[2000-05-15-WCW-Nitro] Sting vs Vampiro (House of Pain)

[soup23]

Even though this is a feud I have no use for, this is a pretty big opening match to Nitro and the video package beforehand is well done in trying to make sense of it. The cage match itself is their best effort as they convey the violence without drifting too far into cartoon territory. Sting shows a good bit of aggression handcuffing Vamp and then delivering the Stinger splash. A little bit of magic ends the segment as the cage lifts up with the lights going out and when they come back on, Vamp is gone. **

[GSR]

The ‘House of Pain’ is a roofed cage with shackles attached to every side of the cage. The object of the match is to handcuff your opponent to those shackles, and then you can do what you want to them. No pinfalls or no submissions here. Vampiro locks the cage door before the Stinger can enter, so he has to climb up on to the roof and force a hold by striking the cage with his baseball bat. As soon as Sting gets in there he just unloads on Vampiro. ‘Stinger splash’ and a facebuster, however Vampiro responds with a kick to the mid-section before launching Sting into the cage. Side belly to back suplex. Clothesline in the corner followed by a snap suplex. Mark Madden then starts talking about how he’s never seen a rivalry more personal and more intense than the one in the cage right now. Yeah, right Mark! Vamp with a knee to the groin and Madden’s back at it “there’s more hate in this ring than I’ve ever seen anywhere”. Mark Madden, a man who’s clearly not watched much wrestling in his life! Great spinning back kick, but Vamp then goes for something off the top (a leaping rana?) which Sting counters into a powerbomb. The Stinger rallies the crowd and a trio of clotheslines with Vamp taking a spin bump off the last of them. Inverted atomic drop and he then hurls Vampiro head first into the ‘House of Pain’. With him dazed, Sting is able to cuff him (face first) to the shackles and get the win. Sting doesn’t give Vampiro much of a post-match beating (so much for that hatred!), just splashing him against the cage and then kicking him against it. As Sting exits and heads back up the aisle, the lights in the arena go down and when they come back on, the cage has been raised and Vampiro is nowhere to be seen.

 

I liked the beginning and the end of this, but Vampiro’s control section in the middle bored me rigid. Then you have all this ridiculous hyperbole from Mark Madden where the action inside doesn’t correlate with what he’s saying. All this talk of ‘hate’, yet no intensity, not much aggression, no weapons, no blood. You would’ve thought a situation like this would be the culmination of the feud, but I think this has got someway to go yet.