This was a Double Hell Barbed Wire Death Match.
For the less initiated, that means two sides of the ringside area have barbed wire boards there and the drama is about trying to push the opponent (or send them flying) into said wire, which — on try number one thirty seconds into the match — is already something that Korakuen Hall treats like, one has to imagine, a modern crowd would really only react to something like someone pulling a gun out and trying to shoot their opponent in the face (or maybe a 20 foot senton through a glass board).
Essentially, not only does Onita have to fight the meanest bitch in the entire world, but does so in the most dangerous match wrestling’s seen up to this point.
The match is, again, kind of a fascinating thing, looking at it with more modern eyes.
So much of the match revolves around the boards on the outside, but always in slight and spartan ways, much like the barbed wire around the ring in the last major FMW spectacle like this two months prior. Like that match, it works again because they get so much out of it. The struggle to not get shoved out of the ring or off the apron is immense, and feels realer than the struggle in, like, every Inferno Match and unlike many modern No Ropes Barbed Wire matches, some better than this overall, also never totally goes away. Onita is scarred up when the final struggle happens, he doesn’t have it in him to fight with as much animation as in the first minute of the fight, but the desperation is there, in a different form — first solemn, and then triumphant.
What I love most about this is how literally they take the title of the match.
It is not to say that, when outside, Onita is punished by a variety of demons, but that it is next to impossible to escape.
Both because of the wire itself, but also because, Manabu Kurisu is yet again an absolute mother fucker. Not in the same way as he was two months ago, as save for a few chops early on, this is not a body-on-body kind of physical punishment, but in terms of almost never letting Onita back in. It’s a beautiful mix of the scumminess of never letting him back to even really fight all that often and also the cheapness of, effectively, letting the barbed wire do the work — tearing up the back of Onita’s top at a point, and again cutting open his arm — when given half a chance to take it a little easier.
That’s not to say he doesn’t suffer too.
In moments when Onita tries to pull him out too — again seeming to take the title seriously and pulling Kurisu into Hell along with him — Kurisu eats a little bit of shit too, as in an odd way, the Steamboat Rule finds itself obeyed even here. Mostly though, as the main character of the story, this is about Onita suffering and eventually finding a way out of that.
Fittingly, the path forward is not dragging someone else into Hell alongside him, but fighting as hard as possible to escape from it himself.
Onita fights like never before to escape Hell, and it’s only then that he finally actually gets out, and — like always in early FMW — frantically and beautifully hurls bombs as soon as he has this one opening.
Kurisu surprisingly survives one Thunder Fire Powerbomb, but Onita hits a second one right after that for the win.
The match is not perfect. Given the dramatic talents of Onita and the immense abilities of Kurisu to deliver ultra physical punishment, one imagines there is perhaps a better “normal” match within them possible, but for one of these FMW spectacles, it again hits that lovely balance. Violent and dirty enough to scratch that certain itch, but dramatic enough to also feel like a real proper gargantuan struggle.
Yet again, something that is not blow away great on the surface and fairly minimalistic by modern standards, but that succeeds through strength of performance, and above all, total commitment to the idea.
HANDWERK 