Very Cool!!!

Did you people see the same film I saw?

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

This Buster Keaton comedy isn't really a 'funny' film. If you are thinking of funny, as in "hahahahahahahahaha, I cannot stop laughing" funny, then you're out of luck. The repetitive slapstick in this 21-minute long feature is mostly just silly, acrobatic fun--not something that you'd chuckle at. I certainly didn't. But any fan of these old cinema pictures will find this something worthwhile.The movie starts out with Keaton arriving at the bank for his workday. However, since he's Keaton, everything goes wrong. He gets his hands in glue and messes up all the dollar bills, creating any number of mishaps with his mistake. Meanwhile, the bank president and his counterfeiters are filling the bank with counterfeit money, and using an abandoned house as a hideout. All these events and people come together eventually--resulting in a series of mishaps inside the house.I haven't seen many Buster Keaton films, but I've figured out his slapstick is normally very repetitive. That's the case here. Pretty much once we get to the house, Keaton has a bunch of encounters with 'ghosts' and 'skeletons' and stuff. All he does is run around the house for like, the rest of the movie. The thing is thoroughly entertaining but isn't funny--that's why if you're looking for a nice juicy comedy, look somewhere else. And if you're not, this one remains an entertaining and fun film, even if it lacks laugh-out-loud humor. Yeah, call me an idiot for saying Keaton isn't funny--but this kind of slapstick, while entertaining certainly, doesn't get me laughing. Oh well, it's still lots of fun anyway.

Buster Keaton's 1921 short stars the actor/director as a New York City bank teller. Keaton being Keaton soon gets into trouble, spilling glue all over the counter and accidentally stopping a robbery before ending up in a haunted house.The film begins with a shot of 1921 Wall Street. I always like to see exterior shots in silent movies as it's a rare chance to see the real world as it was back then. The action then goes inside a small bank. One of the funniest moments in this sequence is the sight of a customer with glue on his trousers getting stuck, backside to backside with another bank teller.The second part of the film takes place in a large house in which counterfeiters have set up shop. This is the funniest part of the film and features a recurring gag about some collapsing stairs which doesn't get old. The counterfeiters have filled the house with pretend ghosts in order to scare off police and intruders and Keaton finds himself confronted with scare after scare, none of which are really scary but in fact quite funny. We're talking men with sheets over their heads and others dressed as skeletons. The best part of the second act is two such skeletons who construct a man who appears, through cunning editing to come to life. The film ends with a classic scene which has Keaton receive a blow to the head and climb stairs to heaven. When he gets to the top, the stairs collapse (again) and he plummets into hell. All is well in the end though as when he wakes up in the arms of his love interest.This isn't the best Keaton film but I've also seen worse. Its well worth checking out and at only 21 minutes won't take too much time to do so. I laughed about nine or ten times in those 21 minutes which is a very good laugh per minute ratio and much higher than any 21st Century comedy I've seen.http://attheback.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/haunted-house.html

This is one of MANY shorts that buster Keaton made over his long career. None of them were intended as deep entertainment but contained a lot of funny low-brow humor--full of pratfalls galore! Well, this one is certainly no different.Buster is a bank teller who is accused of cheating the bank and having passed forged money. The interminably long scene involving glue and money, by the way, is the absolutely WORST part of the film--it goes on way too long. However, once he is fired and accidentally goes to the haunted house (how he knew to go there since it was the crooks' hideout is amazing), the film picks up a lot of speed. The fun intensifies as the crooks try very hard to scare Buster. When he quickly figures that the ghosts are fake, then the crooks try to kill him! Watch the film to find out the cute conclusion and have a few laughs along the way.

I have to give Buster (more) props: carrying on a single gag through many different encounters and many different characters and keeping the looks of confusion and chaos fresh the entire time is very hard to do, but he does it here, and admirably. Anyone who's seen this and Benny and Joon will recognize that little flick Keaton does with his arm was mimicked so incredibly perfectly by Depp that it's difficult to separate the two images as distinct.But about this, that is, this short, it's typical Keaton fun-fest: machinery, badguys, booby traps, and hilarity, all intersperced with really clever titles. However, this one's plot didn't really flow as well as most of the stuff I've seen of his. I'm still rather unclear as to how Keaton's character ended up in the house in the first place. That said, the surreal moment with the skeletons building the living man made it all very worth it. Watch that shot, it's amazing.--PolarisDiB