This review was commissioned by PEN over on my Ko-fi account.
There’s an innate charm to these kinds of matches that I can never quite shake. Regardless of quality, I always find myself sympathetic to a small room. The tight space creates a claustrophobic feeling that, at its best, enhances the sense of violence being presented to the viewer. With a gimmick match like this too, the addition of the cage adds another layer of tightness and closed quarters to the action that might otherwise be difficult to capture in a larger setting.
Contrary to the cage stipulation, this match functions at its best when the action spills right into the laps of the audience. There’s an early skirmish on the floor here when Sanchez goes for an entrance ambush with a hockey stick that leads to a brawl around the ringside area. It’s at this point that the match feels its most violent. Sanchez and Perez tumble into chairs, struggle over control of that hockey stick, and try to swing each other wildly into the cage wall. It’s messy in the best ways, really looking like a scrap between two people who have let their hatred for each other take over any sense of sporting competition.
It’s a shame then that the same can’t be said for when the action goes back into the ring.
What greets us in the hyperbolically dubbed Cage of Death (CZW this is not) is a fairly loose and limp gimmick bout that does very little for me. To be entirely fair to these two, the problems are not entirely theirs. For a reasons better discussed by the person commissioning this review (PEN keeps a close eye on all things Puerto Rican wrestling, her word is bond on this matter more than my own), the crowd has reactions totally opposite to what is intended. Nathalya Perez, valiant champion attacked at the ramp, is met with indifference or outright disdain throughout the match, while Serena Sanchez gets the lion’s share of the crowd’s adulation.
The result is that after feeling fairly certain about the heel/face alignments to start–an ambush is a cowardly thing, surely?–I began to question myself later on in the bout, especially when Sanchez gets that big pop for winning the bout with a rather spectacular dive off the cage as well.
The swapped crowd reaction means that the action takes on an odd read as well. Mostly a back and forth gimmick bout in the first half, the two trade a few extended control segments that just read awkward. Sanchez ends up reading far more valiant in the back half kicking out of all these big bombs from Perez, even kicking out at 1 at a certain point, drawing an extended “what now?” reaction from the champion.
Really, what the match lacks the most is heat. The strikes land like pillows, the weapons are standard at best, and we don’t even get fun pay offs like seeing someone crash through that giant piece of plywood sitting in the ring the whole match. The sense of animosity that might make something like this sing doesn’t feel present, and it’s especially noticeable when the big spots are fairly average on the whole. In both the figurative and literal sense, a fairly bloodless match overall.
Rating: **
