah the respite of the divan!) the whole room starts dancing, poor chap, all of us drunks have fallen for this mirage of comfort. The voyage over the city in his bed is a bit odd for me, but doesn't dampen this excellent entertainment.