This review was commissioned by Dan Vacura over on my Ko-fi account.
Oftentimes when sound gets discussed in pro wrestling, it’s in relation to crowds and strikes. The roar of a big venue or the delightful meaty smack of flesh on flesh. In a match like this though, the sound that leaps off the screen are the little yelps and tortured screeches from the participants involved. This may be on a very short list of some the best verbally-driven matches ever, up there with clear influences like Terry Funk vs. Jerry Lawler’s empty arena match. At multiple points, one is bound to hear some truly heart-stopping screams and squeals ripped from the mouths of these two psychos.
All the spontaneous outburst rock too. Sincere where so much other in-match talking these days feels scripted and fake. Something as simple as Eddie pulling from the aforementioned empty arena match with some delightful “My eye!” towards the finish or even just pained brooding over his damaged hand. It’s delightful, the kind of talk that only really gets overheard because of the presence of a microphone in the ring and the proximity the camera can get towards the action. Importantly, it rarely feels like these exclamations are done for the audience’s benefit—although they clearly are especially in a venue this intimate—which gives us the impression that we’re merely overhearing the true to life effects of the gruesome action in the ring.
The action itself has a lot of that same spontaneous energy. It doesn’t have the kind of rigid structuring that even other Eddie Kingston matches might have later in his career. This is Eddie Kingston still in his Wild Cards gear, being dragged into something loose and primordial for better and for worse. For example, there’s a dueling limbwork story here with both men making targets of the other’s arm. While Eddie displays a lot of that prodigious selling in the moment for each attack, he’s a little too early in his career to have the kind of laser focused long-term selling that he would come to perfect later on. It doesn’t do much to truly detract from the bout, but given long how the match is and how often both Ian and Eddie return to the limbwork, it’s enough to quirk an eyebrow at an otherwise immediate and visceral experience.
One can’t help but picture just how great this might have been even a couple of years after this bout. It may seem like a margin but even just a little more seasoning on Eddie Kingston could have transformed this gruesome hidden gem into something of an all-time classic. There’s certainly room for him to be a tad more aggressive in this bout. Some of those chair shots don’t land quite flush—there’s a shockingly tame one to the hand that can’t help but stand out amidst how violent everything else in this. And the runtime never feels overly bloated, but there’s a certainly a meandering feel to it, and more than a little repetition with the limited material they work with.
But the things that do land, and there’s a lot of them, are so fucking great. Truly disgusting shoot headbutts, solid body blows, and a lot of scrappy malice in this like trying to rip Ian’s cast off his broken hand. Ian also delivers so well real, really feeling the driving force of the match more often than not. We get some tricked out MethArts counters early on and then a lot of that really direct and impactful violence afterwards. Watch they way he claws at Eddie’s mouth and eyes to escape a hold or the confidence with which he just launches his skull right at Eddie’s. It’s gross stuff, and that’s long before he even pulls out the fork to stab at Eddie’s wounds and threaten to poke out his eye Magnum/Tully-style.
The production values goes a long way here as well. Grainy ass VHS tape, not even given the Smart Mark Video DVD treatment. There’s also the crowd. Borderline disinterested at many points, demanding more spectacular forms of violence, but then drawn in with heckling and trying to replicate the competitors’ cries of anguish. It gives everything a sadistic feel to it, like some fight club started to pass the time down in Muscatine, Iowa.
This much blood spilled, this much pain on display, it’s hard to be anything less than great.
IS IT BETTER THAN 6/3/94? I can’t deny the power of a bloodbath as visceral as this. Look at how it coagulates on Ian’s face in the post-match backstage promo. Messy and undeveloped as it may be, there’s a vividness to the experience here that just can’t be match by something quite as structured and organized as a King’s Road epic. There’s room for grand struggles in big stadiums, but there’s just something powerful about a shitty VHS documenting what looks like true to life torture somewhere in the Midwest. Give it to the 2000s indie boys once again (my secret true love, no matter what my YouTube channel looks like).
Rating: ****1/2
