Mischief Movie Night - They Were Sly Like Foxes

★★★★★

January hasn't the best month for me and my mental health and it makes me so happy to say this past weekend I was lucky enough to see the penultimate show of Mischief Theatre’s Mischief Movie Night and I safely say this will become one of the best nights I’ll have in 2018.

I was already smiling while waiting in the bar in London's Arts Theatre with the girl selling program posters and scripts (it was a blank book) lip syncing to classic R’n’B tones saying how much of a drag queen she was.

If you don’t know who Mischief Theatre they’re a superbly funny and award-winning company. They took the West End by storm with shows like The Play That Goes Wrong (which went on to go to Broadway) and The Comedy About A Bank Robbery. Recently the past two Christmas periods they’ve had shows Peter Pan Goes Wrong and A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong on BBC One to strong ratings.

Mischief Movie Night centres on the cast creating a movie based on audience suggestions. So we picked the genre, subject and venue and in my case, the audience I was with was a rowdy and kinda horny group of people.

In the hour-long film was a horror film with unicorns set inside a hotel classically called The Unicorn Hotel with the added bonus of an animated porno western.

From the beginning this show/film had me laughing out loud and I mean proper belly laughs something I haven’t experience for a long time and there are a number of standouts both fantastic and childhood ruining.

The surprise to me was the pausing, rewinding and deleted scenes and each was used to brilliant effect. One deleted scene moment after learning unicorns are “sly like foxes” was that the same actor was in Jaws was that Jaws has “sharp teeth like sharks”.

Jaws Zoom GIF from Jaws GIFs

You know I mentioned we had an animated porno western was, in fact, the thing that ruined my childhood as the cast used Toy Story as their preference with sentences “I have friends in me” and “I have a snake in my boot” yes it was a gay porn film, which the audience loved.

The pausing and rewinding were used to great effect, for example, there was a party scene where cast seeming had different dance moves after rewinding the film and then there’s probably the use of the joke book where the cast have a shocked look whenever the viewer replays to the knock-knock joke.

The whole cast was utterly superb though there were some continuity and thank you, especially Jonathan Sayer, for still making me smile and changing how I’ll watch the Toy Story films from this moment especially Woody.

If you have never seen any of Mischief Theatre show please do it’ll be one of the best nights you’ll have they have UK tours of Play Goes Wrong and Comedy About A Bank Robbery and I really hope they bring back Movie Nights (or at least a podcast).

I’ll look forward to whatever this cast does next as I won’t be surprised if films or a limited Netflix series comes there way.