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.

Tuesday, April 1

12-Pack Review: CZW 04/07/01

BEER ONE: Ahh, dark delicious Combat Zone Wrestling, I never know what to expect with you. You might bust out the insane spot-crazy super juniors, or you might have somebody get cut up with a weed eater and get lemon juice poured into their wounds. Maybe Mad Man Pondo with dollar bills stapled to his forehead, or maybe balcony dives. Who the fuck knows? But I do know this, I’m about to sit down and review the Boss is Back, which I’m expecting will feature that sick asshole Zandig prominently. I’ve always enjoyed non-Zandig CZW more, but then again, with him there, I can expect carnage, and carnage is always entertaining as long as I’m not the one healing from said carnage. CZW is one of seventeen ECW wannabes that have survived the demise of ECW and hold onto one aspect or another of the ECW style and try and run shows at Viking Hall as well. We have an interview with The H8 Club, and it’s in a parking lot with a big Ryder truck behind them and everybody is wearing black t-shirts. It’s like Heavy Metal Parking Lot documentary at a Slipknot show in Jersey. Ahh, Jun Kasai will be involved, which guarantees mad carnage. What an entertaining little dumb fuck Jun Kasai is. This is a terrible interview to start the show with. This shit is so Jersey, I love it. Metalhead white guys who put hot sauce on everything, even peanut butter sandwiches. Guys who actually have smoking skull tattoos. I think I used to work with Nate Hatred, he was pulling weekends in the regional jail for getting too many DUIs. His big dream was to move to Virginia Beach and do piercing at a tattoo shop. The Briscoe Brothers are too young and peanut headed to sell any fear in my body. Wrestling is so fucking weird, you have all these people who love to put this work on before people, and you get people who wrestle and referee and announce and commentate and sing the fuckin’ national anthem. It’s ridiculous. I don’t know who this little weasel gravel-voiced color man in the white shirt is but I can assure you, I want to beat the living shit out of him already. Some guy just got black tape put on his mouth. This is fuckin’ gay and stupid. I’m drinking more out of boredom. Ahh, now they’ve got the taped mouth guy on a stick like a stuck pig. And they put dirty underwear in the tied up kid’s mouth. When wrestling border on the sadomasochistic gay porn, I am uninterested. I will drink beer to stifle the homoerotic feelings I have for Justice Pain. I already feel as though I’ve wasted ten minutes of my life. I refuse to do any fast forwarding during these 12-Pack reviews, mostly because drinking beer during boring times is valuable to me. But this is really testing my patience. Good lord, I hope the Juvenile Home Drama Club Performance ends soon enough and actual wrestling takes place. I will drink my way through this boredom. It looks as though your face heroes, led by Zandig, are wearing satin steakhouse jackets. It’s the best thing I’ve seen so far. Three different color satin jackets, by the way. I really need to look into getting some Confederate Mack satin jackets made up.

BEER TWO: Memo to every fuckin’ person involved in the wrestling industry: the Stooge concept is not funny or entertaining or worthwhile. Ever. I wish I could create a mental virus where when somebody thinks, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if he had like a stupid stooge sidekick?” that guy’s mind would automatically get rapid terminal cancer and die painfully. Then again, an idiot who thinks like that probably eats plenty of fast food meat sandwiches and will get cancer soon enough. Hey, it looks like a wrestling match is about to start, imagine that. Nick Berk, who I know very little about, is going up against Little Guido, who is fuckin’ okay in my book. The audio from the ring mic is terrible, but I’ve found if I cut the volume up on the TV all the way, it makes me think painful thoughts, but that settles into a self-defense psychological state of calmness, imagining myself in the field I haven’t bush hogged, amidst the yarrow and black-eyed susans. Black-eyed susans are a beautiful wildflower, and they spread like crazy in a matter of a year or two. There’s fields of them around here. I don’t understand why people cut all their damned grass so often. The flowers look so much better than a flat green. Then again, they do the same thing with their faces and heads and think women with hair on their legs are gross. Fuck this World. And stupid ass Combat Zone is no alternative, it’s the fuckin’ jock making fun of the kid working at Burger King from the driver’s side of his Nissan truck with Chinese vinyl lettering in the back window. Nick Berk, perhaps to intimidate Guido, is dressed exactly like a balding white guy in a Super Crazy outfit. You need two good wrestlers to do the whole multiple counter and no one can gain an advantage thing. After a few ovation-inducing series like this from years past, every indy thinks they can throw something out like that. The problem is, like with this Berk/Guido montage I just saw, if you don’t have two great fluid wrestlers doing it, it automatically kills any credibility the match is attempting to recreate. Work or not, a wrestling card still attempts to have the fan suspend disbelief for a while, unless you’re the WWF and you can parade out pop culture icon after pop culture icon, all mouthing off familiar catch phrases. I’ve been reading a lot about Latino drug cults, like the Matamoros gang, and supposedly all the Brazilian child killings going on now, and even Manuel Noriega are all involved in this thing. It’s all, reportedly, a Satanic hybrid of Santeria and native folk religions from centuries past. Well, reading about all this Satanism has had me listening to a lot of Possessed and King Diamond, and thus, I figured it best to drink my beer from a goblet tonight. I also mixed in a splash of tomato juice, to give it blood-like quality. I am evil, CZW is dimwitted. “He has forgotten more holds than possibly any of us could ever hope to know.” Is that good? When you’re not looking at the weasel color guy while he’s talking, and you just hear him, he sounds just like Gilbert Gottfried. Ahh, the time limit expires during the face pin attempt. Nothing kills a card from the get-go like said angle in first match. NO! NOT FIVE MORE MINUTES! Man, my deeply embedded hatred for all things New Jersey had been subsiding in recent months, mostly because I know it’s not good to hold such hate inside of you, plus kicking it with a couple of kids who came from Jersey originally. But watching pug-nosed Nick Berk suck it up with Gilbert Gottfried on commentary, I can only hope terrorist strap Kevin Smith to a fuckin’ missile and blow up half that state. With all the toxic waste, it would probably burn for years. Jeff Rocker is cut like only a goomba on steroids who reads too many of those Flex magazines can be. Doomsday Danny Rose delivers pizza. Fast Eddie Valentine & Jon Dahmer come out, seemingly as talent enhancement. All the sucky guys in the ring start doing dumb shit while the Briscoe Brothers come out. The Briscoes are decent enough, although small, probably because they’re from Delaware and not New Jersey. Everyone knows that Delaware is like one big truck stop with no sales tax. And everybody knows that New Jersey is where you don’t have to feel bad about throwing your empty beer cans and used Altoids tins out the window.

BEER THREE: I was bad-mouthing CZW to Mike DIKK and he told me, “I’d probably like it if I lived in New Jersey and it was right down the street. But I don’t live in New Jersey.” Somebody who wasn’t the Briscoes won the match, and then some fat white guy with a cigarette and an S1W hat came out and did nothing but walk back with some of the guys. Now a carny worker in shiny pants comes out and argues with the Briscoes. They are 17 and tower over the carny worker. By the way, if I could make the Stooge thing completely die, I would also make all towel boys die. Out comes Red, Jose and Joel Maximo. And hey, it’s a three-way between each other. This will at least be entertaining. Sure, these guys all do some stupid flippy moves that are unbelievable, but you know what? They’re fluid in the ring, so it sort of covers up for the ridiculousness of it all, like good luchadors do. Joel blew a spot by hitting his feet on the top rope and ate concrete. God Bless that young reckless Puerto Rican. Red follows that up with some illmatic shit. Red is great, but he’s smaller than my youngest sister and her growth is stunted from smoking cigarettes by the age of fifteen. She also is a high school dropout. You just don’t see that much nowadays. She got a DUI like two months after her sixteenth birthday, and lost her license of course. It was a campus cop at Longwood College in Farmville that gave her the DUI. Me and her went to see the wrasslin’ matches at Longwood a few months later, and I made her drive ‘cause I had been drinking all day. This was when I was building a Unabomber style shack in the woods behind my mom’s house, which still stands and my other sister actually lived in for a while. Anyways, Jimmy Valiant was wrestling on this show, and that campus cop was there as well. I tried to convince my sister to let me pay for her to get a Polaroid with Boogie Woogie and the cop, and have Valiant sign it, “To Corinne. Don’t drink and drive. Love Boogie.” She wouldn’t do it, and she made me drive home even though I was obviously drunk because she was afraid of that campus cop seeing her drive when he knew she didn’t have no license. A triple pin, and the 37 people in the crowd give a standing ovation, and Gilbert Gottfried is impressed. The S.A.T. being in wrestling is proof positive that you can’t make a living wage in a circus family anymore. It’s a shame. Stupid animal rights activists, fucking everything up all the time. Ahh, the stooge’s name is Z-Barr. He sucks, and looks like a fetal alcohol kid. Trent Acid is going up against Ruckus. I dig both of these guys well enough, so we’ll see what happens. The rest of this card has been sports entertainment-style hardcore crap, but with no fun stuff like Mad Man Pondo stapling his own forehead or Necro Butcher eating light bulbs. Ruckus does some somersaults and backflips onto Acid who is laying on the concrete. That shit looks neat, and is great athleticism for a fat black guy, but come on. That shit’s ridiculous. The Rob Van Dam factor. Somebody should beat the shit out of any young, aspiring wrestler who doesn’t get it that every move should be necessary, no useless embellishments. I remember reading an interview with Sandy Scott where he said he yelled at Lex Luger while Luger was a face in Jim Crockett’s heyday, because Luger did a promo with a gold necklace on. Scott’s reasoning was that your average fan would not identify with the gold chain, so Luger should never where it while trying to be a babyface. Scott would have a hard time now, what with these “writers” brainstorming catch phrases and goofy alternate names relative to the doers gimmick for regular wrestling moves that everybody knows by something simple. They set up six chairs and set Ruckus up on them outside the ring, then Acid does a lame jump on him. Not many things make me wish for a Shane Douglas match, but CZW is doing it.

BEER FOUR: While I went into the kitchen to refill my goblet, Trent Acid won. Now, Jimmy Washington and Natasha come out. This is gonna play on the rednecks sucks gimmick, just like I’d play up the New Jersey people suck if I was a booker here where I live. I like chicks with a little weight, and Natasha is right at that cut-off line. I think she’s too fat, but then again, she’s close enough, with a couple beers in me, I’d be down like the ground. On a related note, it has not taken Big Naturals long to surpass The Bang Bus as my favorite naked women oriented website. If you took the whole CZW roster and did a group shot, it’d look like a bunch of Fast & Furious fans hanging out at the Giant parking lot on a Friday night, only with taped up hands and shiny boots. If Zandig ran a tribal tattoo shop, he wouldn’t even have to pay most of these guys, he could just hook ‘em up with some ink. I bet Natasha was the CZW’s locker room main rat at one point, and that’s how she “broke” into the business. You gotta love the wrasslin’. I figure an ugly dude like Zandig who lets himself get chopped up with barbed wire and shit for forty people is probably the type who likes big tits, regardless of them being on a big woman, and he’d be all up Natasha’s shirt in the parking lot after the show. I think the greatest thing professional wrestling could ever see is if Combat Zone and XPW had an inter-promotional feud and they ran a hardcore war games event in a cornfield in Nebraska, with Jake “The Snake” Roberts as special referee for the event. Zandig and Z-Barr are like two guys you’d see at a flea market, buying aviator sunglasses and snakeskin bandanas. Here comes Lobo, looking like a homeless guy in a stolen football jersey. Even though these guys suck, you’ve gotta hand it to John Zandig. He took a bunch of his shitty friends, started a shitty wrestling company, and now they’ve traveled the World bludgeoning each other. Or at least to Japan. So this started as a Jimmy Washington piece, which turned into Johnny Kashmere talking, which turned into Zandig and his crew talking, and now we’ve got Lobo running his derelict hip hop Mel Tillis yap in the ring. And all the while, Gilbert Gottfried keeps chiming in from moment to moment. I imagine if there’s a Hell, and I’m as bad as I portend to be, it’s gonna end up with me being a 16-year-old girl from New Jersey who eternally has to go to see CZW with her knucklehead boyfriend/baby’s daddy. And I won’t get to hit the blunt behind the building/garage/storage area during the intermission either. Lobo is throwing his credit cards down in the ring in some sort of challenge. You know all three of those credit cards are three hundred dollar limits and there’s just enough for the Chinese buffet down the road on all three combined. Finally, the never-ending CZW mic filibuster has ended. This match has H.C. Loc, and Ric Blade. Ric Blade’s t-shirt says “EXTREME AIR”. Ric Blade is a fuckin’ fag. Every fuckin’ guy dresses the same in CZW. It’s embarrassing. No new girls up at Big Naturals tonight. That new Ines chick is banging, I’d like to see more of her. The wet tank top shot is fuckin’ great. Nobody beats Justine though; she’s my favorite so far. “That match will haunt him for the rest of his career.” I imagine former CZW wrestlers think that a lot.

BEER FIVE: Ric Blade gracefully executes a Lou Thesz press on H.C. Loc, and follows up with a stunning spinning toehold center-ring, for the submission victory. He graciously slaps hands with the decent upstanding citizens in attendance and heads to the back for a glass of rum on ice. Johnny Kashmere is in the ring, and they’re hyping up a matc with Trent Acid, which means it won’t happen. Towel Boy, who looks to be 14, is gonna face Johnny Kashmere, in a much anticipated rematch to their match in Z-Barr’s aunt’s backyard two Wednesdays before after school. In that one, Towel Boy did a wicked hurricanrana off Z-Barr’s aunt’s roof with a reverse duct tape thumbtacked whiffle ball bat onto Kashmere who was laid out on a full-size trampoline. Kashmere took powder to the face and didn’t flinch. That doesn’t mean he’s double tough; that means CZW is shit. Justice Pain and Wifebeater are in the ring, and they look to be interchangeable with seventeen other guys who have been on this show. Nate Hatred and Nick Gage enter the ringside area. Now, with face paint on, Nate Hatred looks like a guy I used to work who was pulling weekends in the regional jail, but with bad Halloween party paint on. He’s trying to be King Diamond, but he didn’t feel like trying real hard, because, you know, trying ain’t cool. Gilbert Gottfried guy’s voice has gotten weaker from him pretending he talks like that, so now he sounds like Dee Snider’s younger brother. I am anxiously awaiting the Catch 22 team of Zandig and Jun Kasai to come out and fuck all this shit up that’s going on. How can you enjoy a match where everybody is a heel to one extent or another? Kasai is so damned goofy you have to love him. I heard he retired recently. Tough shit Japboy. Maybe you shouldn’t have wrestled barefoot on thumbtacks and fucked yourself up so bad on light bulb tubes that your elbow muscle was hanging outside of your arm. But I enjoyed it while you were doing dumb shit in front of video cameras. Do you have a younger brother? Or better yet sister? The blockbuster neckbreaker is my least favorite move. It’s another one that has lots of embellishment but little substance. The guy getting victimized basically just falls backwards and pretends it hurts. The guy doing the move takes a worse bump. Wifebeater on two tables in front of a balcony. And Jun Kasai drops from the ceiling. That’s worth drinking beer. Plus the fact the announcer repeats two times, “The Wifebeater is not moving,” all serious-like. Wow, the match ended while I wasn’t paying attention. The locker room has emptied and now there’s twenty-three guys in black t-shirts flailing away on each other. Jun Kasai rocks. Everything else sucks, except maybe Lobo, because I bet he rolls tight blunts. Those poor Briscoe Brothers. I bet they aged, psychologically, so much by being in the CZW locker room for however long they were there. Bad metal music comes on cuing the end of the tape, so fuck, I’m over and out.

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