After a long day of travel and wrestling watching on Thursday, sleeping in a bit was a must on Friday morning. Today was the day that the Brit wrestling revolution came to WrestleMania weekend with shows from both Progress and RevPro. The schedule of many fans, myself included, would be disrupted by show delays when the WWN set up was hammered with an alleged DDOS attack. What was originally three shows on our schedule turned into two as the clock ticked down, but even with that in mind, we still had a great day of shows ahead of us.

Rev Pro
3/31/17
4pm

This was the first show where Lee, Jason, Jose, and myself were joined by Jason’s wife Mary. Of our group, I’m the most well behaved at shows so I sat next to her. I love sitting next to non-hardcore fans at shows because they usually come at things from a completely different perspective. For instance, Mary resoundingly disagreed with my rating of the Swoggle match.

The show kicked off with Jay White taking on Sami Callihan. This was my first time getting to see White live and I was super excited about that. I fully expect White to be a huge star one day. The match had the typical Callihan brawling on the outside and White gave as good as he got. In one of my favorite bits of continuity over the course of the entire weekend, Callihan had White in the Stretch Muffler submission and White managed to break out. This was a tremendous moment because White has had to fight his way out of that move countless times in his many matches against his best friend, David Finlay. Moments like this are why I love when the greater wrestling world is referenced in matches. Non-New Japan fans wouldn’t have caught that moment, but it was huge for people like me. I love little Easter eggs like that! White went on to win the match with a Boston Crab. What a fun opener this was.

The second match was STIFF. Martin Stone beat the piss out of Jeff Cobb and surprisingly picked up the win. I’m used to seeing him as a job guy on NXT, so it was nice to see him get this hard fought win. I didn’t care much for seeing Cobb treated this way though. He looks like he would be a very nice man that would have wonderful life advice. Has anyone met Jeff Cobb? If you have, let me know if I’m right. I’m putting off talking about the next match because it was the shits. And it’s not like I hate Swoggle, his WeeLC match was one of my favorite WWE matches that year. This match was just hot trash.

RevPro Live in Orlando (March 31) Results & Review

At some point in the first half of the show, I went to buy a bottle of water and spent six fucking dollars on it. This was easily the most overpriced thing I saw the entire weekend, especially seeing as the OLE was selling water for two bucks. Needless to say, we brought in our own drinks at this venue for the rest of the weekend.

What might have been my favorite match of the weekend was the pre-intermission bout of Ricochet vs. Marty Scurll. I probably overrated this match, but I don’t care, there was just something special about it. Both men came off like absolute stars at the top of their game. The crowd was into every little thing that happened in this match. Maybe it was because the crowd was so hot or maybe it was because Scurll was dedicating this match to the memory of Kris Travis, but whatever it was, this match had an indescribable energy to it. Ricochet and Scurll should both be proud of their performance. This is one that I’ll remember for a long time to come.

After a much needed intermission, the crowd still felt a little burnt out. It took a bit for us to get into the Josh Bodom vs. David Starr match, but after a while, these two men won us over. This felt a lot like a match that you would see in NOAH THE REBORN, pink chests and all. This hard hitting match was the complete opposite of the match that would follow it. Will Ospreay and Fenix had an incredible high flying contest. While it was an amazing athletic display, something didn’t entirely click. Some botches killed the momentum of the match, but overall it was still pretty good.

The most disappointing match of the night was the tag team match between the Unbreakable F’n Machines and Shane Strickland and Ryan Smile. I have no problem with the work in the match, everything looked great. What bothered me was the pacing and the numerous kick outs. The Machines hit Strickland and Smile with an absurd amount of offense, but all it took for Smile to pick up the win was a frog splash. What made things even stranger was the way that Smile stormed to the back immediately after the match finished. I don’t know what happened, but it seemed like he wasn’t happy with how things worked out either. It didn’t help anything that the commentary could be heard at an annoyingly quiet volume over the sound system. I’m pretty sure everyone that heard it thought they were crazy until they figured out what was happening.

Finally the show was closed out with an awesome match between Zack Sabre Jr and Pentagon (I’m calling him that for the sake of brevity). This was a clash of two big personalities. I love watching both men on my TV, but they have such a huge presence in real life. Something that didn’t hit me until several days later was that this main event was ZSJ’s third match of the day. Not of the weekend, of the day! That’s insane and the fact that he was able to put on such a great performance is a testament to what a high level wrestler he is. When I saw him at the gimmick table after the match, he looked completely exhausted. The schedule that these wrestlers work on Mania weekend is insane and I give them all the credit in the world for doing it. Sabre survived the title defense (survive is the best word for it, especially after the sick package piledriver he took on the apron from Pentagon) and left the show with his belt collection intact.

Rev Pro Live from Orlando results and ratings

  • Jay White def. Sami Callihan ***1/2
  • Martin Stone def. Jeff Cobb ***3/4
  • Lord Gideon Graves def. Swoggle DUD
  • Marty Scurll def. Ricochet ****3/4
  • Josh Bodom def. David Starr ***1/2
  • Will Ospreay def. Rey Fenix ****1/4
  • Shane Strickland & Ryan Smile def. Unbreakable Fn’ Machines ***1/4
  • Zack Sabre Jr. def. Penta el 0 M ****

###

Following the show, we realized that we wouldn’t have the time to get to the OLE for the start time of CHIKARA. We instead opted to eat some delicious chili back at Jason and Mary’s place and watch a bit of the WWE Hall of Fame ceremony to kill time before our next show of the day. We needed to fill our bellies and rest up for the fever dream of a show we had ahead of us.

Kaiju Big Battel Civil Wars
3/31/17
11:59pm

Two of my greatest loves in life are wrestling and giant monsters. Kaiju Big Battel combines the two in a perfect marriage. I first discovered Kaiju as a kid when Hasbro took out an hour long infomercial in the mornings on G4 where they played old episodes of Beast Wars and GI Joe, with chopped up Kaiju matches being shown in between the cartoons. Somewhere I have a literal comp tape I made of the Kaiju matches shown on this programming block to go along with the two officially produced Kaiju DVDs I own. Needless to say, I was incredibly excited to see the monster madness in person for the first time.

If there is any show over the course of the weekend that is more about the moments than the matches, it’s Kaiju Big Battel. While I kept notes and gave star ratings to every other show I saw, that wouldn’t do a show like this any justice. In fact, it would probably make it seem pretty shitty. Let’s just be honest, the wrestling isn’t very good. If you’re there for high workrate matches, you’re going to be severely disappointed. When you go to Kaiju, you go to see a giant sea urchin and a giant burger with bear arms smash into each other.

When the show opens, I’m reminded of one of my least favorite things about KBB; the live commentary. Listening to commentary over the sound system at an indie show is the dirt worst. It doesn’t help things when the commentary team has terrible in-ring banter between every match. Thankfully, I was able to tune them out at some point. Prior to the opening match, the hosts beckoned all of the fans with floor seats to get rid of their chairs and for all of us in the stadium seating to abandon our seats. Maybe four people actually left their seats to stand on the floor. If this wasn’t my second midnight show in two days, I may have considered joining them.

It’s hard to write about something like this show without it sounding like complete fucking nonsense. In our opening contest we saw Unicorn Party win the finals of a tournament that didn’t seem to have any previous rounds. I love me some Unicorn Party. We saw him again later in the night when he and Super Wrong attempted to solve the problem of the multiple versions of Dr. Cube running around.

It turns out that over the past year or so, alternate universe versions of Dr. Cube have been jumping into our universe, thus putting our universe in an unstable state. The machine that would have sent the Cube’s back to their home planets was destroyed by the group of Cubes. At one point there were at least twenty different Dr. Cube’s in the ring at once, including a sexy Cube. Eventually things took a turn and they all started fighting and snapping each other’s necks. I want to say that only three of them remained when the dust settled. It looks like our universe will be safe for now.

The Cube kerfuffle was followed by a tag title match which saw Silver Potato and Power Rangeroo take on Hell Monkey and Su Yung. This was essentially a ladder match, but in this case there was a giant building that was made with a ladder as its base. From an in-ring perspective, this was probably the best match of the night. During the course of the match, one of the monsters called for pizza. And pizza they did receive. A pizza delivery man kept walking down the entrance aisle with pizza box after pizza box. The stacks of boxes kept getting taller and by the end of everything there had to be at least two hundred boxes that were then all flung into the ring like we were in the ECW arena and chairs were raining down on Public Enemy. It was complete madness, made even crazier by the fact that now Su Yung is a champion in this company along with Hell Monkey.

From there on, my memories of the show become a bit of a blur. I stopped paying attention to the hosts so when a puppet version of Louden Noxious was rolled to the ring, I was very confused. At some point there was a corgi brought to the ring as a representative of British Kaiju. I couldn’t see shit so I have no idea what this segment was. Upon looking at reports of the show, I discovered that the corgi was dressed like a shark. Do with that information what you will.

The semi-main was for the arm wrestling championship, which means that the arm must be pinned to the mat for a three count instead of both of their shoulders. It’s a bizarre stipulation that seems like it could make a match go on forever, but it was still quite a bit of fun. The Grudyin defeated Dusto Bunny with a pedigree onto a pile of marshmallow Peeps. Seeing Peeps treated this way made me sad. I love Peeps.

This crazy town banana pants show was closed out with a huge ten man tag elimination flag match. I couldn’t tell you what happened here because it was complete nonsense. One of the monsters was a giant scab, so that should tell you everything you need to know. There was a part in the match where Ophidian did a run-in, while wearing an awesome Tron looking costume, turning the match into a dance contest. The ending of the match was a convoluted mess, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

My inner child rejoiced at having seen this monstrous display. This was everything I would have loved as a kid and it just so happens that I still love them now. The show was completely stupid, exactly how I like it. I’m lucky to have friends that I could share this nonsense with and have them react the same way that I did. We called it a day and readied ourselves for the third and final loaded day of live wrestling.

To be concluded…