The Haunted Curiosity Shop (1901)

One of my all time favorites.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

In this roughly two-minute long 1901 short movie by British film pioneer Walter R. Booth, there's lots of magic going on. Not really the spooky kind, more like the fascinating one.We see a head flying across the room and the moment it stops, there is a torso approaching from the left. Props to the curiosity shop owner that he didn't run away screaming in fear, but kept watching. His reward is a beautiful young woman when the head and the torso get together. But the moment he wants to hug her, she disappears into an old lady and he's gently-put not amused at all. Transformations back into the young girl and into a couple other forms take place, such as three children dressed as dwarfs. It's a decent little film with nice set decoration and I'd recommend it, only to silent film enthusiasts though.

In the very early days of film, outright stealing of ideas was rampant. Often, when a good idea developed, other filmmakers would copy it EXACTLY or as exactly as possible and market the product as their own. It clearly was theft and nowadays you'd get sued for such blatant ripoffs. But in the 1895-1910 era, the problem abounded. For example, I've seen an alternate version of the groundbreaking "Voyage Dan Le Lune" (Georges Méliès) that was so close to the original that I thought perhaps Méliès had decided to rework or remake his own film.In the case of "The Old Curiosity Shop", Walter Booth decided to make a film that wasn't exactly a copy of Méliès' work--but was very strongly inspired by it. It features a scene that is very, very similar--with a man making things appear and disappear through the use of double-exposures and stop-motion. But, unlike a Méliès film, the tricks come VERY rapid-fire--so quickly that the film lacks grace--though the tricks, by 1901 standards, are quite nice.One other note. The plot of this knockoff film is not exactly as it is described in the IMDb summary. Perhaps there are various versions of this film varying in lengths. The one I downloaded from archive.org (which are often linked to IMDb--but this film is not) had cute gnomes and no hint of the old lady wanting a kiss from the conjurer.

Robert Paul is a largely forgotten name today, but he was a major pioneer of British cinema, and was quick to grasp the commercial potential of cinema in ways that better known pioneers such as William Friese-Greene were not. He was more of a mechanic than a filmmaker making, with Birt Acres, his own camera on which to shoot films in 1895, and also Britain's first projector, the Animatograph, with which to screen them in 1896. Early in the 20th century he had a custom-made studio built in Muswell Hill.The Haunted Curiosity Shop is a special-effects film made for Robert Paul by Walter Booth. There's no real story to speak of, and the film really just serves as a showcase for Booth's technical wizardry. Its use of stop-motion, substitution and matte photography is quite sophisticated and fast-moving for its day.

This short film is a succession of appearing, disappearing, split second metamorphoses and character fades. There is no obvious story line. The Curiosity Shop contains mainly Egyptian artifacts. It seems to be well executed for its time.