Featured image by Earl Gardner
This review was commissioned by Hippoboy281 over on my Ko-fi account.
Sort of surprising in how nasty this gets at points. Without even touching on all the gimmickry involved, there’s some real meaty elbows in this that I don’t always see in deathmatch wrestling (even in Japan). When they’re on the floor doing the bar fight too, one hears more of those punches land than don’t. Once we do involve the gimmickry though, there’s some nice surprises there as well. I’m especially a fan of the gestures at hand work that Bentley makes here. I like him attack the hand and shoulder with tubes early, and then coming back to it late in the match with those cinder blocks. The latter is an especially nasty visual too.
As great as some individual spots are though, this never comes together strong enough to be a truly great match. The story they seem to be going with is that even with Reed Bentley showing up at not 100% mentally, he’s got enough in him to whoop Tremont’s ass for a vast majority of this match. But with Bentley unable to focus, he just needs to get caught with one mistake for Tremont to get the victory. Perhaps that landed better for others, but it felt like a rather tacked on idea for me, commentary doing a lot of heavy lifting where I don’t think the match achieved as well.
This might even be a shade better if removed from all that context and storytelling. Either way, it’s a good time that’s just a little more violent than your standard deathmatch fare.
Rating: ***1/2
