This is a commissioned piece from longtime friend of the blog, Tim Livingston. You can be like him and pay me to write about anything that you want. Usually, people just want wrestling matches, but you ought to not let that limit you if you have a mind for something more ambitious. You can purchase these things by going over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon, where reviews currently go for $5 per match (or $5 per half hour started, if you want a movie or TV episode or something, so like an 80 minute movie is $15). If you have a want for something that cannot just be solved by multiplying a number by five, drop into the DMs, and we can talk.
Ideally, if you are of a mind to commission reviews, you ask for something a little less daunting than this.
I mean, holy shit.
There is an implicit complement to a request like this, wanting someone’s specific voice and/or style applied to something already exceedingly well known and written about a million times before, but it’s a big one. There have been some reviews that I’ve found incredibly intimidating (Bret/Austin, Atlantis/Villano III, etc.), but eventually found some way to start eating those particular elephants, so to speak, and finding something to say about it that, if not new exactly, felt like I did justice to matches that huge, that great, and that iconic.
I’m not sure that this is the case here. I’m not sure it could ever be the case, be it from me or better writers or anybody else trying to talk about this match in a meaningful way. I say that with some confidence because not only have I read other far more talented people try to write about it and make videos about it and fail to really do justice to it, but personally, I’ve tried before too.
For years — at this point, decades — I have struggled to put this match into words that feel appropriate. I’m not sure they’ve invented language that quite does it justice.
Years ago, probably two or three years before I became a certified Movie Guy, the shorthand I got in the habit of using to express something about this match was that, if you compared famous independent brawls to horror classics, typically slashers, this was the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974, Hooper) of the bunch.
Not the first — no, I don’t know what the BLOOD & BLACK LACE or A BAY OF BLOOD or TORSO of U.S. indie brawls would be — but the best one.
It’s simply and, I guess, it maybe has a reputation for brutality and violence that makes it seem like it ought to be bigger and more bombastic than it is, but when you really get into it, it’s the atmosphere and the raw craft that gets them there just as much as anything else. It’s dirty as hell, it’s grimy to a degree that is honestly a little disgusting, not everything looks perfect (more later), and at moments, it is genuinely horrifying. All of its followers and predecessors come with a polish that, to the credit of this, is absent, making them feel less genuine. On top of the violence, it also feels realer than its other contemporaries could ever think about being. Most of all, it is a scenario in which Our Hero (Samoa Joe), despite his dominance in the bell-to-bell match, feels lucky at the end to escape. In the movie itself, the ending — after Joe has won via ten count TKO — sees this hillbilly psychopath come back and send the protagonist scurrying away for their life, surviving more than anything else.
And yet, none of that feels quite right.
Samoa Joe vs. Necro Butcher, as much as it sometimes feels like a horror movie, also feels like a genuine fight, in all of the ways that I wish more professional wrestling matches would, but it’s also so much more than that.
From start to finish — which is to say from the start of the video on Youtube or the presentation of the match in its official release, before the match even begin — there is an incredibly malicious energy to every single thing that happens, and to the atmosphere in the New Alhambra itself. The things Joe and Necro can control mix perfectly with the things they cannot, those other forces that show up from time to time in the truly special professional wrestling matches, and each has a way of heightening the power of the other.
This will always get the credit for the audacious displays of violence — the last third in particular with the many great shots of the mat or the floor or Samoa Joe’s legs, whatever’s there underneath him, being covered in the blood of the Necro Butcher — but sort of secretly, it’s also a masterpiece in ways it never gets credit for.
More mechanically speaking, every choice made in this match, not to suggest there was some great level of thought put into it, is correct. Every shot is a killer, every move that happens, or better yet, that is attempted feels not only like a gigantic swing, but a real attempt to end the fight as quickly as possible. One of my favorite ideas in wrestling — as has been written about a lot here before — is the idea of a one on one match that’s fifteen minutes tops, and where every movement seems geared towards winning in the immediate moment. I reference WCW main events of the 90 like the unofficial DDP/Sting/Goldberg round robin in 98-99, but also something like the Bayley/Asuka matches, and what stood out a lot on rewatch was that, maybe secretly or at least just hidden underneath all of the incomparably sensational violence, this is just as much one of those matches as it is anything else.
Of course, not everything goes right.
Critics of this match will point out the two (2) times where Joe is theoretically supposed to hoist Necro up and over — a powerslam in the crowd and an Exploder off the apron — but which see Necro land on his face and the hard floor of the New Alhambra instead. However, as a result of the more realistic tone of the match, as well as how unbelievably gross these moments are, they work on a completely different level, feeling like parts of a real and actual fight, on top of how disturbing and grotesque it is to see a man’s face smack off of the floor as hard as is humanly possible.
(hours later, Necro Butcher would take place in not only one of the best CZW matches ever, but probably the all-time best tag team deathmatch ever on U.S. soil, teaming with Toby Klein against Nick Gage and Justice Pain. Many great wrestlers never have two matches this great on back-to-back days, but Necro did them in a maybe six hour span, even after the two all-time nasty looking and sounding spills right onto his face.)
On top of the horror on display, it is also one of the sickest matches of all time.
Personally, I think that how disgusting those things that go “wrong” turn out to be are a benefit, but even if you just want to talk about the stuff that worked, it’s a certified all time God Damner. It’s the sort of match that if I started pulling gifs from, I would wind up just capturing every single spot. Everything they do is not only cool and feels designed to win a fight, but also just always lies on this border between feeling like wrestling and feeling like something far more dangerous.
The ultimate compliment paid to this match comes after it’s all over, as the Smart Mark Video replay section (sorely missed in the era of live steams and the quest for near-instant turnarounds on VOD) is something like one and a half to two times as long as the match itself. Which is to say that the best part of this match is fucking all of it, so why not just watch it again from a few different angles? I don’t believe something like that ever happened before, nor would it happen again, which feels right here.
Because truly, there is nothing like this.
It is an absolute mother fucker of a match, unlike almost anything else ever.
There are few answers to the question “what is the greatest match of all time?” that I have genuinely nothing to say in response to.
A handful of the know-by-date-alone classics, some other Joe hits, Flair/Steamboat or Flair/Funk, Bret/Austin, Punk/Cena, some Lesnar stuff, etc. There’s no one singular correct answer to that, of course, but there are a whole lot of real wrong ones, some I have no interest in debating or would roll my eyes at because it means we want entirely different things out of wrestling, and a very select few that I completely understand and totally respect.
This is one of them.
Joe and Necro have one of the only matches ever that feels like a question to that previous question, just as much as it feels like an answer to “what is the most rewatchable/most dudes rock/dangerous/coolest match of all time?”. It is as much at home, to me, in discussions with something like Necro/Toby with the VCR throw as it is with Joe/Kobashi. It’s a rare overlap, a bridge that very few wrestlers ever have been able to build let alone successfully walk across, and nearly two decades later, even in the middle of Necro’s unbelievable peak and in the middle of Samoa Joe’s 2005, what I believe to be the best single year of any pro wrestler’s career ever, it still stands out as maybe the greatest accomplishment in the career of either man.
I still don’t think I did it justice. If you liked this, I’m happy you liked it. If you, somehow, had found this blog without knowing about this match or maybe never seeing it yet, I hope I maybe at least talked you into finally biting the bullet and clicking play.
However, this is not a match to be written about or read, or at least, it’s not one whose greatest virtues are done proper justice through anything else beyond simply watching it and living it and experiencing it for yourselves. It’s better, on an artistic level, than virtually every other match I might talk about like this, and I had way more to say about it than any match I would describe like that, but the feeling is the same. There’s a lot to analyze, but at the same time, you really never have to.
Just watch it and feel it.
I cannot recommend any more strongly — whether it will be your first time or your thousandth — that you just go and do that again.
HANDWERK 