Ghost Parade

Ghost Parade (1931)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Unfunny film from Mack Sennett has Andy Clyde and a group of people in a creepy old house when they start to experience various hauntings. A constable (Harry Gribbon) comes to investigate but does very little other than flirt with a cute woman. GHOST PARADE is a pretty bad spoof of the "old dark house" genre and it's pretty worthless from start to finish. There were a couple mildly interesting moments but those are few and very far between and for the most part you're just sitting there watching forced jokes fall flat on their face. I think the biggest problem is that the film doesn't even try to be funny. There's never any clear work being done to get a joke to work and instead it seems like everyone is just going through the motions. There's a sequence with a talking dog, which is just embarrassing. There's an even dumber sequence where everyone is eating at the dinner table when stuff starts to happen below. Both Clyde and Gribbon are wasted in their roles as is the rest of the supporting cast. I'm sure Sennett was trying to do something with this movie but it's clear that his style of comedy was way past its prime.

With Mack Sennett directing, Harry Gribbon and Andy Clyde starring, and a funny story that spoofs haunted house stories, this short comedy is pretty good for its time. It has a good pace, especially considering that it was made in the early 1930s, and most of the gag ideas work fairly well.

Clyde plays the owner of an old mansion where a series of strange and unsettling events is taking place, and Gribbon plays the local constable, who is more interested in flirting with Clyde's young secretary than in investigating the trouble. The plot is played purely for laughs, right up to the anticlimax at the end. Gribbon has some particularly amusing moments in his role, while Clyde plays the straight man most of the time.

Sennett follows his often-successful approach, with the gag ideas starting off relatively simple and gradually get more ridiculous. There are plenty of sight and sound gags, plus lots of exaggerated screaming. Not to say that this is some kind of little-known masterpiece or anything like that, but it's an entertaining little feature that most fans of these old two-reel comedies should find pretty enjoyable.

During the 1910s and 20s, Mack Sennett was on top of the world. He was churning out hundreds of amazingly funny slapstick films and was responsible for films from such comedy legends as Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin! And, when people think of slapstick, they usually are thinking about Sennett's films. However, although he made a lot of swell films, his status in Hollywood really took a hit when the talkies approached. By then, the sort of crazy humor and pratfalls were pretty much passé. This wasn't just because of sound, but silent comedies had become a lot more sophisticated--with intricate plots instead the usual filmed on the cuff style Sennett was known for doing.

The film "Ghost Parade" is one of several sound comedies by Sennett I have seen and it's probably the worst--though none of them was particularly good. It is totally devoid of humor, is amateurish at times and really, really stupid. You know you're in trouble when a film features a talking dog and a guy in a gorilla suit! If you care, the film stars Andy Clyde and Harry Gribbon and is about some folks' attempt to scare some folks out of their home. It only succeeded in making me scared to watch another Sennett talkie! Oh, and by the way, the film mentions George Washington's son. Washington had no children and it's assumed by historians that he was sterile. Odd, then, that he's often referred to as the Father of Our Country!

Mack Sennett must have had an easy time sleeping. Coming to work wasn't much of a challenge since all he had to do was had his actors react. The situations didn't have to be clever, indeed better if they aren't. Its a strange brand of humor, very temporal.

The idea in this case as always is that you have simple character types that we can recognize in seconds. They encounter a situation that allows them to make faces, act ridiculous and indulge in some physical humor. We know from the title that this will be fake ghosts.

The humor depends on the cheap nature of the threat because we know we wouldn't be "fooled" a moment. So part of the humor is watching our young woman scream and run, and part knowing that such a person exists.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

This is really a not so good short. Not a lot of humor, poor writing and not worth anyone's time.

Reminds me of Reel Camp shorts taht used to be shown on TV at 2 in the morning when I was a kid.

So sad. Never really gor Max Sennett anyway. Except for the free range shorts he let WC Fields do.