Deathmatch Wrestling: How much is Too Much?

[KawadaSmile]

Alternatively, how much is Brian Christopher and Scott Taylor

 

Stemming from the discussion in the "Comments that don't warrant a thread", I thought that maybe this topic indeed warrants a thread, so there it is.

So, just to contextualize: this week, GCW had a show which saw a tag match between EFFIE and Allie Katch going up against Matthew Justice and Mance Warner. This match had a spot in which Justice, tied against the rope, had his belly slashed by Allie, who was using a pocket knife. It is as sickening as you can imagine.

Then, it came to me: how effective is this, even? Not just as a storytelling tool, but as a spot, or even as a promotion stunt. Is this comparable to Mr. Pogo using a fucking sickle to Onita's belly, or is a more realistic, "dry" weapon something less charming? 

I remember when I was younger and came across CZW matches using damn weedwackers and I thought to myself how that was overkill, but still was cartoonish despite the gruesome results. 

 

So, what are your thoughts?

[Sweet Brown Koko]

I think that’s definitely overkill and totally kills any suspension of belief. If you can just go in the ring with a knife and slash someone why would you even try to wrestle them?

I’m generally not a big fan of death matches, although I do have a Best of Big Japan comp from YEARS ago. Although weird to say, there’s a tasteful way to incorporate these spots into a wrestling match, IMO. Knives and weedwackers aren’t it and just show how much someone DOESN’T know what they’re doing.

That’s just my opinion though….

[WingedEagle]

I find the entire genre revolting and reason enough to avoid any promotion that features it.  I love wrestling, watch too much of it during waking hours that aren't occupied by work or family and also love blood in wrestling.  In most instances I think it significantly enhances a match whether planned or not.  But this death match nonsense borders on snuff films without the finish.

[elliott]

Explosions good. Sickles and knives bad. 

[Makai Club #1]

I could do without having knives being used in my wrestling honestly. I watch Big Japan and Freedoms often enough and they usually use knives on boards which I'm fine with. But, using the example above, slashing needlessly isn't the way to go. There is no real drama to it. It's gross, and that can be good, but give me an Irish Whip into a knife board spot any day of the week because you are still doing pro wrestling. 

[MoS]

Yeah as I said, intimate sharp objects are off-putting and I would be happy if I never saw them again in wrestling. I don't need to see two wrestlers stab each other with a knife or a fork. Something like the sledgehammer is corny and obviously business-exposing but it is not off-putting to me like small sharp objects are. Something about them just doesn't fit in

[Laz]

Deathmatch stuff only works for me when it's still a wrestling match that just so happens to involve a lot of blood, stunts, and whatnot. I think US deathmatches peaked around 2006/2007 when the focus became more about heated brawls with plunder and insane highspots than when it was before (weedwhackers and 10,000 lighttubes) or after (glass, glass, and more glass). Too much of it spot, stall, spot, stall, etc. until a finish that comes off as deflated because of the carnage that came before.

I didn't see the incident that sparked this, nor do I really care to (I think GCW, as a promotion, is kinda shit), but knives and sickles and whatnot just screams "we're out of ideas." If the point of pro wrestling is to create a hyper-realistic world where athletes are so well-trained and tough that they can regularly compete in this form of barbarism, then introducing something that could happen in a pub parking lot after one drink too many just doesn't cut the mustard.

The odd dichotomy, though, is that I don't think a broken lighttube being used in that manner would've been out of place, nor do I think it would've drawn this kind of (negative) attention. As it is, I just end up thinking less of everybody involved as performers, because "I hate him so much I'm going to use a pocket knife to slash his belly" screams creative malaise. Why not just stab the motherfucker if you hate him that much? Or go for his face?

In regards to MoS's aversion to forks, though, I don't mind forks being used, mainly because there's a history of them being easily concealed weapons that are so "out there" that the people who use them are seen as even more dangerous for taking such a common tool and making it into a weapon. Knives just come off as cheap.

[ragemaster]

As a wrestler i rather take a blade across the stomach, than thatJon Moxley chokeslam bump onto the back of two chairs a couple of weeks back. In fact unless you unucky and catch a major artery, much safer and does less damage than most wrestling you see.

As an art form it's not what i enjoy and i'm more worried by glass spots, as you are more likey to lose an eye. 

[MoS]

It also has to be said that the personality of the deathmatch wrestler is very important here. Abby could use a fork because he genuinely felt like a crazy psycho who would just forget the rules of wrestling and would want to murder you on the spot. Sheik's matches would go like 4 mins and never pretended to be actual matches so it was fine for his matches to have those weapons used. But (and this is not a shot at Allie and Justice, I haven't seen them work, it's a general point) when unskilled, bland, uninteresting randos use these weapons and do these spots (with all the stalling) for 15 minutes, it makes me feel like I am watching a couple of drunk/drugged idiots fight outside a bar or a park at 1 AM, or an awful, domestic fight in a household. It's just not something that I think is a viable wrestling attraction.

[sek69]

I'm just reminded of Paul Heyman being so grossed out after the Sabu/Terry Funk barb wire match where Sabu got his arm torn up and glued it together mid-match. that he vowed to never have another barb wire match in ECW again (and he didn't) because he couldn't ask anyone to do that in good conscience. That match would be considered relatively tame by today's deathmatch standards. 

[Phil Schneider]

Are Allie and Justice even feuding? 

I wrote up the Sami Callihan vs. Danny Havok match in my book, and that ends with Callihan slicing Havok's wrist to set up a move off of a scaffold, but that was the culmination of a violent feud. I mean Magnum TA tried to jab out Tully's eye with a broken chair leg, I mind it much less in that context, but something in the middle of a random tag with no backstory seems like a bad idea

[Blehschmidt]

For me the extreme or hardcore style peaked with ECW, and I wish it had died there. When it was just tables, chairs, trash cans, etc and the barbed wire match was the epitome of dangerous. I didn't even mind FMW with their somewhat more extreme version of that same style.

At first all of this glass, light tubes, staple guns stuff was a neat oddity, but now it just keeps getting more and more and with shit like this knife slashing I'm afraid of how much further they will have to go to satisfy things eventually.

My other issue with it, is that a lot of these guys don't need to do it. When I was working as a ring announcer and a commentator, I worked a ton of shows with Matt Tremont and G-Raver. When they did matches that didn't involve that shit, I thought they were just as good or better than when they were maiming themselves for the same pay. But I guess it doesn't get you noticed.

I never had a problem with stuff like Abdullah and his fork, and The Sheik's pencil, because if we are being honest, 95% of the time you could see from the way they were holding it, that it was making minimal contact with the opponent anyway.

So, while I don't have the Cornette levels of disdain for the participants and the fans of deathmatches and angles like the knife thing, it wouldn't hurt my feelings at all if it dried up and went away tomorrow.

[sek69]

It has to have some kind of audience or else people would stop doing it, right? It's not my jam but it seems like the shows that feature it get enough of a crowd to keep doing it so I chalk it up to "if it works, it works, but I don't have to like it".

[joeg]

I think context and execution are the two things that stand out here. I don't think over the top violence is a bad thing in of itself, I think over the top violence for the sake of over the top violence is a bad thing. The idea of how much is too much isn't really an issue to me, its why is this happening, where is this leading, and how was it executed. I haven't seen the GCW match and I probably won't. An intergender tag match in the middle of a card with no heat or backstory shouldn't have any sort of blood or gratuitous  violence let alone a stabbing. The excessive blood and violence in feuds such as Magnum vs Tully, Pogo vs Onita, Funks vs Shiek and Abby, LA Park vs Wagner Jr. etc. is warranted based on the characters involved and the story of the feud.

I think the tag this weekend highlighted several problems in modern wrestling. A lot of these kids weren't really trained or trained properly so what they do is unsafe. They don't understand psychology or story telling, so things that seem wild and crazy are done for the purpose of doing something wild and crazy. As opposed to telling a story that leads to something wild and crazy.  And lastly there's a large section of wrestling fandom that just wants to see wild shit. There is a large portion of the audience that don't care about the story, they just want to see cool moves, flips, or blood. 

[Boss Rock]

I think done correctly (logical escalation of spots, wrestlers who are actually trained and know what they're doing), death matches can be very good. Like almost anything in wrestling, it's all about the execution whether it be a huge move or a spot through glass/light tubes. Masashi Takeda's 2018 in BJW sticks out to me in that regard. But knives is where I draw the line as doing too much.

[concrete1992]

Having seen the spot I can not imagine using any other describer as lame. It puts the whole discussion on a weird footing when we treat that spot in the context of modern deathmatch wrestling as grotesque.

[fxnj]

Any gifs/clips showing the knife spot for those of us who aren't in tune to this sort of this?

[MoS]

I think this clip does a good job of showing the spot in the context of the match itself, although there might be any additional context about the rivalry that I don't know of.

[Rah]

Honestly, it comes across as some bad cosplay of an action movie. She's presenting herself as this vicious knife-wielding psycho only to make sure to lightly slash the guy. That was awful in its execution. Her dropping her selling to pull the knife out of the door for the next spot was also unintentionally hilarious.

I don't have a horse in this race and I'm not asking for someone to be maimed/killed (or even be cut up worse than he was), but if you're going to commit to it just do it or gimmick it. Dump came across as a sociopath by stabbing Omori. Allie Kat? Nowhere close.

[Laz]

I'm with Rah on this one. At least Mr. Pogo would use his sickle to gash because he was a sadistic fuck, really working it while letting the "victim" gig between slashes. This was just sorta business exposing and further proves that the only GCW deathmatch workers who really have a clue have been Nick Gage and...well, anybody else that was big in CZW ~20 years ago.

[Sweet Brown Koko]

Utter crap.

[joeg]

Earlier I said it all has to do with context and execution. After watching that clip I don't know how they could have failed more on either end. It looked bad and didn't make a whole lot of sense.

Edit- I just watched LA Park vs Rush from Neza last month. Multiple glass bottles were broken. A big part of the match was breaking bottles over each others heads and stabbing each other with the broken bottles. It was far more gruesome than this clip. But it made sense. The glass bottles were weapons of opportunity as they brawled around the ring. It wasn't a poorly executed, over contrived spot but a realistic portrayal of a bar fight gone off the rails. And the violence didn't come out of no where as those guys have been feuding for 6 years now so the escalation to that level of violence was warranted. 

[sek69]

Also LA Park is legit one of the best brawlers in the world and is very good at making things look like chaos while at the same time making sure no one gets (seriously) hurt. 

[Coffey]

Man, I don't even know. I definitely think my tastes have changed over the years, for sure, but I never had a super high tolerance for death match wrestling & Terry Funk is probably my all-time favorite wrestler. That's more for his character work, promos & his older stuff though, not his ECW or FMW shit.

I loved ECW & I've always been a big fan of table spots... but like barbed wire or fire? Not gonna be able to do it! The more "extreme" shit, like light tubes, panels of glass, barbed wire ropes & shit - total turn off. I thought Foley was insane for the Hell in a Cell bump. I think thumbtacks are the most extreme thing that should ever happen in a match. And even then it needs to be a super seldom & rare thing.

I don't mind blood. I still love a good old school cage match. But I also think that you can't keep raising the bar & trying to top what others have already done. Like enough was enough years ago & it's a bad look when you had dudes damn near killing themselves for no money in front of no fans just for the shock factor or whatever the fuck. If you're in the main event of a huge show & have a big gate & are making big bucks... and you think you can do something safely & agree to it beforehand & get it cleared? That's a whole different beast. Foley's bump was dumb as hell but it was during the main event of King of the Ring on Pay-Per-View. The shit guys are doing on the Indies like in fucking CZW or GCW? Just fucking stupid.

To me, I liken it to the horror genre in movies. I like some horror films. But shit like The Human Centipede didn't need to be made or exist. The fact it has sequels sums it up. Same with pro wrestling & why morons like Nick Gage get a spotlight.

[Rah]

14 hours ago, joeg said:

Earlier I said it all has to do with context and execution. After watching that clip I don't know how they could have failed more on either end. It looked bad and didn't make a whole lot of sense.

Edit- I just watched LA Park vs Rush from Neza last month. Multiple glass bottles were broken. A big part of the match was breaking bottles over each others heads and stabbing each other with the broken bottles. It was far more gruesome than this clip. But it made sense. The glass bottles were weapons of opportunity as they brawled around the ring. It wasn't a poorly executed, over contrived spot but a realistic portrayal of a bar fight gone off the rails. And the violence didn't come out of no where as those guys have been feuding for 6 years now so the escalation to that level of violence was warranted. 

Speaking of lucha, Pentagon Jr sliced up Arez forehead with a huge knife back in 2014 - he also hammered it into his skin at one point. Graphic but every person who watched that came out thinking "holy fuck, Pentagon is a badass, why can't he be like this in AAA?". That was kinda the match that put him "on the map" as his character, I'd say. With this, we're going to go back to not even knowing/caring who Allie Kat is within a week.