[1999-11-08-BJW] Tomoaki Honma & Ryuji Yamakawa vs Shadow WX & The Winger (Death)

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

I liked this, but I'd like to see a Honma match where its quality isn't predicated on him taking inhumane punishment. He's not the only one in this match who does, of course. Fire, light tubes and barbed wire on a board all find their way into this. I guess that's what makes this style unique, but it's the selling that makes it good. I don't love it quite as much as the best stuff, but it's still very good.

[Tim Evans]

Shadow WX powerbombing Homna from ring through a barbwire board and Homna landing on his head is one of the sickest bumps i've ever seen. Homna gets busted open right away and the blood is flowing like a facet. Then to top that, Winger does a senton from the baclony while on fire!!! And the fire doesn't go out right away. Insane bumps in this match. I liked it more than Loss I think.

[El-P]

I remember that match. Insane. Big Japan was really fun as the renewal of Japan hardcore sleaze. Shadow WX I could do without, he wasn't much of a worker, but the team if Homna & Yamakawa were the coolest mothas of this scene at the time. Winger was decent. Really good match indeed.

[Zenjo]

Despite the death match setting they kicked off with a period of actual wrestling. The fans sat in stony silence. Then the gimmicks and hardcore stuff began. The people had come to see crazy spots and blood, and that's what they got. I felt absolutely no emotional connection to any of it. As a spectacle it did have some entertainment value.

[tim]

Damn this was wild. Definitely the deathiest death match on the set. Some decent enough wrestling to start and then Honma and Yamakawa just get killed. I liked Honma being taken out by the powerbomb to the outside and then him just crawling around ringside trying to recover as Shadow and Winger destroy Yamakawa. The fire senton was really a wild spot. Honma finally makes it back into the match and they blitz Shadow and Winger with huge moves before ending it with an avalance superplex, which nicely had been teased earlier in the match, onto light tubes. Really fun with some wild spots.

[PeteF3]

Good Lord, I cannot describe how BORED this made me. The flaming balcony senton was a holy-shit moment, the rest of this was four anonymous guys managing to make action involving light tubes and barbed wire boards as dull as humanly possible. The pre-match "straight" tag stuff is work not worthy of opening-match work on a rinky-dink '90s Midwestern indy, much less a rinky-dink Japanese indy. Honma was supposedly the darling of the early-'00s deathmatch scene but he's rapidly running out of chances to impress me at all.