April 23rd 2008
Where the Funny Matters: Blood Squad
By Corbett Cummins and Heather Christianson
Blood Squad!
It's hard to say enough good things about Blood Squad because at first glance it doesn't sound like a particularly good idea... co-founders Elicia Wickstead Brandon Felker and Michael White improvise a hilariously nasty gore-fest? based on a movie title suggested by the audience.

[White] also said that the stripped down improv provided A cinematic experience in their brains. We don't use any props or fake blood, so the audience creates all of the horror between their ears.

At last Saturday's show the packed audience chose the title Champion Chainsaw Cheerleaders. After taking about 40 seconds to prepare, the cast dove into a performance that parodied every slasher convention I knew, and a few I had forgotten. It had shower scenes (lethal and non-lethal) a cheerleader rivalry, a hidden boob cam, nerdy friends (who died), a creepy-yet innocent old man (who died), a troubled-yet-fateful heroine, a bon fire fight, a chainsaw/cheerleader fight, a doomed make out session, and a bumbling dad (who also died). Even with all of those references, it seemed that the slasher theme was not the center of the performance rather than an artifice to showcase BloodSquads other talents.
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Friday dec 21st 2007
Twisted Christmas bloody good improv fun
By Richard Wallace, Special to The Seattle Times
"He Sees You When You're Sleeping,"
Twisted Christmas is a holiday show tradition in Seattle. Maybe it's our short daylight hours, or our depressing, runny-nose skies. Whatever the reasons, a fair number of Seattleites like their yuletide fun slightly bent and sinister. If you recognize yourself in that last sentence, check out Blood Squad's mingling of horror and holiday spirit "He Sees You When You're Sleeping"  a one-hour improvisational comedy that is different every performance.

Is it funny? Lots of it is. Some of the fun is in watching how the trio builds the story  with flashbacks, sound effects and inventive body language. Felker and White riff off each other with glee. Wickstead is a little boxed in with her passive, little-girl character, but still gets off plenty of one-liners.
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June 13th 2007
Killer Prom at Murder High
CIENNA MADRID

The night I catch Blood Squad, they're performing Blood Drive at Transylvania High.

The performances are simple: no intermissions, costumes, or props besides three folding chairs. Blood Squad functions without blood. Everything is left to the audience's (vivid, sometimes drunk) imagination. Special effects are pantomimed and/or narrated as quick asides: "She tucked her disemboweled, uh, bowels back into a marsupial-like skin pouch..." A vampire father-son battle?the climax of the show is set on the vertical facade of the high school and executed through aggressive crab scuttling and hissing on the floor (it works better than I could possibly describe). Someone loses a face. A teenager wails. The audience laughs. The man to my right remarks that Blood Squad has captured the naked essence of teen slasher flicks, even without the gore.
"What is that?" I ask. He says: "It's fun watching teenagers die."
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Oct 5th 2007
Trick or Treat... Where's Your Face?
ANNIE WAGNER

There are plenty of great things about Blood Squad. First, there are the voiceover special effects, which are like Book-It's compensatory narration, except demented. ("Her ear smears off her face. Shhhmop.") There's the way the trio pushes back against lame suggestions (dissing the pianist's choices without breaking character, mocking the rejected title Sea Monsters by inserting some harmless, porpoiselike mutants into the mise-en-scene).they know when to let the relentless upbeatness of TheatreSports slide into something more cynical and culturally aware. And there's the material itself: Hormonal, absurd, and shamelessly devoted to its audience's basest appetites, slasher flicks were made to be mocked.
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