Rough on Rats Review: Ten minutes of pure, chaotic silent nonsense

Is this ancient short worth watching today? Only if you have ten minutes to kill and a high tolerance for extremely grainy, chaotic slapstick from a hundred years ago. Fans of bizarre, unpolished silent comedy will probably find it charmingly weird. Anyone looking for an actual plot or, you know, acting will absolutely hate it. 🐀

The whole thing stars Harry Bailey, who spends the entire runtime running around a kitchen set that looks like it was built in twenty minutes. The plot is just him trying to catch a rat. Except the "rat" is clearly just a piece of gray felt being pulled by a very visible black string.

At one point, Harry climbs onto a wooden table and it wobbles so hard you can actually see a stagehand's hand try to steady it at the bottom left of the screen. I had to rewind it three times just to make sure I wasn't seeing things. It is hilarious.

The short has the same frantic, dangerous energy you get in The Midnight Alarm, but with about five percent of that film's budget. There is this one gag where Harry gets his foot stuck in a bucket of soapy water. He hops around the room for a full minute. A full minute!

In a film that is barely nine minutes long, that is a massive chunk of time to devote to a bucket. But honestly? It kind of works because of how committed he is.

Unlike the highly polished Hollywood stuff like Merrily We Go to Hell, this is just pure, unadulterated nonsense. There is a weird jump cut right after a chimney collapse where Harry's soot makeup suddenly disappears. Then in the very next shot, the soot is back on his face but on the wrong cheek.

Classic. Nobody cared back then, they just wanted to get the film reel shipped out to theaters as fast as possible.

I also love how the camera never moves once. It just sits there like an awkward neighbor watching this grown man destroy his own kitchen. It lacks the clever pacing of something like The Betty Boop Limited, but it makes up for it in sheer clumsiness.

The ending is so abrupt too. He just sort of gives up, looks directly at the camera, and the screen fades to black. No lesson learned, no real resolution.

Should you hunt this down? Probably not unless you are a weirdo silent film completionist like me. But if you do stumble upon it on some dusty corner of the internet, it is a fun little time machine. Just don't expect a masterpiece.