Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

How sad is this?

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

There are recurring characters in the Melies canon, and the devil is one of them. Apparently, there is a fixation on what hell would be like and what the devil would look like. I thought the dancing was really fantastic. George's Melies was obviously a multi-talented performer. He was a magician, an actor, director, creator and scene stylist. His closing dance was incredibly addictive. No plot, but has that ever mattered with him?

What does a Melies musical look like? Well with painted sets, bursts of smoke, a few trick camera shots and the appearance of demons, unsurprisingly it looks like most his other films, only here the tricks will not impress anyone already familiar with Melies skills, and there is no story, so that what we are left is basically 5 minutes of what is some pretty uninspiring dancing.I notice a reviewer above me cited this film as a parody of a popular dance at the time. Of course, more than 100 years on, this context is completely lost, and there is not a laugh to be had. Why Melies felt like making a film that danced to the devil is open to interpretation, but there was certainly no enjoyment in it here.

This film, The Cake-Walk Infernal, is one of silent pioneer Georges Melies' most well known films. There isn't much of a story as much as a succession of images, which Melies energetically parades across the screen with his usual doses of interesting backdrops and costumed characters. At times, some of Melies' films can be overly stagy, and this is one such film. Some common motifs in Melies' films appear here as in characters or objects appearing, disappearing, and reappearing again, the use of smoke effects for transitions, the use of stop action motion, and Melies' appearance as a character with a devilish costume. **1/2 of 4 stars.

It seems incredible to me that a filmmaker who was so far ahead of his peers in 1903 could fall so far behind them within the space of a decade. By 1912 or so Melies' career as a film-maker was over and he ended up selling sweets from a street kiosk for a living. And yet this film is so energetic and inventive, it leaves you wishing he hadn't found it so difficult to adapt as the movies evolved.There's no story to this one as such, just a group of people dancing in various styles against a typically fantastic Melies background which is presumably presumed to be a vision of hell - although the set could easily have been used in Voyage to the Moon. I watched this on YouTube, and the soundtrack was played by a jazz quintet. It's remarkable how well the music suited the visuals and the soundtrack complements the astonishingly lively and kinetic capers on the screen. Definitely worth watching.