John Mortell’s blog

Never heard of Dan Kroffat before but this is an absolutely brilliant match from 1995. Even though Van Dam lacks a lot of the moves that later made him famous, he still puts on a great show and Kroffat moves with much greater poise than a man of his size should be able to…

Ridiculous, yet very short match. Watch the absolutely insane movement of Yoshitune. 1st move – jump over the rope, 2nd, over the rope again.. and so on. Absolutely crazy to watch:

You watch this kind of match where they have solid mat wrestling and high-flying in what seems to be a ‘normal’ (i.e. not PPV quality) match and you really have to wonder what people see in the WWE:

Just a couple of links that are pretty interesting. The first is a new Stephen King series ‘N’ which has been made into a combination animated comic/cartoon in association with Marvel Comics. Seems pretty good from what the first episode shows anyway.

Next is ‘wrestling mania‘ which is more for my own entertainment, a handy blog with most of the big American shows on video.

Finally up, is a blog by my mate Harry from TCD. Definitely one of the more interesting characters I’ve met debating, his blog hasn’t a whole lot on it yet, but is worth the look.

I watched the most recent episode of TNA today and after watching some very poor matches like Bubba Dudley vs Homicide and A.J Styles vs Booker T I went and re-watched this classic from the early days of TNA. It really underescores is how poor TNA has gotten in recent years.

The Great Muta vs Hiroshi Hase. A match so infamous that it has its own term. Owing to the amount of blood on certain websites you can find bloody matches rated on the ‘Muta scale’. If you don’t believe watch from 15.20 on. And if you don’t think watching that much blood isn’t an awful lot.. well your probably a very sick person.

While I’m posting stuff, here’s an Eddie Guerrero / JBL match that also ranks pretty high on the Muta scale and Muta himself against Jushin Thunder Liger in a pretty entertaining match Continue Reading »

A very weird match against Yin Ling. Cian has some more weird stuff that this guy has done.

Two great websites that I’ve neglected to put onto my blogroll so far – Wrestling Gone Wrong is pretty self-explanatory one would think, while Act-I-Vate is a ‘webcomics collective’ featuring some truly great talents. While I haven’t had a chance to go through all the content they have, I would happily recommend ‘Kelly’ by Dan Goldman, though be warned that it is a truly fucked-up piece of work and ‘Lily McKenzie’ by Simon Fraser

Seek and you shall find I guess. It’s interesting how in the opening clip alone, there are nearly more people than appeared in the ‘Rise and Fall’ and how people involved seem to back up Paul Heyman’s claim that he created ‘attitude’ in wrestling… Update: For example, this dvd shows up two of the main faults I have with the WWE produced stuff, there’s a proper explanation for what happend with the NWA and its championship AND they mention whats apparently the ‘first’ 3-way dance in the U.S between Sabu, Shane Douglas and Terry Funk. Now apparently its an hour long but why hasn’t the WWE put that on the ‘Rise and Fall’ disk? I mean, if it’s simply just becuase of the fact that they weren’t working for them its a bit of a blow to the fans…

Continue Reading »

So as a few of the posts I have done before might suggest, I’m somewhat of a fan of ECW. Now, I have covered the ‘Rise and Fall of ECW’ before in the book form, but I recently picked up the DVD version of the same.

As I said in the book review, the DVD works better because wrestling is a visual medium, and the whole documentary works really well as a talking heads example of history. Now plently of the history and things that happened there are covered, though you can’t help but feel that the lack of Raven, Sabu and Shane Douglas harms the production somewhat (many wrestlers who weren’t under contract to WWE at the time were not involved in the DVD). In some ways, its an advertisement for the ‘Forever Hardcore’ documentary that Douglas did afterwards. Yet, despite the fact that it is a ‘WWE produced’ dvd, it seems to cover most of the bases pretty honestly. Many of the individuals involved are quite critical of each other, and so on, but to be honest, until I see ‘Forever Hardcore’ and see what that says about things, I won’t really know how to feel. Basically, its 3-odd hours of solid documentary and well worth a look.

There are one or two serious complaints though, both of which appear in my other reviews of ECW material produced by WWE. Firstly, as I said in the review of the ‘Rise and Fall book’ the whole ECW seccedding from NWA isn’t covered, while it’s mentioned in the book, it has no real role in the DVD. Secondly, I’m fairly sure they have the same ‘Bam Bam Bigelow VS Taz’ match on both the ‘Rise and Fall’ and ‘extreme’ dvds. Seriously! If your going to put out these dvds, try minimise overlap! ECW ran long enough that there should surely be enough good material to go around. Still though, the matches available on the DVD are quite enjoyable, with plenty ‘holy shit!’ moments so….