Loose Moose duo laughing in the face of danger
Hilarious improv show sends up every great action movie ever made
You know it’s not going to be the usual Saturday night at the Cineplex when the two stars of the show, Jamie Northan and Andrew Phung, open by asking the audience to name things every great action movie has. “Gunfire!” “Russians!” “Really, horrible, terrible bad guys,” says someone else.
“The hero having sex with beautiful women!” “Betrayal!” “Oooooh,” says Northan. “Betrayal.”
Welcome to North East: Kill Hard, a live, improvised comedy action movie that packed the Loose Moose for a late- night show Saturday to close the 2015 Calgary Fringe Festival.
( Northan and Phung are packing up their plastic weapons, sunglasses and other assorted props and taking the show to the Edmonton Fringe, which kicks off on Aug. 13.)
Not only do Northan and Phung solicit the audience for script notes, but they also go right back to the crowd for help choosing an evil villain who reflects that the whole thing is set in Calgary’s northeast.
That’s how North East — Kill Hard ends up with Len T. Wong, local late night TV fixture, Calgary real- estate salesman ( who promises to buy your house if it stays listed for over 30 days), as its bad guy — at least for one night. ( The villain and hero change every show, as Northan and Phung take turns swapping parts).
This paves the way for a 80- minute long play that incorporates many of those audience suggestions, along with fitting in many references to the North East that leaves the large, young and boisterous Loose Moose crowd howling.
Northan plays Jack Striker, a cop with a past — and don’t they all have one?
Phung plays Wong, who, in addition to being an evil villain, stole Striker’s wife, adding a personal note to it all.
Those are just a few of the aspects of action movies that Phung and Northan hilariously send up, as they take us to a drug house in the northeast, where the dealer has been trying to build up demand by spreading free drugs around to the local high school.
Phung and Northan have been improvising on the stage of the Loose Moose for a decade now, and it shows in Kill Hard, where they manage to alternate between loosey- goosey riffing and carefully calibrated slow- mo action sequences ( some of the show features set pieces they obviously worked on).
There’s two comedy rivers that run throughout Kill Hard. One is the action genre spoof. The other is North East Calgary.
Right from the start, when they appear in a kind of live trailer, emptying their guns from every angle ( like every action star ever), the action thriller spoof produces consistently funny stuff.
Although the deeper into it Kill Hard gets, the more the show has to stop spoofing the genre and start embracing it in order to make whatever plot they’re unravelling add up. ( Amazingly, they do).
It’s guy- friendly comedy, really a sharp, smart comment on masculinity more than anything, and the gap between our pop culture ideas of manliness and the Loose Moosers’ western Canadian comedy dudes’ witty deconstruction of it. ( But — just as in real action movies — no strong women please!)
The secret comedy weapon of Kill Hard, possessed by Northan and Phung, isn’t their fake guns or their encyclopedic knowledge of action thrillers, however — it’s their devious delight in the specific comedy — and embrace of — all the cultures clashing in North East Calgary, the most interesting neighbourhood in the world.