Ghost Parade (1931)
Article 5840 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-2-2020
Directed by Mack Sennett
Featuring Andy Clyde, Marjorie Beebe, Harry Gribbon
Country: USA
What it is: …

A realtor visits a haunted house. He gets scared.

I’ve seen a lot of bad comedies for this series, and one way to classify them is how you feel after watching them. Some of them leave you feel insulted. Some of them leave you bored. Some of them leave you angry at your time having been wasted. But to my mind, the worst are the ones that leave you feeling depressed. I’m afraid this is one of the latter.

This short is almost entirely a compendium of people acting scared when scary things happen, but the scares aren’t scary, and the being scared isn’t funny. It feels as if virtually no effort was made to tell a coherent story; arbitrary things happen and people react. Practically everything here feels desperate, forced, lazy and/or sloppy, as if everyone involved is either only putting in enough effort to pull a paycheck or are hoping that something somewhere in this mess will work. After it was all over, I felt sad and embarrassed, not amused in the least. Yes, it may all be an overreaction to what is really no more than a bad comedy short, but that’s how I felt. Really, this one isn’t worth watching.