Davey Jones' Locker (1900) User Reviews

The Skeleton Dance

[ackstasis · 5/10 · 8 September 2009]

Around the time that Georges Méliès was experimenting with superimposition and other optical effects to enhance his on-screen "stage acts," American director Frederick S. Armitage was testing similar techniques for manipulating cinematic reality. 'Davey Jones' Locker (1900)' was produced for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, and was created by double-printing two sets of images, originally filmed between 1896 and 1899, over each other. The result is that the two images – one a character (a dancing skeleton) and the other an environment (a shipwrecked boat in the waves) – appear to coexist with each other, the skeleton given the translucent weightlessness of a ghost or spirit. The film is an amusing curiosity, but lacks the complexity of contemporary Méliès efforts like 'The Four Troublesome Heads (1898)' or 'The One-Man Band (1900).'

There's a Skeleton on the Ship

[Michael_Elliott · 15 December 2016]

Davey Jones' Locker (1900)

*** (out of 4)

At just twenty-seven seconds it's hard to rate this movie but if you're a fan of these old films then you're bound to find some slight entertainment out of it. Basically this "trick" film is an example of two images being superimposed in order to create a trick. On one image we see a ship and on the other there are some dancing skeletons. This here gives you the illusion of the skeletons dancing across the ship. Fans of early films will certainly enjoy this film for what it is. It's certainly nothing ground-breaking but the visual trick is nicely done for 1900 and I'd argue that the skeleton's have a strange sort of atmosphere that helps the film.