Every Film Ever Made (FringeTIX)
The Hound of the Baskervilles @ The Pod
11:00pm, Mon 3 Mar 2008
It seems a good candidate for easy laughs: Rob, Tegan and Adam joining together to whip through every film – well, every genre (nearly) – ever made. As you may expect, this performance is high on farce, and there’s the requisite personality clashes – the boys want to cover all the sci-fi and action movies, whereas Tegan is keen to delve into arthouse and Bridget Jones.
Whilst obviously the title of the show is a complete fib, they do manage to cover a ton of films – re-enacting snippets from the Godfather, Terminator, Star Wars, Aliens, Top Gun, A Few Good Men, and so on. It’s all played for laughs, with a minimum of props and a loud, unrestrained style that’s heavy on the wild gesticulation and yelling. A fair bit seems ad-libbed – with mixed results – but that may be “ad-libbed” with massive air-quotes around it… you can never really tell with these comedy troupes ;)
Yes, it’s loud, and brash, and most certainly funny, but you can’t help but think it’s shallow too. Still, I guess you could say that about most comedy shows, so why not just enjoy it while it’s there? But – as one of the few people in the audience that got the …Say Anything reference, I have to object to the “most obscure” tag they gave it; there were many other references that this Cusack fan missed ;)