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Interactive movie coming to Texas Theatre will make you ‘feel insane’

If you're sick of convention or the status quo, there's a unique opportunity this weekend to leave boredom behind and enter a world of the strange, absurd and hilarious. That opportunity: an interactive movie and performance hybrid called Everything is Terrible, which stops through Dallas' Texas Theatre on March 6.

The show features video mash-ups -- most cut from VHS tape -- and encourages audience participation with two costumed hosts who facilitate the event. Video sequences are constructed around themes, and several times throughout the production the hosts allow audiences to "choose their own destiny" by cheering for the videos they'd like to see next.

To be clear, this isn't as tame as it sounds. Everything is Terrible is a frenzied, R-rated spectacle that frames American culture in ridiculousness.

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"Everything is Terrible is a psychedelic and comedic re-spewing of our culture's video memory," says one of the creators and performers Nic Maier, who prefers the title Commodore Gilgamesh.

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According to Maier, the show's story begins seven years ago at a large state school in Ohio where a group of "wastoid, shitty college students," who were feeling uninspired by their education, carved out its own creative niche. The students manipulated funny, scary, or off-beat video clips, then weaved them together and posted them on the Internet.

"People started to pay attention and talk about it, which was weird," Maier says, adding the response drove him and his friends to push themselves creatively. That push eventually led Everything is Terrible to integrate the performance aspect. "We always feel like we're going too far, but everyone keeps on encouraging us."

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The subject matter of Everything is Terrible can vary from show to show depending on whether attendees want to see a montage of clips featuring children, featuring celebrities, about animals, about sex; really no subject is off limits. The creators raid thrift stores and video stores (preferably ones going out of business) to find tapes, and in recent years they've begun adding digital downloads in the mix. No matter where they go, however, they always look to buy places out of Jerry Maguire.

"What a mistake. What a boring mistake," says Maier of the movie. Because it's the antithesis of Everything is Terrible, Maier and his cohorts collect and "build a prison" out of the tapes. They have more than 8,000 to date.

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You may be thinking, this is all really random and eccentric sounding, but what the heck is the point?

Maier says Everything is Terrible is designed as both social commentary and a mechanism to provoke emotion. When I saw the production at Denton's Thin Line Festival, one guy literally stood up in between segments to shout in anger (and no, he wasn't part of the show).

The goal is "to engage people in a way that gets them screaming and crying and jumping up and down -- that feeling you don't expect from the experience in the movie theater," he says. "We made the world that made people make those videos. It makes you feel insane."