The Critic-Proof Perfection & Stupidity That is Hell Storm vs. Crazy Crusher

ER: Sometimes art forms go so far beyond stupid that the point of criticizing them becomes pointless. Sometimes critic-proof can refer to something being genuinely bad, but is still popular regardless of what critics might say (there's a reason why we're waist deep in a Transformers franchise that nobody actually admits to enjoying); But the best kind of critic-proof is the stuff that is genuinely wonderful, and would seem to point and laugh at anything that would even attempt criticism towards it: Bands like Ratt or Personal & the Pizzas, or the first season of Claws, or any movie with Linnea Quigley in it. Criticizing them would be futile and inconsequential. You need to just sit back and enjoy, and respect. 

But this match carves out its own critic-proof niche: The two performers who appear to be both so dangerous and so stupid, that any criticism directed at them would likely be a) met with total apathy, and b) not understood in the least. The match gets a shocking amount of things correct, while simultaneously getting just as many things incorrect. The second it gets something brutally correct we are immediately snapped awake by something so wrong that we are left dumbstruck until the next brilliant/terrible moment, seconds later. This match is the Now That's What I Call Music Vol. 6 of professional* wrestling: You get all the bangers you pretend to not like, such as "Love Don't Cost a Thing" and "Independent Women Part 1" and K-Ci & JoJo's "Crazy" and of course 3LW...but then it immediately hits you in the face with Creed and Fuel and Incubus.

Everything about the match is crazy or dangerous or stupid or awesome, and at several times all four at once. I mean just look at their names alone! Wrestling names can often be excessively stupid, but these two names seem too dumb for even pro wrestling. These names seem like two characters in a 1992 kart racing video game. Battle Hell Storm and his Demon Dragster! Look out for Crazy Crusher in his Monster Truck Masher! It is 2004, so both guys are dressed like Red/Dixie/Deranged, and both wrestle as if they not only washed out of a one day Mikey Whipwreck training seminar, but also as if Mikey Whipwreck is also their absentee father.

And most importantly, for me, the match totally works. It's stupid, it wasn't worth it, several moments have absolutely zero logical reason for happening, but it was extremely fun and surprised me in a several ways. They work really stiff, which I wasn't expecting. If there was one thing I expected to be absent from this match, it was selling (there wasn't any logical selling). If there was a second thing I expected to be absent from this match, it was stiff strikes tying together the increasingly stupid spots. And therein lies the brilliance of the stiff work and minimally sold stunt spots: Both guys were too stupid to come up with ways to not do everything in the match full force, so the lack of selling was easy to excuse because these guys were ACTUALLY taking this punishment. Once a guy takes a death valley driver off a ladder, onto another ladder that's set up horizontally on the turnbuckles, that then sends both men bouncing violently in an uncontrolled freefall to the floor...and they get up from it? Good for them, because they just cheated death, and once you cheat death you shouldn't have to worry about selling a leg. Any injury selling that was going to occur was going to be from actual genuine injuries. They were clearly taking a longform generations-long Daniel Plainview approach to selling an injury. The way Kikuchi would gradually sell damage over the length of a tour, these two were clearly just going to be doing over the rest of their lives. If you were pissed that they undersold major spots in this match, I guarantee you that if anybody were to contact Hell Storm or Crazy Crusher today, they would STILL be selling this match. It is merely our fault that we did not appreciate their longform selling enough. When it's rainy and Crazy Crusher's joints make it hard for him to grip? He's selling this match. When Hell Storm can't pivot his head to talk to the person next to him? He's selling this match. And it's a damn impressive 13 year ongoing sales job, so have some respect.

But the stiff work! I expected this to be a series of stunt spots, set up in mostly awkward ways. And it was, that. But when Storm is throwing nasty push kicks at Crusher's eye and Crusher is trying to bust open Storm with sharp 12 to 6 elbows or crush his windpipe with a standing lariat in between all of the prop set up? That's awesome. Also awesome is how fast they climb the ladders. This is legitimately some of the finest ladder climbing within a wrestling match in ladder match history. No hyperbole. These two scrambled up those ladders for the title, only appropriately slow climbing during the genuinely good finish. They ran up these ladders and flung themselves towards the title, making the saves great and the misses brutally painful.

The match reaches peak "equal parts brilliance/unabashed awfulness" when we get a minutes long team building exercise, as the wrestlers, the referee, and a ringside photographer all figure out in real time how to best build the stupidest stack of ladders, a real Eiffel tower of ladders standing on other ladders that are being held up by other ladders. It was the Canadian bored dead of winter backyarder version of the company retreat ropes course, and it was at all times brilliant and anger-inducing. It was Donna Godchaux caterwauling over an otherwise sublime Playin in the Band. This prop set-up was flat out performance art. All of the traditional selling was condensed to this specific portion of the match, as Hell Storm got to rest on the mat while everybody else assembled this mouse trap of ladder death.

The spots were undeniably spectacular, with countless suplexes off of the worst angles of ladders and chairs, like Crusher getting suplexed off a ladder and landing back first on the top of another stood up ladder, or Storm getting snap suplexed into unbending plastic chairs, landing fast and violent on them, breaking them with his body. At one point Crusher climbs a ladder while also wearing a ladder, for no reason that would actually make sense to anybody at all. There is no reason why anyone would just slip into a ladder only to climb another ladder. But who cares because then he gets shoved off the ladder, planting his own hybrid body-ladder vertically, driving it into his stomach in sick fashion. Every bump in this match looked crazy, and I genuinely have no clue how these two walked out of there. And again, the stiff strikes added to it, with both men climbing for the belt at the end, and Crusher just pasting Storm with more 12 to 6 elbows, knocking his loose from the ladder so that he ended up hanging by a knee.

This match has made every other ladder match obsolete. At minimum, it has made every other mid 2000s Canadian backyarder ladder match obsolete. Meaning that somewhere, in a public park in Ottawa, some kid just realized that he took a Burning Hammer on a picnic table...and it was all for nothing.


*There's a great chance they did not get paid money