(photo credit to BAHU’s wonderful site)
This was, surprisingly, a Texas Street Fight.
It feels too easy to just call it the best FMW match ever, easily, up until the point in which it happened. This is a very young company, and a match as great as this ought to achieve something with the ease that this match does. It’s an accomplishment, given some of the truly great matches to come from FMW already, but it also doesn’t feel like enough.
Forget FMW for a moment.
This is one of the best matches of its kind ever. Relative to its ilk — explosions of realistic violence in professional wrestling — you can count on one hand the matches, up to this point, that have done it as good as this, and fewer that I might say did it better. Over thirty four years later and counting, that list has grown, in no small part because of matches like these in a place like this,
What ought to be mentioned first is that this match is a delight for the senses, or at least the two big ones tickled by watching a wrestling match at home, sight and sound (not to be confused with the movie list).
Visually, this thing is stunning.
Part of that is down to the looks on display. This is almost definitely the best ever collection of looks in a single pro wrestling street fight. Onita and Dragon Master more than know what’s required here and hit the classics with shirts and pants, but it’s the other half of the match that shines. Tarzan Goto shows up with one of the all-time classic real early 1990s looks ever, a tank top over a super tight t-shirt, both tucked into sweatpants, with knee pads over those two. It’s so over the top and weird, so much of a specific period in time, that it makes this feel grounded and real in a way the simple stuff cannot quite achieve due to how often that’s been copied. The same, in a different way, goes for cranky old bitch Masanobu Kurisu, showing up in the pre-requisite jeans, but also with cowboy boots and a green and white plaid shirt, all looking like he ought to be playing an aging bandit trying to settle down on a farm in a Western, or like someone would eventually be cast as him in a later season of NARCOS: MEXICO. Like with Goto, it is such a specific and real feeling look, although somewhat foreign on Kurisu, that it makes everything feel that much realer.
In the moments when the two combine, when Kurisu and Goto fight each other, it feels less like a wrestling match, or even just a wrestling fight, than matches like this have ever felt, looking and thus feeling like an actual fight that just so happened to wander its way into a wrestling ring nearby.
The match is also filmed in such an interesting and spectacular way.
No shot exists in what I would refer to as anything approaching cinematic, but that’s sort of what I mean. The match itself isn’t quite horror, but there’s a kind of found footage feeling to parts of this, as the camera seems almost lost among the chaos. It moves, trying to capture things like chairs being thrown or swung, but occasionally has these sudden steps to the side or back, or a drop down a few inches or feet, ducking out of the way of something flying, or trying suddenly to stop out of the way with someone runs into the frame holding a table or a chair. It is almost assuredly accidental, a consequence simply of being this close to a match this out of control, but the art is the art, and this match gains so much from not just how it looks — the outfits, the colors, the messiness — but in how that’s captured, to the extent that it’s almost definitely a worse match seen from farther away, let alone without the same sense of frantic movement.
It’s also an auditory delight.
Constantly, throughout the match’s near eleven minute runtime, there is something wild that you not only see, but that you can hear. Some things, like great chair shots or strikes thrown with a clear visual connection, will always have some value, but there’s a difference when you hear it, and in this match, you HEAR IT. The chairs have an extra audible impact, every chop is as loud as possible, and there’s a roar to Korakuen Hall at all times here that adds as much — if not more — than any individual sound of impact.
Having said all of that, this isn’t great because it looks so interesting, either on an individual level or up close and at large, or because of all of these loud crashes and vibrant thuds that make it impossible to ignore.
This is as great as it is because, more than most other wrestling matches ever, it’s real fucking violence.
For no longer than eleven minutes, three of the greatest brawlers of all time and a very very capable fourth in the Dragon Master go completely insane. What they’re doing is fairly simple, whipping chairs at each other, simple strikes like chops and punches and kicks, and basic offense. Far more important — and really the key lesson of this match — is how it’s all done. When Kurisu uses his cowboy boot, he gets as much out of it, both in physical impact and the feeling put into the shots, as possible. These chairs are not just swung, they are whipped forward or hurled with as much force as the man responsible can muster up, with enough hatred to power a city. They are not just simple shots either, they are these remarkably cruel and/or vengeful shots, in so many different places and moments, from Onita being chased into the crowd by an insane Dragon Master chair throwing parade and trying to get feet up to block them before returning fire, or each team slamming them down on heads outside, or in my favorite, Onita frantically diving in the way of those on Goto to cover him up in a scene with the sort of genuine feeling that, five years later, Kenta Kobashi could only ever dream of.
Every strike is thrown with more hate than, even knowing what these guys (especially Kurisu) are capable of, I could imagine.
Not many real pro wrestling moves happen in this, as much a byproduct of the runtime as it is the style. We’re talking double DDTs, double suplexes, a Piledriver or two, and the Onita signatures, in a match otherwise populated by these absolute mother fuckers of chops, punches, and some especially Kurisu’s gross short punts to downed opponents. The thing is though, that (a) the lack of wrestling moves in a brawl is a positive in my eyes, the sort of thing that makes it that much more realistic, & (b) each one of those moves has such an impact to it. Not just speaking physically, although yes absolutely, but in how it’s executed by the man giving the move. Each one of these moves has an unspoken “fuck you” added onto it, sometimes in all caps, or the feeling of an exclamation point in it.
In talking about all of the extremely visceral and sick stuff that happens in this match though, it’s easy to also miss that this is simply perfect old ass blood and guts meat and potatoes pro wrestling too.
Wild bad guys starting major fights, putting Our Heroes in real feeling jeopardy as each prospective comeback gets snuffed out with increasing force, and eventually getting every shot revisited upon them and then some. It’s not a marvel of construction and narrative heft or anything, but like all the truly truly great FMW matches to this point, there’s always a struggle. Not just in the movements themselves, but in the entire scope of the thing. The struggle of Onita and Goto to get back in it, the struggle to fight through different things and overcome this awesome physical onslaught, and finally, the struggle to end it in the few moments once they pull together, itself feeling like a desperate and earned reaction to how badly they got beaten up for the majority of the match. It’s the best of all the worlds FMW wants to show you, the easy and tried and true formula, spruced up not only with such phenomenal presentation, but an unmatched commitment and willing to take these ideas to lengths like these.
Onita and Goto finally pull it together in the end, gang up for the first time all match, and Onita manages to pull it out with the Fire Thunder Driver.
The good guys win, prevailing due to self sacrifice and heart in the face of unyielding violence from two of the least likeable wrestlers around. It’s elemental stuff. Not that everything has to be quite so simple, but a match this great with material this spartan shows, yet again, that it never really has to be more than this, so long as you put in the effort, the energy, and the overall feeling that all four of these guys do.
An immense chunk of violence, as real as it gets.
HANDWERK 