The H8 Club (Nick Gage/Justice Pain) vs. Tough Crazy Bastards (Necro Butcher/Toby Klein), CZW High Stakes III (7/9/2005)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Sam G. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was a Fans Bring The Weapons match for Pain and Gage’s CZW Tag Team Titles.

Many deathmatches and/or big brawls have something to say.

So many of the great deathmatches are about generational conflict, like Gage/Tremont or Gage/JWM or Kasai/Takeda, but like a Shuji Ishikawa vs. Masashi Takeda, you can also simply tell a perfect bully vs. underdog story within the environment. There are great tag team deathmatches about outsider underdogs against faces of the promotion, or famously, one of the all-time retirement spectacles. There are so so so so many things that can be done within the framework of extreme violence.

This match has none of those aspirations.

It is pure violence and mayhem and wandering carnage, ninety percent of it seems thought up on the fly based on whatever fan-procured weapons they are around at any given time, and it absolutely fucking rules.

Necro, Toby, Pain, and Gage wander about the New Alhambra for some twenty minutes, destroy almost everything in their path including one of the glass doors coming back inside the building, and almost every bit of it is cool as hell. Not everything is perfect, but it’s one of those matches where the things that go wrong — typically involving Justice Pain on one side of a power move or the other — are even nastier looking than what might have been had they gone right, and so they make the match just a little bit better. There’s a sense of anarchy that the best matches like this have and that this has in spades. Not only in terms of how they seem to just stumble upon things and riff on them in increasingly horrific ways, but also in a lack of bodily control at times. In the best possible way, it feels at times as though things just happen to the people in this match, against their own will, a larger universal force throwing items in the way and making things just a little dirtier and more hateful than usual.

They have the sort of match in which, if I began capturing a spot here or there to post or simply insert into this piece, I would wind up just capturing 75% of the thing or more. Superplexes on cage walls, people hurled into grocery carts, one of the best Necro punch fights of all time, metal filing cabinets smacking off a bare head repeatedly, and what feels like a million other things that hide in the shadows behind the real huge bits.

So many things happen and they all rule.

Nate Hatred returns at the end to destroy Pain and Gage, and after a senton bomb to Nicky under a pile of chairs, Necro gets the pin to give the superteam the titles.

It’s barbaric and wonderful stuff, a deranged fight that hits in the way the best matches like this do, ruling simply because it does. Self-evident, the stuff that makes you hoot and holler and shout in delight in your own home in the wee hours without realizing a noise is leaving your body until it’s already escaped. The sort of shit that makes you lose control of your body, reaching out through the screen and taking it over, even if only for brief moments in reaction to the psychotic nonsense it offers up.

This is not exactly Samoa Joe vs. Necro Butcher in terms of insane spectacles of violence and mayhem from the summer of 2005 that are so much better watched than read about and that kind of defy the written word, but it’s also not that far off either. Words are bullshit, this is not a match designed to be written about, and I would implore you instead to click x on the window right now, before the end of this sentence, and watch the match instead.

An unbelievably sick match, and to my memory, also only the second best match these teams had against each other.

***1/4

 

Low Ki vs. Necro Butcher, IWA-MS We’re No Joke (4/1/2006)

Commissions continue, this one from Ko-fi contributor Parkmap. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $10/hour for things over an hour in length, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

WrestleMania weekend in 2006 was pretty cool.

Not only because even in this shortened form — a big ROH weekend, the WWE Hall of Fame, and this afternoon show — it was really the first of its kind, but way more importantly, because as a sixteen year old in the Chicagoland area at the time. There were just few enough shows that, save the ROH show in Detroit on a Thursday, I got to go to all of these shows. I’ve told stories before about it before — Roderick Strong restarting his mid-match promo against Danielson at like 12:30 am, seeing Chris Benoit in a McDonalds and saying I was a big fan only for him to not look up at all and just say “okay”, my intense confusion at the Allstate Arena choosing to cheer for Triple H over John Cena — but the entire weekend is the sort of thing that I know I was really fortunate to get to consume a single bit of, let alone all at once.

I am not going to tell you this was some formative experience for me. I was not a full on regularly-in-attendance IWA Mid-South sicko pervert after this. Hell, as a teenager who was still kind of transitioning out of only watching TV wrestling and mostly just an ROH fan rather than a full independent fan here for some of the bigger names, I didn’t even really become a big Necro fan for another few months. Hell, it really may have been the first time I ever saw him, although reputation preceded him. Those transitions will take another year or so, and it isn’t as though this is even something that began the process, given just how much great wrestling there was that weekend.

It was, however, incredibly cool to see Low Ki vs. Necro Butcher in person, and as I for sure didn’t appreciate it nearly enough at the time (this can be said for all Chicago area indie wrestling I saw as some dipshit kid in the 2000s), so so so so somuch cooler to me in retrospect. 

Of the shows I went to that weekend, IWA-MS’ WE’RE NO JOKE was probably the least of them. Not that it was a bad show, so much as that it lacked the near wall-to-wall hits of Ring of Honor’s two Chicago Ridge shows that weekend or the pomp and circumstance and feeling of the last ever non-stadium (but still with fans in the room) WrestleMania. IWA rarely gave you full great shows outside of the tournaments, but the reason for that was the same reason I always found them so charming, the willingness to throw just about everything out there, including things that nobody else will, and see what works. The show is filled with a lot of fun and weird stuff, including the famous Marek Brave SSP into the ring cable accidental classic, but before the double main event (this and Chris Hero vs. Milano Collection AT), not a lot of great matches.

There is this match though, and holy shit.

By the time Low Ki and Necro Butcher are done with each other, none of that matters.

I prefer their rematch in December 2006, but as you might expect from two of the greatest wrestlers of all time, this is the exact correct kind of match for this specific place and time.

With a bunch of less hardcore fans here, filling some time before either the Hall of Fame or a much bigger ROH show later that day, they leave some of the crazier and grosser setpieces aside for the future, and just have a god damned fight. It’s a simpler match, not really even trying to attain levels of obscene violence seen in other Necro dream match superfights, but succeeding because (a) they really nail the difference between the two, with Ki’s advantages coming through nastiness and martial arts and Necro’s through a more straightforward punching and throwing, & (b) everything they do is so god damned good.

The first half is almost all striking, at least the first third is them hurling each other around the world famous Midlo-Dome in scenic Midlothian, IL, and it is perfect. Every other shot is a genuine mother fucker, and each man treats every shot they take not only as this devastating thing, but constantly in new ways throughout the match. No reaction is exactly the same, just like no shot is ever exactly the same. On that note, this is a match to watch on full volume, or with some headphones on, to really get all of it, in a way that maybe makes it just as good at home as it was live. You know the chops from both men and Low Ki’s kicks to the chest are nasty, but the grossest sounds come where you least expect them to. A kick to the top of the head when Necro is bent over or Necro thrusting his bare foot forward into Ki’s chest like he’s trying to kick down a door in a movie, and a million other little less important shots that sound just as nasty and beautiful as the ones thrown in major momentum swings.

Removed from just the thrill of pure hitting, the big stuff is also so well done. Not only does it have a simplicity behind all the violence that fits the tone of the first half, this sparser and more simplistic fight with maybe a broader appeal, but it’s all set up so well. A table in the corner for a third of the match before it gets used on the third or fourth attempt, so it never feels like a spot obviously being set up. The chairs that get used all come from them simply fighting over by them, things like that. It isn’t airtight in the sense that every single thing is necessary or perfect, but every single bit of the match makes sense, even down to the very end. Necro gets knocked back while on the ropes to fall on the table in a Tree of Woe, removing the part where Ki has to step on the knee to give someone a reason to be in the air like that, before then hitting one his all-time nastiest looking double stomps down through it.

Following a genuine God Damner of a kickout off the double stomp, Low Ki chokes Necro out with the Dragon Clutch to win.

A lesser version of something great, but when that something is maybe the best match of all time (or when the other thing is an even better rematch between these two), that’s not really even an insult at all. The pro wrestling version of landing amongst the stars.

***1/2

Samoa Joe vs. Necro Butcher, IWA-MS Something to Prove (6/11/2005)

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.

****1/2? ****3/4? *********? honestly, the entire idea of putting a star rating on this feels like you’re missing the point

Super Dragon vs. Necro Butcher, PWG Battle of Los Angeles 2006 Stage Two (9/2/2006)

Another commission, this time from friend of the program Tim Livingston. You can be like Tim if you head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon, where you too can pay me to review wrestling or whatever else you’d like. The current going price is $5 per match, and if you have something larger in mind, just do that math inside your head. As always, make sure I haven’t covered it before or consider that there are certain things I’m just going to get to eventually and whether or not you want to pay for a match you really like to jump the line like this. If you have some sort of wild other idea, like a list or like an episode of TV or something, hit the DMs and we can talk. 

(this was a first round match in the 2006 Battle of Los Angeles tournament. This barely matters in the grand scheme of things, it is unlike basically every other BOLA match ever, but I am a stickler for accuracy.)

I love this match.

Genuinely, it is one of my favorite matches of all time. While not quite Desert Island level or the sort of match I’ve seen a million times (for reasons I cannot fully explain, I almost feel like I have to earn watching this or Joe/Necro I again sometimes, like I can’t just sully them by watching them whenever I’m a little bored or bummed out), it is a match in truly rarified air in my mind. The first time I saw it was one of the greatest and most eye-opening viewing experiences of my life, the second only saw my appreciation grow, and here in the third time, I see this match in a whole new light.

Before anything else, I think it’s fair to talk about the lens in which I first saw this match, and the lens in which the people in Reseda and watching it months later on DVD/.avi file saw this match.

From early 2004 through some time in early 2007, the three biggest ass kickers in independent wrestling were Samoa Joe, Necro Butcher, and Super Dragon.

“One on each coast and in the middle” is an oversimplification and not totally true, but they represented different scenes between Dragon’s West Coast, Necro’s deathmatch status, and Samoa Joe being one of the flagbearers for the decade’s tentpole independent in Ring of Honor. It was healthier time in independent wrestling, in which despite what old head know-nothings will tell you, there really was something of a territory system that still existed. If not in terms of people being able to move around and start over, then in terms of wildly different feelings and presentations between different independents. Some people worked all over, but each area or major promotion had a handful of guys that were [x promotion] Guys, resulting in matches every so often that could feel special in a way that this felt special.

People often lament how you often only get one big time megastar in each era of mainstream wrestling when talking about Rock and Austin in their primes t the same time, and while there’s an element of fed propaganda in that that never totally felt correct, it’s how I feel about these three on the independents at this point in time. In the years since, we’ve been gifted with a few wrestlers and acts that felt close to this sort of a thing. A certain combination of the ability to produce extreme violence and fantastical chaos, but also seeming wholly and completely like The Man within their spheres. The re-emergence of Nick Gage in the mid to late 2010s is the closest, maybe WALTER in the few years before he sold out, but those never quite reached these sorts of levels, and never got to be thrown at each other in the ways that those three were thrown at each other on a few special occasions.

The result of that was that when they met — in PWG in 2004 and 2005 for Joe and Dragon, and for IWA-MS in 2005 and earlier in 2006 for Joe and Necro — it felt like the biggest deal in the world.  Electricity. Magic. Whatever word you want to use to describe that sort of a feeling. It’s there in the building. It was there when I saw it for the first time at sixteen, and like so much one experiences at that age, it means it’s probably always going to be there with me when I watch it. Not that it exactly takes me back to having just moved into my mom’s terrible new apartment and having a makeshift desk made out of two small dresser cabinets and a plank of thick wood, using a bar stool as a chair, and experiencing PWG for the first time, but that element of awe is still there, baked into each successive viewing.

Of course, that all probably doesn’t mean a god damned thing thing to some of you, people who weren’t there or weren’t fans around that time, or at least weren’t fans of these two around this time. I want to explain to you how I felt watching this for the first time, and the sort of feelings it still evokes in me nearly sixteen years (4/25/2002) later, but my love of this match doesn’t rely upon that. I feel incredibly nostalgic about this match, but this isn’t great because of nostalgia.

Yesterday don’t mean shit.

What ought to still mean something to you is how god damned nasty this still is.

There is so much that happens in this match, and it is all great.

Really, the only flaws this possesses are down to production. Reseda lit more poorly than it would be. Awkward after-the-fact commentary from Excalibur and Bryce Remsburg that occasionally drowns out the audio of what’s happening and/or is embarrassing in the ways some old PWG commentary can be. Had this happened with the production PWG had from 2007 or 2008 on and you could hear 100% of every single shot thrown and had more authentic reactions from a live commentary booth (shaped like a table), it would be a significant improvement.

And it’s still this great.

If I began making gifs of more than just one spot in this match, I might never stop. If I began just listing off different things that happened in this match, it would become the sort of review that I don’t like to read or to write. Just about every single thing that transpires in this match is tremendous though, and there are some real highlights even among all the nasty punches and slaps, cool ideas, and disgusting chair and table shots. Among the highlights are Super Dragon fighting back with a chair wrapped around his own head and charging Necro like that, Necro taking a hip toss into the ringpost, Dragon pulling on Necro’s beard to hold him down in the one (1) hold that this match has in it, and some of the more heinous punch exchanges in some time. Just about everything in this match rocks, in one way or another, and I don’t just mean these big moments.

Initially, I had thought about comparing it to a classic kaiju battle, but that’s not quite right. Neither of these two is exactly the King of the Monsters (Samoa Joe was), but also there’s something else to it. Those films and those fights have a sense of grandeur and/or otherworldliness to them that is completely absent from this match. It’s a vicious and violent, of course, but there’s something else to it. It’s smaller scale. Necro and Dragon do some brutal things to each other, but it’s not like the Samoa Joe matches against either man. It’s hard to call a match like this grounded, but there’s an earthier sort of a quality to this, as the fighting takes more and more of a toll and as the match is about an injury to Necro as much as anything else.

Necro and Dragon still give you these big moments, like the Tiger Driver on the stage or the bevy of moves in the last third of the match, but there’s something else in between these moments that the Joe matches never had. The audacity on display is replaced by something almost contemplative, a desperation between moments of violence that makes them feel even more significant. The consequences for this level of violence laid more bare than they are in those matches, if not always on purpose. While nothing here tops a powerslam on the concrete taken face-first or the blood fountain that Butcher’s head became against Joe, the things that happen in the last third here have a way of feeling like the most disgusting things in the world, despite not having quite the same novelty, having been seen before in other big Dragon brawls. Shots become not only more desperate and sloppy, but more out of control as well. There’s an unease that develops in the last third of the thing, once they make their way back into the ring for the last time. The hooting and hollering of the first several minutes replaced by wincing and shrieking in horror over the last several minutes.

It helps too that even before all of the big stuff, the body of this match is comprised of some of the nastiest smaller-scale stuff you’ll ever find in a match like this.

As if there wasn’t enough to love, this is also one of my favorite hand work matches of all time.

(I endeavor to never going to be the sort of insufferable nerd who says “THIS MATCH WAS MADE FOR ME!!!” every time someone does knee work or whatever in what always feels like an attempt to seem interesting, but between this sort of more thoughtful show of violence and incorporating hand work into a super violent Necro brawl, I am closer to that point than I likely ever have been or will be again.)

Dragon first attacks the hand on the apron with the chair, in a single act of petty vengeance the first time Necro really gets him with a big shot outside. It’s on Necro though, the 2006 Wrestler of the Year, that this gains the narrative weight that it does. From then on, he is constantly holding his right hand or wrist. He never forgets it. Necro is, at one point, caught in a headscissors and his instinct is to grab at his right wrist instead. This is not some short match, but Necro always keeps that injury present. Necro also makes the decision to frame it as more of a wrist thing than a hand or fingers issue, and if you’ve had both of those kinds of injuries, you would know that there is a difference. It means that, for whatever it matters in a match like this, Necro gives himself more of a clearance to throw punches.

The great thing about Necro Butcher is that in spite of that, he still knows enough not to, and to save that for when it can mean the most.

Necro instead tries to mix it up with chops and elbows and boots. He breaks out the rare hurricanrana off the top at a moment. It’s only in the last moments, once Super Dragon is beginning to uncork the biggest and best stuff, that Necro explodes with a flurry of punches. It’s his own version of the famed Violence Party, performed with enough panic and desperation to be as frightening as it is exhilarating. The trick to it is the thing Necro Butcher understands, and the thing that takes this match from being really great to being an all-timer. After spending the match trying to work around the bad hand, to use it less and always registering the effects of everything, one fully understands the stakes and thus the gravity of Necro having no other choice but to use it in the way that he does.

Beautifully, it does not save him at all. Not even close.

Dragon takes him down with just as much desperation and leaps to double stomp him right on the side of the face. The Curb Stomp on a chair follows, and Super Dragon winds with a Psycho Driver onto the seat of an open chair. One of the most violent finishes of all time brings one of the more violent finishing runs of all time to a close, a fitting end to a match like this.

I initially compared Joe/Necro I to THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Both dirty and bloody, a stunning application of violence, and a totally unforgettable experience, standing almost entirely alone even among movies/matches within its genre. I was thinking about that a lot when writing the early portions of this review, this being the other part of that accidental round robin and all, and what this was like in comparison. I thought about a lot of big Joe matches like that, and matches like this around this time as being like horror movies, as a result of the force and hostility that they possessed. This is something else though. It’s not a slasher, it’s not all that bloody. There’s force and hostility, sure, but it doesn’t ever seem to point out in an uncontrolled rage like the best Joe sometimes does. Instead, it almost feels pointed inwards. There are horrifying and jaw-dropping moments, but not quite like that. Hours after watching this again and trying to put word to everything I feel about it, the movie I come back to at the end is something closer to THE DEER HUNTER (or if you would prefer, John Woo’s superior BULLET IN THE HEAD), moreso in composition and ambitious length than in outright story. Although, there is some of that to behold as well.

People say matches or fights feel like and/or are wars all the time. I’m not opposed to it. Big explosions, bombs hurled back and forth, a constant fight over everything, it’s a nice a shorthand to express a certain idea, as overused and misapplied as it sometimes can be. Of course, it never feels quite right, I don’t think. This match feels like something more than just that. If another match that I maybe like a little more offers big highlights, this is a more well-rounded thing that comes closer to capturing the real ugliness of the thing. Not just explosions and highlights, but the road there, a violent shift, and then what happens after, and a return at the end to that sort of barbarism with a new weight added on. The real guts of the thing on display. Not everything goes perfect, a lot goes wrong, and it makes things even better. Everybody is worse off for having taken part in this conflict.

Arguably, the greatness is taken out of Super Dragon as a full-time wrestler in this match, somewhere in between clearly being concussed at some point and hurting his knee pretty badly on the botched bump off the stage. He’ll be too beaten up to continue in the tournament, although booked to make it to the finals himself. He’ll have great matches still in the future, including yet another of my all-time favorites, but he’ll never be the same wrestler as consistently as he used to be (even if this was his return from another injury). Although Necro will still be a great regular wrestler for another three to five years after this, this stands as something of an end, shifting more into regular brawls from 2007 on, rarely in matches quite this brutal ever again.

The victory of Super Dragon in the end is Pyrrhic at best, marking this as one of a handful of wrestling brawls in which it truly does feel like nobody really wins. It’s a match great enough to make a cliché like that feel like sensible. A more thoughtful and guttural piece of violence than all but a very select few in wrestling history.

One of the greatest matches of all time.

****1/4

Necro Butcher vs. Matt Tremont, CZW Tournament of Death X (6/25/2011)

This was a first round match in the the Tournament of Death

I love deathmatches, but on this blog, I very rarely write about them. This isn’t an effort to change that, but the truth is just that they rarely leave me anything to really say that isn’t repetitive or that I feel is boring.  It’s especially that way when I’m at a point as a fan where I’ve seen just about everything that can happen in a deathmatch environment and it’s not shocking anymore. At this point, I need to either see something stunning and new to me (Gage/Tremont cinder block ring), or I need to see something with a little more behind it.

This has a little more behind it.

In fact, this is the best US deathmatch of the decade that nobody really talks about.

It’s a little much maybe to call this a passing of the torch. Necro Butcher probably isn’t THE GUY in this scene anymore by this point, it’s Drake Younger or someone, but he is still the Necro Butcher, and it matters what he does in an environment like this. Deathmatch wrestling rarely ever has clear moments where the torch is passed. It’s just a stylistic quirk, I think. People who book deathmatch wrestling often aren’t creatively inclined toward big dramatic gestures like that. Wrestlers get over, and over time, they become top guys in the scene on their own. Tremont doesn’t become the guy here, it’s a process. Necro’s already lost whatever torch he had. And yet, it’s an important match. It’s a big thing and it matters. What it’s much more like is the first Okada/Tanahashi match in 2012. A young and immensely talented new face takes on a figurehead, announces himself, and absolutely beats his ass. This is, I think, the closest that US deathmatch wrestling ever had to a moment like that (and I’m not sure if Gage/Tremont counts, because that was someone taking a torch back). 

The match itself is a wonderful display of violence. The clear story behind it helps, but you don’t need to know what Necro represents or what Tremont represents, who they are to each other, or who they are and will be to the deathmatch scene in this country to enjoy or understand this. They punch each other incredibly hard in the face. They swing heavy stuff into each other. There’s blood. Tremont works the feet (v antagonistic to this blog) and they make liberal use of the greatest weapon in the history of wrestling, a water jug on a stick. It’s a match with a lot of GIFable bits but that I don’t want to spoil for anyone, and that don’t land quite as well without the horrifying sounds of a fist bouncing off someone’s face, or a water jug being swung full force into someone’s body. It’s a full sensory experience, and one I’d like anyone reading this to experience in full and unspoiled.

The story is ultimately what drives this to a level higher than most other deathmatches though. All of that is well and good, but it’s the stuff here that matters that separates this from every other deathmatch with hard shots or some cool moves with light tubes. Necro tries to show a young punk what the order is, but his mistake was trying that at all. Necro’s been out of deathmatches in a regular sense for a while now, and his body betrays him. Tremont is as good of a fighter as he is, he’s somewhere around as tough as Necro is, and he wants it more than Necro’s wanted anything in years. The match is made by a small accident in the first few minutes of the match, as Necro busts his hand open punching Tremont in the face. Necro is an old man now, and his body has betrayed him in the most brutal way. Time’s arrow only moves forward, and all of that. Necro knows what it means and pounces on Tremont after it happens. Tremont knows what it means and never lets go of control once he finally earns it. Necro puts up a fight, of course, but Tremont is too young, powerful, and hungry not to wind up with that he wants in the end. Following a diving headbutt through a bundle of light tubes on Necro’s face, Tremont makes his point and takes his spot.

This isn’t the best deathmatch of the decade, but it would be impossible for me to create a top ten and not include this, both because of its retrospective importance and just how goddamned interesting it is. An incredibly charming fight that any fans of either man or the style in general owe it to themselves to seek out.

***1/2

Chris Hero/Necro Butcher/Candice LeRae vs. Human Tornado/Necro Butcher/Claudio Castagnoli, PWG All Star Weekend 6 Night One (1/5/2008)

This is in the middle of one of the great feuds in independent wrestling history, as Human Tornado turned into an EVIL PIMP and Chris Hero finally became a hero and saved Candice LeRae from his ire. In the process, Tornado turned Castagnoli against a now distracted partner and brought in Hero’s top nemesis as well. Hero doesn’t often get to actually play the hero, especially at the time here when he’s left CHIKARA, is sparser and sparser in IWA Mid South, and is horrifically underutilized in ROH. I can’t credit the feud with PWG’s ascent or anything, that’s a result of ROH’s drop off post-Gabe as much as anything else, but as a fan in 2008, I was incredibly willing to give my money to the only company to correctly utilize one of the best wrestlers in the world, and I know I wasn’t alone in that. The feud as a whole is among the best things Pro Wrestling Guerrilla has ever done, and this is one of my favorite matches

It’s not some spectacle of violence, but it’s quite the enthralling little fight in its own right.

Of course, you have three of the best brawlers in the history of independent wrestling, even if Hero is a small level below Kingston and the all time-king Necro, but the others hold their own. Human Tornado could be viewed as dragging it down with his more textbook independent junior heavyweight offense, but when he’s portrayed as the cowardly top heel using Claudio and Kingston as protection, that’s a lot more okay! Claudio is also out of his element, but this match belongs much more to the other two members of his team and Castagnoli commits no harm and thus no foul.

At a point, this memorably goes out of the building and into the rain. They fight for several minutes outside.

The god damned Necro Butcher begins picking up small rocks off the ground and starts throwing them at his opponents. As much as digging a CVS bag out of his pocket, this is the Necro Butcher in one spot. It’s fucking wild, it’s brutal in its own way, but there’s such a charm to it at the same time. I’ve been thinking about it with some regularity since I first saw this show in 2008.

If there is such a thing as a perfect spot, this is it.

Claudio Castagnoli adds something to it when he eats shit on the wet pavement and has rain water poured out of a recycling can onto him, but this is the Necro Butcher’s moment.

The match becomes something more normal back inside the building, but never loses this sort of fury. Candice LeRae is here trying her best, because there’s nobody else for Chris Hero and Necro Butcher, and because she deserves to get her own revenge. There’s a fine line here, before intergender wrestling was all that common (this is her first try at it in PWG, actually), and she walks the tightrope perfectly. She’s good enough to catch people off balance and pissed off and gutsy enough to keep going for her revenge, but eventually gets rocked yet again by Tornado. Hero is a tremendous face in peril. Chris Hero was )is) so great at everything that he often found himself working as a bad guy to help out people without his natural aptitude, but he’s as good as face as you could ask for in this. Beyond just hitting really hard and doing cool stuff, he’s got that fire in his belly in the first third of the match, but then adheres perfectly to the Steamboat Principle when he’s getting beaten down.

All hell breaks loose again, and it’s terrific. This match is mean as hell and consistently out of control, but they also keep up such a frantic pace to it. This is a match with a segment involving a man throwing rocks at three other men, but it is still a PWG match, and I say that in a nice way for once. It can hold both things at once, without losing the entire value of each thing. It’s a brawl with the pacing and layout of a 1996 Michinoku Pro match, even hitting a dive train of sorts near the end. The finish is perfect too. Candice shows the heart to fight her way back into it, and almost gets on a roll against Eddie Kingston, except that she stops being on a roll. Chris Hero intercepts the Backfist to the Future to protect her and Hero’s nemesis defeats him again with the Backdrop Driver. This is a vicious match with an incredibly mean spirit to it, but that’s an ending with real heart to it. Our heroes fought the good fight and had it won, but Hero chose the immediate moral good over a professional victory. f it was the end of this all, it would be incredibly bleak and nihilistic. It isn’t though. It’s something to avenge, a tremendous character beat in the middle of PWG’s greatest storyline.

The strength of this match is how much it manages to be at once. It’s a brawl, it’s a spotfest in its own way, it’s some classic pro wrestling. It’s everything. This is not a bloodletting or a match with the intensity of one of the bigger Necro singles matches of a Hero/Kingston encounter of the year past, but it’s just so much god damned fun. It’s violent, mean, part of maybe PWG’s all time great feud, but at the end of the day, I keep coming back to this because it’s such a blast. I can’t imagine watching this and not having the time of your life.

An ageless pick-me-up. Give it a whirl.

***1/2

 

 

Bryan Danielson vs. Necro Butcher, PWG Giant Sized Annual #4 (7/29/2007)

This was a Necro Butcher Rules street fight.

Bryan Danielson was originally scheduled to challenge El Generico for the PWG World Title in the main event. Unfortunately, the Briscoes had travel difficulties and the card was shuffled. El Generico would team with Kevin Steen instead to challenge the Strong & PAC team for the World Tag Team Titles, and the usually jovial-in-PWG Danielson was upset to the point of issuing and open challenge. The Necro Butcher gladly accepted.

This is a delightful little piece of horror.

The reason I’m so vocal about Bryan’s 2007 when compared to his vaunted 2006 is that in 2007, he got to have matches like this. This is not a half hour would-be title epic, it’s a ten minute fight. It leaves you still wanting more, but everything that happened in it was so great. There’s that story Necro Butcher tells on one of his shoot interviews where he, for some reason, thought this was done to have Bryan shoot on him, so he threw harder shots than usual after opening grappling, and it was rougher than usual. Knowing that adds a little something extra to this, but really, it was all already there. Bryan goes in fairly hard with a grappling attack, and Necro responds with violence. Both men bleed and get much more heated, more violent, and so much more visibly angry.

The highlight of the match is this delightful little character moment outside, where Necro takes a crumpled up plastic CVS grocery bag out of his front pocket and chokes Bryan with it. It’s a ten second moment that immediately tells you everything you could ever need to know about the Necro Butcher. This is a man who will not simply choke you with a plastic bag, he’s a man who will suddenly think only to do this two-thirds through a hard fought match, which then means that this is a man who simply had a grocery bag in his jort pockets already, for God knows what. Necro is God. Bryan is something higher. He responds by getting more upset than ever and hurling chairs nearly through Necro’s body on the ground and stomping one in at just the nastiest angle. The section on the floor is a microcosm of the match, as nothing they’re doing is all that new to professional wrestling, but it’s all so much dirtier and realer feeling than most other stuff.

Necro is cooked after the big stomp under a chair, but he comes out swinging inside the ring when he seems to realign all of his brain cells and can begin forming thoughts again. Terrific onslaught of rights and lefts, thrown desperately, but with enough force to still be a deadly thing that could conceivably stop this monster he’s woken up. It does not. Bryan is faster and far more skilled and uses that to dodge this and get Necro down. Danielson then goes into one of his more hellacious crucifix elbow series ever. They usually land somewhere by the jaw or the neck, but these are thrown with serious ill will and land somewhere a little higher by the ear or on the cheekbone, and the referee finally stops the match.

All big Necro Butcher matches are horror movies. My brain’s bad, so I always wind up trying to compare them to other horror movies, but this is something a little different. Necro’s usually cast as something to be overcome or defeated, but he’s the more sympathetic one in this in a wonderful subversion of expectations. In doing his usual reckless stampeding around the ring, Necro accidentally woke something up in an already on-the-edge greatest of all time, a sort of primordial evil that Necro can’t withstand, because he’s only human himself.

Necro won’t be the last one in California to pay the price for that today, as this is only the first in a trilogy of what may still reign as PWG’s finest closing match stretch ever.

***1/2