This was a street fight.
It is beautiful beautiful stuff.
Not to beat a dead horse, you can read about this in more detail in the piece about the best FMW match to date a month and a half prior to this, but nothing else looks like an FMW brawl. Kurisu has changed in his long sleeve flannel for a short sleeve tan shirt this time, and in the process, looks even more like a Mexican farmer and/or my father if he was Japanese (specifically it’s the mustache combined with this specific kind of short sleeve tan button-down, we are not always in charge of our own memories, it is what it is), while Asako is in a large gi. The camera work — mostly in the uncommonly deep for the time period Korakuen Hall brawl early on — also has that certain quality, lost in the chaos and practically fighting through the crowd to get a view of the fight again, and these things are so helpful.
“Helpful” is the word I use, specifically, because this already rules.
Like the other big Kurisu singles match in FMW to this point, it is kind of just an extended squash, but like that one, I do not care.
Mostly, that’s because Masanobu Kurisu is so singularly nasty about everything.
Nearly everything he does whips ass. What feel like 70% or more of what Kurisu does in this match is whipping or jabbing a steel chair into the initially bandaged up head and jaw of Sambo Asako, but when it’s all so mean spirited and forceful, it doesn’t matter all that much. The other stuff is, again, both disgustingly rude and impossible to look away from on a conceptual level. Kurisu brings back the cowboy boot assault from April, but gets more disrespectful with it this time now that he can afford to, not only whipping Asako across the face with it at one point, but being the first man I’ve ever seen to try and strangle another person with a cowboy boot. Even more effective in riding that line between violence and humiliation is how he repeatedly chokes Asako with his own red belt, not only in the finish, but at one point using it to trap him against the ringpost so he can whip steel chairs at him. On the whole, Kurisu once again manages to not only deliver some of the grossest and most mechanically perfect looking beatings ever, but to also do so while injecting a feeling of complete hatred — not just for Asako, but just like radiating off of him in general — into everything he does that few can match.
It’s not just him though!
Yes, absolutely, Sambo Asako is not a great wrestle. He is a fat guy who doesn’t do a lot all that well. The forearms he throws on his comeback are fairly average, the offense he’s shown elsewhere has not been all that impressive outside of the actual sambo throws that — based on his name — one imagines he has much more practice with than the other elements of his game. None of that matters. His role here is as a sacrifice, and as such, he performs admirably. He bleeds, he takes the beating, he’s so sympathetic, and although uneffective, there’s real feeling and life behind those comebacks, that makes what Kurisu does to him that much crueler.
Kurisu chokes the big fella out against the ropes with his own red karate belt, in the meanest and most interesting possible finish, forcing the referee to finally stop a match that probably ought to have been stopped a long long time ago. It’s perfect stuff, making something out of a weird big old dude, and yet again, enhancing the reputation of a guy who might actually be the most violent man in the world’s most violent promotion.
Another of the unheralded great squashes ever from someone who I’m fast beginning to consider one of the all-time masters of the genre.
Real fighting for real people.
HANDWERK 