It’s another of those Black Friday Sale reviews, this time from longtime follower Jordan Hamburger. You too can pay me to review matches over at www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. That’s $5/match, or if you want something else reviewed, we can talk about that too.
Nobody ever said they had to be live action professional wrestling matches. They can be weird little CAW things, like Mr. Hamburger requested for all three of his matches. You could have paid me to review Bonesaw vs. Spider Man.
This was was a Hell in a Cell match for Simpson’s SCAW Title.
As the hype video seems to show, Spider Man and the No DQ World Order had attacked working class hero Homer Simpson after he won the title, and the Cell is constructed to keep them away. “
Maybe surprisingly and maybe not, the idea of the No DQ CAW league is not foreign to me. I used to actually follow the NoDQ CAW league in the spring and summer of 2004. I’m not totally sure why I started or why I stopped. I remember the idea of top babyface Mr. Clean, and there was a Superman vs. Batman feud where Superman turned heel and got the goatee. Freddy Krueger stole Jason Voorhees’ mask. It was done on WrestleMania XIX for the Gamecube at the time, which had these matches where you had to throw an opponent in front of a moving car to win or throw someone off an oil rig in the sea, or there was something akin to a ladder match but on a boat. Really great and stupid stuff that, I imagine, modern wrestling video games are missing.
In preparation for this, I watched some of those matches and they’re silly and done with very bad commentary that is a JR impression and then a guy doing a bad Italian mob accent and with some racial slurs. Nothing is as good as you remembered that it was. So it goes.
As for the match, it’s a lot like that.
Fun and very stupid, spoiled significantly by bad commentary. (I don’t know what the fix here is. Anyone doing fan commentary over video game CAW matches is probably going to be really bad at it, right?). Homer Simpson comes out to Steve Austin’s 2000-2001 Disturbed theme, but with the intro of his classic bit of singing his own theme to the tune of Flinstones theme. It’s beautiful. There are like five things off the Cell in a row, and the finish (a Stunner through the cell, then a big splash in the ring) looks like absolute shit.
As an actual match?
Sure, fine.
Incredibly reckless affair by the end, but real dull and uneven in the first half. A real issue with repeating their moves, and the selling was far from ideal. They treated the Cell like anything else. Homer’s choice to bleed off of a simple bulldog early on was a particularly odd one. That being said, there were some truly sensational highspots here when they hit them right (both men falling off the cell after a botched Stunner spot was a rough one), such as Homer diving off the cell onto Spider Man taunting him while standing on top of the barricade or Homer’s elbow drop off the cell to Spider Man lying on the floor. Spider Man’s Flatliner through the ceiling of the cell was also real cool, although it’s a shame he chickened out and grabbed onto the ceiling and didn’t drop all the way with it. Commit to the bit, you know?
While undercut by an uneven nature and a bad finish, it’s real hard to hate a match when guys are willing to go this fair.
If not perfect, admirably ambitious.
HANDWERK 