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So, here’s the thing. Modern deathmatch wrestling is not for me, at least not when it’s like this. At its peak, which to me is the mid-90s scene in Japan, deathmatch wrestling is as good as wrestling gets, a grandiose, operatic spectacle with the grit and hatred and soul of a heated street fight in a southern territory whose fans had basically adopted the babyface hero as a member of their family. If professional wrestling is an artform, and it is, then the desired effect it is seeking to produce is to stoke an audience’s passion for its performers, their ability to love and hate men and women who are at once familiar to them as characters while being complete strangers in life, to an unbearable degree so that the release that follows is as cathartic in its grief or frenzied in its joy.
I am sure that this is still possible, that it still happens in American deathmatch wrestling, but too often when I check in on it the proceedings, horrific as they’re advertised as and even end up being, are mostly agreeable encounters between guys who seem too friendly for their bloodletting to feel like much more than a decent hang. This is an exploding cage match, goddamn it; where is your sense of awe?
In its place, the main event of NHB Vol. 99 instead offers up the mundane terror of the fire code violation, but the fact that you can stream this show right now on IWTV as opposed to an extralegal site hosting a day one feed rip spoils that a bit, as the TWE Arena withstood the exploding cage without much taking much damage. Watching this three months after it took place, that’s where my mind wanders — was the draw of this the sick thrill of maybe watching a venue catch fire? — but even that is quickly dispelled by the fans actually standing around this fucking contraption, none of whom seem seem to register its presence as they do their bits about Hoodfoot, Jameson Shook, John Wayne Murdoch, and Dr. Redacted as they make their way to the ring.
I don’t know that it’s exactly fair to continue comparing this to the exploding barbwire deathmatches of the 1990s, and I feel like I’ve either gone into this in an old Fanfyte piece or need to do so in a future essay, but I think what I particularly dislike about this match is how it figures that the spectacle of the exploding cage is the point of the match, when in the good stuff, the gimmick is a tool used to tell a bigger story. A critical aspect of those matches is how the presence of barbwire and bombs serves as a restriction for its heroes. Unlike the steel cage in America, which promises an audience that a coward heel will have nowhere to run or hide against the prevailing babyface, the gimmick actually kept Atsushi Onita away from his strengths: the people and his ability to brawl through them. He has to be clever and careful to survive, let alone win, and the simultaneous battles he wages against his opponent and the clock are enough to keep things interesting until he or his opponent touch the wire for the first time. In restricting the space available to him and Terry Funk or him and Hayabusa, the once familiar environs of the wrestling ring are transformed into something alien and claustrophobic.
It’d be nice if there was a gesture towards this being a wrestling match, but with so many bodies and weapons in the ring, it’d be hard enough to move let alone wrestle. The first weapon that comes into play is a door, which is arguably the worst weapon in wrestling history. They’re a real boon to promoters considering that you can buy two or three of them for what a rectangular table will cost you and they’re so flimsy there’s no need to gimmick them, but that’s also the problem: I’ve seen a 25 pound cocker spaniel run through one of these things like tissue paper; am I to understand that my dog was tougher than John Wayne Murdoch?
Anyhow, this is one of those matches where the wrestlers waste a lot of time and the guys on commentary say stuff like “I don’t blame these guys for wasting time” without realizing how that sounds. The comedy spots aren’t funny, none of the wrestlers have any urgency despite a title being on the line, and they basically open with the two most grotesque explosion spots, one of them targeting Jameson Shook’s arm and the other a John Wayne Murdoch loaded boot to Hoodfoot Mo Atlas’ chest, doing damage to both of them. The kabooms are impressive, but they’re not important — everyone including the referee is up from the most spectacular-looking one within a minute, and the two that follow, while serving to cast the TWE arena in the post-apocalyptic pallor of post-explosion Kawasaki Stadium, is just the pretense for another wrestler (Eric Ryan, though you can barely see him to confirm) to run in and take Murdoch out of the match. The dueling exploding bat/steel chair explosion would have been cooler were it not for the fact that the chair had been hanging out in the ring all match awaiting its destiny, one of those little things that happens when, again, the point is to get to all of the spots you’ve set up as opposed to using those spots to tell a story.
The finish of Dr. Redacted hitting Shook in the back of the head with a blindside lariat that he couldn’t sense through the haze was good, and Shook was decidedly the most spirited of the four here, but even his willingness to get blown up the most doesn’t rise to meet the scale of the stipulation at play here. Despite the exploding cage and the prodigious use of glass and the title on the line, this felt like a low-end WWF Hardcore Championship match, an everybody-on-the-card scramble where everyone gets their big spot before it’s time for the next match. I like a lot of those matches, but most of them are wallpaper. This one isn’t even fun wallpaper, which is crazy considering how many explosions they rigged to go off in such a small space.
Rating: **