RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Thursday, March 20

12-Pack Review: ECW 04/07/07

BEER ONE: To be straight up with you, I usually drink three beers before doing one of these things, to get myself prepped, kind of like some fag mixed martial artist doing pushups or Triple H letting the oil lady rub oil all over his chest or, well, you get the point, I could run that gimmick for three beers. It seemed fitting that I follow up the first ECW Pay-Per-View review with one of their last PPV, the Omega to the Alpha. ECW ran one more weekend of cards after this PPV, but basically, this was it. Dangerously’s bullshit conman from NYC suburbs way had run too thin even with his most devoted cult members. But he created one helluva cult there for a few years, and had a great run, probably the best non-major run since the fall of the territories in the ‘80s. ECW was a very new product, with some great workers dedicated to the cause, and a pretty smart, wrestling-wise, guy behind the shit, and they still failed. Doesn’t give one much hope for somebody knocking off that roided pervert, Vince McMahon, off his golden pedestal. Oh well. This was the first ever PPV I got out here at the Compound once we got a satellite hooked up. To this day, I can go back into PPV Purchase History, and scroll down to the bottom, and there it is, ECW Living Dangerously. Probably the only promotion that has meant more to me, on an interactive level, where I could watch it happen on TV, not on tape, has been Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling, though if I lived near the Mexican border or they offered EMLL PPVs in America, ECW might fall to third. Goddamn, what nerdy fuckin’ talk. Let’s drink beer and watch some goddamned wrasslin’. The first lyrics to the song on the intro are “No matter how hard you try, you can’t stop us now.” Very ironic. I’ll drink to irony, though I hate Rage Against the Machine, which is the crap that I think is playing. So I’ll drink for the irony, being an English major, and drink more in hatred towards quasi-intellectual white boys pretending to be communists down with rap music. I hope Boots from the Coup murders you with your mother’s nosebone. Shiny outfits are the saviors of whores, whether they be in porn movies, in wrestling rings, or on street corners. They dazzle men with the shiny clothes, which confuses us away from the hideous faces they usually sport. Francine brings these thoughts out in me. I would rather have sex with C.W. Anderson than Francine. This is a really long intro, and there’s no Sabu breaking stuff, which means this was during ECW’s wack years, though the Dawn Marie ring entrance is nice. She also has the hideous face, but I’ve always convinced myself for some reason that her breasts are real, so she can be hot. Chicks with fake tits can’t be hot in my book, ever, just like wrestlers in the WWF can’t be bad ass. These stubborn illogical rules are the yeast that makes the Confederate Mack rise into a loaf of sour cynical sustenance for all the assholes who somehow got involved with reading the zine. Joel Gertner as an over character sucks. He was much better in his tux with no shirt, getting beers thrown on him, just saying zany zingers. His pimp fur coat looks ridiculous, and his long played out limerick gimmick towards the end, with Joey Styles laughing and agreeing, it sucks. Rick Rude is dead and Joel Gertner is alive. There is no God. His creepy fu manchu stache is extra NAMBLA-style creepy. Shit, I paused the tape to go piss off the porch, but now I can’t ‘cause somebody built a house in that field over there and it looks like the house is done and they finally moved in. Goddamn, I hate neighbors. We moved to bumfuck Fluvanna County to escape all other people, after living in scenic run-down Oregon Hill in Richmond, Virginia, where we would occasionally be awakened by clips being emptied into some direction very much nearby, and we’d roll on top of our baby daughter in fear, me and my wife in unison, clunking heads like a heel jobber tag team getting worked by Jimmy Valiant after Rocky King finally made the tag. I’m just as not-down with my pissing off the easily accessible front porch because of fuckin’ visible neighbors as I am not-down with gangsta thug white trash kids with Dodge Rams with nice rims and neon undercarriages unloading their 9 clip in the middle of the night at the end of the block. Hey, look, it’s Christian York & Joey Matthews representing Virginia. Too bad they got jumped by Da Baldies, who sucked whenever Vic Grimes wasn’t trying to die or P.N. News wasn’t doing a hilarious Curly impression. I saw Christian York land on his brain trying a moonsault outside the ring at the Chesterfield County Fair one time. That was the first of two wrestling shows I dragged my sweet over-understanding wife to. She was immensely creeped out by the crowd enthusiastically calling Julio Sanchez “Taco Bell” in unison. Then she was even more creeped out during intermission when the little raggedy kid with her dad in front of us came running up, saying, “Daddy, can I have five dollars to take a picture with Taco Bell?” He gave her the money, and she ran off, cheering, “Taco Bell! Taco Bell!” Cyrus & Jerry Lynn beat York & Matthews. Cyrus sure was funny sometimes as a commentator, but he sure did suck when he was inside a ring trying to say stuff, and he sure was Canadian, with is a euphemism for being fuckin’ goofy. Wow, Matthews bladed a gusher to job out in the opening match. I’ll drink a fuckload to that, the gushing jobber. I wish the masked Mr. JL would show up on EMLL, to feud with Black Tiger. Jerry Lynn saying his last name in death metal style is also nice. Apparently, when ECW was in Richmond the last time it came through, Jerry Lynn was proud as fuck to sport a Lamb of God t-shirt, as he’s heavy into death metal. Knowing all those Lamb of God guys, and how they could give a fuck about wrestling, except the drummer, who used to get drunk and play early WWF video games on the Sega Genesis with me, that’s funny. Death metal and wrestling and guys who wear glasses when they talk but not when they wrestle, that’s the type of guy I can relate to.

BEER TWO: Wow, I had completely blocked from my mind the existence of that garish whore Elektra. Hot Commodity comes out, which is Julio Dinero, the same guy who had that kid chanting “Taco Bell!” in Chesterfield County, and EZ Money, who makes his own tights, and is not afraid to make weird looking tights. Out comes the ECW World tag champs, on the second match of the night and the first real match, showing what a shitty title this was at the time, it’s Roadkill, a guy I tried to pick a fight with not too long ago, and the most useless shitty wrestler of the last 4 years, Dangerous Danny Doring. Chris Hamrick, aka Confederate Currency, is ringside, sporting confederate flag trunks, which is tight, but they are glossy leather, which is not tight. But he is balding with a ponytail, so that puts him over the top on the side of good. Doring & Roadkill were a poor man’s Hart Foundation, without the great technical half and without a dope-ass goatee that the silent guy could stroke during interviews. Julio Dinero, the night I saw him in Chesterfield, billed himself as “The Freakin’ Puerto Rican” and he had a fat white guy as his manager, as is the standard at shitty indy cards where craft shows are within walking distance. The fans love Roadkill, and I dug the Amish gimmick, but it would’ve been much better if he dissed the fans as modern assholes and didn’t play up to them. He should’ve been the eternal heel, because he was so good in an ancient sense. We’re all decadent depraved assholes nowadays, we hate Godly types. Doring does the shittiest high risk maneuver I’ve ever seen. Doring is useless. EZ Money is wearing sheer ass tights, with a thong underneath, plus weird leg strips down the side that open back up by his boots into full pants. He is a fuckin’ weirdo. I would bet everything I own that he has a couple of bestiality videotapes in his possession. I paused the tape to go piss off the front porch, fuck the neighbors. They’ve got a fuckin’ orange doorbell light on all the goddamned time. Why the fuck do you need a doorbell with a light in the fuckin’ country? I have two dogs, they bark when somebody pulls up our driveway. Even if both my dogs had gotten run overed by logging trucks during the day, I would still recognize the oddball sound of somebody pulling up the driveway. But these fuckers that live across the street, they’ve got a fuckin’ doorbell with an orange light. Fuck them. Doring makes the hot tag to Roadkill in a very weak attempt to emulate the Southern tag wrestling style. Roadkill poses to the crowd more than Rob Van Dam. Joey Styles, in the latter stages, was fuckin’ stupid, as every move had some dumbass tweaked nickname related to the goofball doing it. Jalapeno Popper, Money Clip, Wham Bam Thank You Maam, and the Buggy Bang, all were stupid ass supposedly clever nicknames for moves I heard during this match. This is why Joey Styles was great for a couple years, and ended up selling sets of quarters in infomercials, while Gordon Solie is still respected, even as a dead motherfucker. Wow, it’s Nova coming out to Quiet Riot in his new cool guy get-up, after he stopped being a comic book nerd. He’s going against Chris Hamrick, one-on-one. Hell, I just saw this match a month or so ago. Nova sucked then and he sucks now. Comic book nerds on “nutritional supplements” wearing leather pants in order to seem cool to 15-year-old girls who are on the path to obesity and suffering from low self-esteem due to having a drunken violent father figure, those are the lowest comic book nerds of all, and that’s a motherfuckin’ pitiful subculture to be the bottom rung of. This trips me out ‘cause it’s Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC, and Chris Hamrick is wearing shiny confederate flags, jaw-jacking with the crowd. That makes me happy. There’s no armory parking lot outside he can go get high at, and drive away his Escort with the passenger side door smashed shut eternally, outside. It’s a goddamned city out there. Fuckin’ Babylon. And here’s some balding ponytailed fucker from some shit-town in shiny confederate flag gear playing the heel. I love some motherfuckin’ wrestling sometimes.

BEER THREE: Nova is a non-selling asshole, and the superkick is the most overused move in all of wrestling. Fuck a superkick. I want more swinging neckbreakers. Shit, here’s ref angles involving Chris Chetti, and Sign Guy Dudley pretending to be Paul Heyman. Shitty gimmick overload. Of course, out hobbles Spike Dudley with a bionic Steve Austin kneebrace on. The Dudleys’ were better when they wore real tie-dyes and not the two-color bleach dyed deals. Dances With Wolves Dudley is still the penultimate Dudley, him and pre-super popular Buh-Buh Ray Dudley. Wow, there’s all sorts of crap going on. Suddenly Nova wins over Hamrick, when that match had already ended. And Nova pours water over his head. He is Triple H Light, all the ego with a third of the crowd in attendance. A Steve Corino promo with Jack Victory stalking behind him, making facial expressions. That is some motherfuckin’ wrestling right there. I fully expect them to go back to a desk where Gordon Solie makes some comment about how Corino’s views are his own, then Jimmy Garvin, with the Southern belt with that swank red background in front of his mic, says that Corino made perfect sense. The busted brick wall entrance ramp of the ECW set is about the wackest fuckin’ thing ever. Out comes C.W. Anderson, throwing up gang signs. This is an I-Quit match with Tommy Dreamer, and I remember the first time I watched this how much I thought it sucked. I-Quit matches are judged, by me, according to the high watermark of the Magnum T.A./Tully Blanchard cage I-Quit match at Starrcade ’85. Since seeing that, any I-Quit match is like the Red Hot Chili Peppers doing a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground”, completely unnecessary and not even close to how fuckin’ ruling-it the original was. If you’re gonna take a stab at an I-Quit match, you have to come with something extraordinary, completely insane and believable. C.W. Anderson and Tommy Dreamer are not gonna bring that, no matter how hyped they can get. For me, this doesn’t make their feud seem more intense; it weakens my opinion of both these guys as wrestlers for thinking this wack-ass curtain-jerking event qualifies, simply by being an I-Quit match, as a major feud-decider. Plus, Tommy Dreamer creeps me out more than any wrestler ever in the history of me paying attention to it. Even more so than Gene Ligon. C.W. is smaller than the ref, just as bald, and has hands doing the “C.W.” thing on his trunks. C.W. is not cool. There’s a Jewish guy in the front row with some goofy rice field hat on, trying to make funny hand gestures towards C.W. while the match is going on. I hate New York City. “You can send me to Hell or New York City; it’d be about the same to me.” God bless you, Hank Williams Jr. I’m going to drink beer in Hank Jr.’s honor and in spite of C.W.’s sellout ass joining Chris Hamrick and EZ Money in being southern stereotypes that job to Paul Heyman’s buddies in some weak attempt to put the North over the South in the squared circle, when everybody fuckin’ knows that Dusty Rhodes could get stopped for an autograph anywhere in the World, while Bruno Sammartino is lucky anybody even wants to listen to him complain anymore. Or something. Tommy took somebody’s beer and took a tiny little sip. Crowd participation, and gay as shit. If you’re gonna take somebody’s beer, throw it on somebody. The bell-ringing thing Tommy Dreamer did was the worst. Tommy Dreamer sucks more than hitting a porn link at one of those free sites and accidentally seeing a gay amputee guy anal action picture. Dreamer’s bleeding like a fat fuck, but it still ain’t selling me. Oh, a little tiny loop of razor barbed wire, big shit. I’ve seen backyard wrestling wrap their roof in that shit and dive off through a table full of burning little sisters, so why should I care about Tommy Dreamer’s shiny little loop of razor wire? Towelboy gets superplexed by C.W., and in a move that makes me drink more beer, C.W. held him up for a while, up on the second rope. That’s tight. Of course, it’s stupid like when my uncles would take turns suplexing me across their bed at the back of my Grandma’s trailer, but what the fuck, it’s ECW. We have chairs set-up next together for suplexes, and we have bad wrestling trunks with too much purple and we have Tommy Dreamer and we have Joey Styles over-emphasizing everything and we have a crowd that tries to be cool by chanting the same old shit, even when not necessary. I hate how Tommy Dreamer’s Death Valley Driver became the Spicolli Driver after Louis OD’ed, like him and Tommy were best fuckin’ friends since childhood or some shit. Tommy Dreamer is a piece of crap. He and Paul Heyman can’t be in a car together, riding to a C-team WWF event, and wreck and die fast enough for me. My mama told me to not say shit like that because it could come true and I’d feel bad, but seriously, if Heyman and Dreamer died tonight, I’d just think, “Wow, that’s fucked up I said that and they died. I hope my boss dies, too.” I wouldn’t get all weirded out; I’m not one of those famous-people worshipping dorks who think any type of spiritual energy in the Universe cares when you say “R.I.P. Famous Person I’ve Never Met In Real Life”. ECW Theater Hour, starring Francine as a dumb bitch making sexual innuendos with a large 3 foot sub sandwich that was probably originally hired to feed the boys, a balding young ‘un named Justin Credible, a used tire-lipped bitch with fake tits called Missy Hyatt, the giant hockey jersey wearing Jack Victory, and Steve Corino pretending to be shocked at what he knew would happen. It was terrible, I’m purposely not drinking beer for 10 minutes in protest of this crap. The Full-Blooded Italians come out. Tony Mamaluke rules because he looks like a 14-year-old growing his hair long for the first time ever because he just heard evil rock-n-roll for the first time. He’s always looked like this. Then, invariably, in his match, he breaks himself in ways that any other self-protecting wrestler never would. Plus, he has a bird chest, which is rare in wrestling. Out comes Kid Kash, claiming Waynesboro, Virginia, as his hometown, which is like 20 minutes up the road. They have a hella nice dirt track there. Super Crazy is his partner. And team three is Mikey Whipwreck & Yoshihiro Tajiri, the absolute most fuckin’ kick ass tag team of the last couple years. Whipwreck & Tajiri in matching outfits with flames and shit, they rocked. They fuckin’ rocked. Whipwreck hobbles, as usual, and Tajiri’s eyeballs look like he just got stung by yellowjackets, as usual.

BEER FOUR: This is the first match on this show I’m actually stoked to be re-watching. ECW tag team 3-way dances are the only 3-way matches I’ve ever really enjoyed. This is to determine the number one contenders to the World tag titles, which were contested in an unimportant match earlier in the night. This makes no sense, and makes your titles seem stupid. Crap like this wouldn’t have happened in ECW circa 1995. And it happening in ECW circa 2000 is why there is no ECW circa 2002. Tajiri and Super Crazy are in the ring together, and of course, they’re doing that annoying camera pan in and out thing that ECW did to make you think things were so fuckin’ hyper you could barely keep up and were getting ready to have an epileptic seizure on your goddamned couch. YES! Whipwreck and Tajiri hit the double submission holds, lucha style. Beer is drunk, fool. Kid Kash and Super Crazy are eliminated, because they’re not a team, just two guys put together. Little Guido is probably the only Italian I like on Earth. Everybody who can has been convinced to wear purple tonight, I’m not sure why. Double Whippersnapper from the top rope turned into Double Fujiwhatever Armbar, turned into Tajiri kicking fuckers in the face, leading to finishing shit. That James Vandeberg dude was evil looking, even with his stupid long fingernails and stupid over-laughing. He should’ve sharpened his teeth into fangs if he was carney serious about being evil. “Unbelievable balance”, that’s a term I’ve heard quite enough of while watching wrestling. If I’ve heard that shit so much, don’t you think I can believe it by now? If they were having a ladder match, and some dude walked the wire the belt was hanging from, with one of those old school long rods to balance himself that black-and-white guys over top of cities used for some reason, that’d be “unbelievable balance”. But Kid Krash doing a lucha move, that’s just some normal shit to me. Wow, they’re plugging the upcoming shows, and the last ECW show was in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. That’s fuckin’ funny. Post-WCW The Sandman was too skinny and shirtless for my tastes. Simon Diamond and Johnny Swinger come out, late in the show, because Dawn Marie is with them. This review sucks. I’m gonna just drink beer. Johnny Swinger rocks. Wow, out comes the Blue Boy, formerly the Blue Meanie, with his whore fiancé Jasmin St. Claire. I’m gonna make a poster of Nova & the Blue Meanie when they were Stevie Richards sidekicks, and then put beside it pictures of Nova now & the Blue Boy, and put it in wrestling schools around the world to keep fuckin’ dumbasses from thinking they are cool by being wrestlers. Balls Mahoney and Chilly Willy come out in the goofiest leftover guys paired together team of the night. Rhyno, or is Rhino, fucks up everybody, including whores.

BEER FIVE: Rhino sucks and is punching the exact same door that supposedly Justin Credible was having sex with tire-lipped Missy Hyatt behind. Cyrus has long hair and small eyeballs, like any Canadian who thinks he’s cool. Steve Corino comes out, with logo shit on his dick spot on the trunks. Why do wrestlers try and bring attention to their dicks? Justin Credible comes out and I’m bored. Tank top and jeans The Sandman sucks, compared to t-shirt and Joey Buttafucco weightlifter pants The Sandman. The Sandman is pouring beer over the railing on people. The Sandman’s upside down tattoo of his head with a bullet hole through it, so when he drinks beer with his arm upraised, the tattoo is rightside up, that’s a great fuckin’ tattoo. Corino/Credible/Sandman outfits are the three degrees of the modern wrestling outfits. Corino’s golden old school trunks are the red sky, Credible’s grungish cut-off shorts with leggings are the white air, and The Sandman’s street clothes not really being street clothes but what the wrestles in are the black earth. There’s a ladder being bounced around and guys wrestling and shit and I’m kind of paying attention.

BEER SIX: Kick to the ladder, always in a ladder match. Predictable shit sucks. We’ve got a third ladder and I missed the second one. The belt goes higher in the air, it’s a shenanigan. The Sandman wins the belt in a very unclimactic ending. Match over, but Jack Victory puts a table in the ring. Somehow The Sandman is champ and a table got left in the corner leaning and Rhino is back. Of course he wins the title suddenly. It sucks; but it’s wrestling. Out comes Rob Van Dam, in tiger stripes and skull trunks. Out comes Jerry Lynn, so they can hope to recreate the magic that made RVD a superstar and Jerry Lynn a guy who has a regular job. They do the four minute thing where nobody hits anybody because the guy just barely moved out the way, flip over the back, face off with both fists up, guys are equally matched nonsense. Psychologically, I can respect that sequence for establishing the guys as the fuckin’ same. But on the other hand, once you’ve seen it like four times in the same promotion, it’s like getting a blowjob from the same chick, it gets boring. You know what’s going to happen. I haven’t paid attention because I don’t care. That’s the sign a show sucks. Jerry Lynn and Rob Van Dam are having a long match and Rob Van Dam is bleeding from his bongsucker. I wonder how many guys got paid for this show? I wish I hadn’t have rewatched this to remind myself how I wasted twenty bucks on crap.

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