(Written by jom)
Truly a who's who of a SED tag. DRAGON SCREW favorite Greed is here, joining forces with the mountainous Big Joe to take on the faux-nooj contingent of top guy Nashimoto and fed owner Samurai. It's irreverence like this that really speaks to my soul. And wouldn't you know it, this was fun! Not at all great or anything, but a good time to be had nonetheless. Greed and Joe work almost like an ascended version of the Big Show/Miz duo, probably because the little guy in this rendition is actually a talented worker. They do way less tag moves than you'd probably hope for, but they few they do pull off are all pretty cool. Instead, they're just a general force to be reckoned with, running interference and doing their best individual jobs at beating down the faces. Big Joe's big man spots have some good weight to them, and his suplex on the very large Nashimoto was genuinely pretty impressive. Speaking of Nashimoto, this might be the best Hashimoto impersonator I've seen yet, just by virtue of looking almost exactly like him (if the impression was specifically "Hashimoto after a Cheesecake Factory run" then he'd be spot-on). He throws some good chops and kicks as well, and all of his DDT lands with a nice oomph. Ero Samurai is easily the least engrossing of the four men here, lacking the crispness of Greed or the bigness of Joe or the Shinya-ness of Nashimoto, but he still comes off as a good enough local act with his Mighty Inoue sentons. Of course, my favorite guy here is Greed. It'll always be Greed! Even with this being more of an unserious crowd-pleaser tag, he finds a few moments to pull out shit I've never seen before, like his flying knee/cutter combo. I'm not going to tell you that this was anything particularly special, but it's a seven minute match and a fun one at that. For a match taking place in a shopping mall, it does its job as well as it can. Who wouldn't want to see two guys called Big Joe and Greed beating up the fraudulent shin nihon soldiers while going to Spencer's to grab a vibrator and a t-shirt for the worst metal band you've ever heard of? I know I would.
Match Rating: B-
Big Akabira vs. Hannibal Shimizu (WIN 03/02/1986)
This is easily the oldest match I've covered on the blog yet. WIN is one of the oldest amateur feds ever, starting back in the 70s as JWA Kanto and still running shows to this very day. Akabira and Shimizu are two of the biggest legends of the WINverse, so seeing them face off is pretty awesome. Akabira looks like the entire IWE roster merged into one junior heavyweight, while Shimizu comes out looking like the most evil Shiro Koshinaka, complete with "One Of These Days" by Pink Floyd. Using Abby's theme song definitely sets a certain expectation for violence, but I honestly think they did a solid job of trying to reach those expectations. Easily the best parts of this match come in the form of the brawling and Shimizu heat spots, with both guys very happy to recklessly throw each other into the crowd and swing chairs with tons of force at each other's heads. Shimizu's time in control is pretty damn impressive, using the ring bell hammer like an icepick and jabbing Akabira all over the head with it, while also throwing what I can only call prototype shoteis, nasty sweeping palm strikes usually to the chin or forehead. He also plays the victim well once Akabira takes back control, running the blade and getting good juice while Akabira proves his worth with nasty kicks and no-hand headbutts (Akabira in general is pretty awesome here, just not in a way worth much discussion). Shimizu certainly isn't a perfect product, and his moveset's lack of variance ends up making the tail-end of his control segment feel a little redundant, but I have a lot of love for a guy who knows how to torture, and Shimizu tortures well. What I do not have a lot of love for is the matwork in the first third of this match, especially Shimizu's. He has a real hover hand dysfunction going on, barely ever putting any hold on with any sort of torque or force behind it. Akabira is a fine enough matworker and works to fill in the gaps left by Shimizu's work, but it feels so unfitting for a match like this to have a genuinely boring motionless matwork segment as the opening act to a hateful brawl. Without this segment and with a little more variation during the heat spots, this match could've been something truly special. As it stands, this is still borderline great, and more than that, such a fascinating piece of wrestling footage. The fact we have any footage at all of these guys is pretty incredible, and I personally welcome any and all new footage of amateurs pretending to be Abdullah The Butcher.
Match Rating: B+
Sado vs. Hareta Kogan (WIN 04/11/2010)
We now leap forward almost a quarter of a century, landing in a WIN with a larger ring base, a smaller fan base, and a whole new crop of guys that strongly resemble your favorite professionals. Sado is a little nondescript style-wise but looks like a Dollar General action figure version of MIKAMI. Hareta Kogan meanwhile comes out to the nWo cut of Voodoo Child, carrying a weight belt while already having one on. Now, having heard this, if you guessed that these two would proceed to have one of the more creative and compelling technical matches of the decade, you would be shockingly correct! No joke, this is some damn good stuff, the kind of gritty matwork that speaks all languages and tells you the type of story wrestling was built for. Both of these guys are hardcore arm victimizers in this match, and not only do they get their moments to shine, but each moment says something about the wrestler themselves. Sado is a really plucky and desperate underdog, constantly unleashing hell with lots of knee strikes and kicks to the arm whenever he can. He's fighting from beneath for most of the match, so he really tries to get everything he can out of each moment he's in the driver's seat. Kogan, on the other hand, is a petty, ruthless scumbag. His armwork is a lot more creative and usually very targeted, almost aimed directly at small spots on the arm rather than trying to attack the whole thing. He pulls off this incredibly nasty environmental move at one point, slamming Sado elbow-first onto the stepladder-type thing serving as a corner. When he's not finding new and inventive ways to permanently decrease the range of motion in Sado's left arm, he's letting out his frustrations at Sado's endurance in some of the most despicable ways possible, like slamming a defiant Sado's arm directly onto the gym floor. Honestly, more than being just an excellent technical match, this also serves as a tour de force for Kogan's character work. He comes off as such a chickenshit bully, gleeful as the tormentor but conceited as the tormented. There's this one really wonderful moment in the closing stretch of the match where Kogan finally escapes from a Sado armbar after knee'ing his way out of it, only to then throw the shittiest grounded chop with his bad arm, really only hurting himself in the moment. That's just the kind of guy he is, though. Kogan feels the need to always get one over, no matter how pathetic his attempt may be. Having given this match so much praise, I do feel the need to clarify it's far from perfect. There are a few sloppy moments in the latter half of the match, combined with Sado's armwork being decidedly less interesting than Kogan's even if it served the purposes I mentioned before. The biggest mark against this match is how, in the end, it becomes more about the final bombs of the match than the armwork that led up to it (even if those bombs, especially the incredible step-up kenka kick, are generally great). The armwork isn't forgotten per se, and flashes of it appear in the final moments, but it does feel a little weird for a match like this to end with anything but a hold on the arm. That being said, I wouldn't say it wasted my time with the armwork. The work was compelling, told a great story, and got the match where it needed to go. I had a great time here, and I definitely recommend checking it out for yourself.
Match Rating: A-
Enshop Takeuchi vs. Skin Takano (Pablic 05/05/1995)
Now this right here is an anomaly. I've tried looking into this "Pablic" show multiple times now, and every time I've found nothing. It's weird considering there's a sizable crowd and this tape has pretty high production values, but I can't find a single thing concerning this event. Hell, I haven't even had any luck with finding info on any of the wrestlers. As far as I know, Enshop Takeuchi and Skin Takano are ghosts haunting this VHS tape, ephemeral beasts of passion and pro-wres that existed within the sphere of "Pablic" and nowhere else. It almost feels fitting to the match itself, because this match is bizarre. It feels adjacent to a lot of styles but never actually fits into one. My best summation of this match would be two aliens trying to work the Battlarts juniors style, while also not actually knowing any of the conventions of wrestling beyond what they've picked up from being on Earth for 10 minutes. Even then, I don't think that summation does this match justice. At certain points it feels closer to something from the 2000s backyard scene (which you can read all about on Yard Subject To Change! I write there! My friends write there! Go read it), and other times it feels like the kind of slower matwork you'd see from the Osamu Kidos of the world. Takeuchi and Takano work sequences never put together before, going from backflip lariats to side headlocks with such little transition in-between that you'd think it's always been natural to jump from one to the other. The big spots of this match are equally baffling; I've never before seen an up-kick used as a counter to an elbow drop, and considering just how scary it looks, I kind of get it. Looking for the actual plot of this match feels like a losing effort. At certain points, it seems like the story is Takano's more technically-minded offense cancelling out Takeuchi's bigger bombs, but then Takano will pull off an even crazier bomb and now that idea is out the window. For as much as this match says, none of it actually feels real, but there's something incredibly engrossing about complete fantasy. I wouldn't say I get this match, but I really do love it. It's professional wrestling from an alternate universe where the conventions are flipped on their heads and nothing makes sense to us. Maybe one day someone will figure out what the fuck a "pablic" is. It probably won't be in my lifetime though.
Match Rating: B+
Karasuno Sho vs. Sylgadeter Smatallone (RAW 12/04/2022)
To pull the curtain back a bit more than I usually do, this right here is why I'm doing this special post. Kusa Pro Wrestling RAW is a promotion I've had a long fondness for, and some of the first writing I ever did on this blog (then the Shin-Kiba 1st BLOG) was covering matches for my series "Monday Night RAW." It had a not-so-clever name and subpar writing, but it was where I started to flex my creative muscles and attempt some sort of analysis beyond match recap, along with being some of the most fun I had ever had doing this blogging stuff. I'm also doing this because of the champion going into this title match, Karasuno Sho. Sho's been the ace of RAW for years at this point, returning from a hiatus just recently to re-cement his place at the top. He's also the reason I'm still writing. I've stopped and started on this blogging business for a long time, jumping from site to site, but the reason I've never truly given it up is because of this. I've had this tweet saved to my computer for nearly four years now. This was the first time I ever received any sort of praise like this from one of the subjects of my writing, and it's something I fall back on mentally whenever I'm in a rut and feel like giving all this up. I'm sure Sho doesn't even remember doing this anymore, but the fact a guy from across the world would thank me like this has never left me.
I say all of that in part to admit I almost certainly have bias going into this match, but having watched it for the third time at this point, I do think this is a pretty awesome rendition of the modern main event formula. The biggest thing this match has going for it is the commitment both men have behind all of their stuff. Sho throws kicks with a sound comparable to the crack of a home run swing, and Smatallone slams Sho at like he's trying to drive Sho through the ring. There's a ton of awesome little moments from both men to keep the mind occupied between the bigger spots too, like Sho taking the Bret bump in the corner on a hard whip, or Smatallone throwing throwing grounded elbows to the back of the head. Hell, even the match's opening stands out compared to other big main events, as both men rush directly at each other for the lockup and work a more natural opening grappling stretch than most matches usually do, foregoing the cookie-cutter Internationals and really struggling over limbs instead. And while it delivers on the micro, it certainly does just as good of a job on the macro: the big spots in this match feel monumental, especially Sho's slingshot curb stomp (the best curb stomp of this decade). It's a match that feels very complete, if that makes sense. They do a good job of giving you everything they can in every aspect of the match, and that gets a lot of admiration from me. Alas, this isn't perfect. For as good of a modern main event it is, it's still a modern main event, and these guys aren't able to shake off some of the tropes I've grown to roll my eyes at. A couple moments of strike exchange go on a little too long, and there's one or two phony melodrama moments that take me a bit out of the match. Sho's also still got his cartwheel cutter move, which I'll probably never like for as much as I love everything else he does. The presence of nasty kicks and slaps in these lesser moments does help to mitigate the pain, but it's still damaging enough to be worth mentioning here. Still though, this match does a respectable job with a formula I usually dislike, even giving us one of the best "final stand" finishes of the last ten or so years. I cannot lie to you and say this match is flat-out great, just like how I can't lie and say it's bad. This match spends a lot of time kicking ass, and the few moments of falling in the dirt aren't enough to ruin that for me. It's a damn good match and one I'm happy I watched.
Match Rating: B+
