Matches from JAPW Redemption: 2/24/18

The Hooligans (Devin & Mason Cutter) vs. The Private Party (Isiah Kassidy/Marq Quen)

ER: I like the Hooligans, squat chubby guys who will take a couple big reckless bumps, set up junior offense nicely, have a couple nice high spots of their own, and have a great throwback wrestling hillbilly look. I'd never seen the Private Party, and came away wanting to see more Kassidy. He's an Amazing Red trainee and had several Red-like moments of stringing together some unexpected and beautiful offense. Hooligans have some thump and can work like Nise Necro Butcher (even dropping Quen over the back of a couple chairs at one point), loved their hip attack/cannonball combo, loved the assisted standing "corkscrew" moonsault, they're good at catching dives (and Kassidy and Quen each had a couple big dives, with Kassidy hitting a wicked tornillo that could have fallen short, and later hitting a cool plancha running up the turnbuckles and shifting directions to land on Mason). Private Party had a few killer moments that Eric Corvis (gotta call out Corvis by name, as Phil was the big drum beater for him) on commentary called "Rewind Moves" that feel like something they both worked out with someone like Red. Not just simple reversals, more like getting hiptossed into your partner, and your partner flipping your momentum back the other way leading to a cool headscissors or kick. There were lots of neat "momentum reversing" moves, a cool Electric Boogaloo way of delivering your offense that's more than welcome in a tag like this. 8 minute tag, plenty of fun spots, basically exactly what I was hoping for when I went out of my way to check it out.

Da Hit Squad vs. Team Tremendous (Bill Carr/Dan Barry)

ER: This started out mildly joke-y and I was considering just going forward to the main event, but I'm glad I didn't because this turned out to be a total blast. Team Tremendous is a team I'd pretty much written off; never did much for me in their Evolve run (though while I hated the stupid 70s cops gimmick, I do gotta say Carr looks cooler as Big Bubba), and they don't always turn up in places that I frequent. But I cam away especially impressed with Barry, naturally when they say that he's going to be retiring soon. He's been around the indies for years, and this was the best I've personally seen him look. He's chubbed out a bit, and he really controls this match (which is crazy considering the guys across the ring from him). He was hitting DHS hard with chops, busts Maff's nose, throws a jab with great snap, nice vertical suplex on a big fat guy, nice running forearm, all good stuff. Then starts breaking out highflying that lands on point, hits a nice tope on Mack, hits a wild Fosbury Flop running moonsault to DHS on the floor, lands a great moonsault back in the ring. It's odd not seeing DHS as the aggressors in a match, I always expect them to steamroll dudes, but I liked Tremendous controlling a lot of this, made Hit Squad's big stuff seem even bigger. Mack hits a great fat guy dive, and even a rana (leaping off the middle rope onto Barry), and Barry deserves tons of credit for catching that dive, catching that rana, and taking a brutal double cannonball from DHS. The visual of Hit Squad doing the piggyback double cannonball is always so great, feels like a double team move you'd do in the old Simpsons arcade game. Barry himself even does a big man flip dive! There was no overkill, everybody got their moments, Barry was a freaking workhorse, and the match ends simply after Barry eats a Burning Hammer. Just the match I needed.

Homicide vs. Dezmond Xavier vs. BLK Jeez vs. Teddy Hart

PAS:  Really a tale of two different matches. We open with Cide, Xavier and Jeez in the ring and the commentators saying Hart no showed, there is some really stinko juniors wrestling to start, with Xavier looking especially terrible. Then Hart comes from the back and we get a classic psychotic Hart vs. Cide JAPW arena brawl. Eye gouging, fish hooking, awkward chairshots to weird parts of the body, everything you want from those two lunatics try to kill each other. At one point Homicide places Hart's foot in between a chair and smashes it with some fans backpack, Hart pries open Homicide's jaw with his hands and punches his square in the open jaw. Xavier and Jeez take some bumps too, Xavier gets hurled into the bleachers back first, Homicide takes Jeez's head and cracks against the wall like he was trying to open a coconut. All of this is going on while Julius Smokes (who is managing Jeez now) is running around whipping Hart and Xavier with his belt while his pants are falling down exposing his bare ass. It goes back to ring we get another terrible looking juniors run between Xavier and Jeez, while Cide and Hart are fighting on the floor. Hard to rate this, because the brawling was fucking amazing, and the wrestling parts were mostly awful. On a pure enjoyment scale though, this was pretty high.

ER: What a confounding match. Genuinely terrible at times, genuinely exhilarating at times. Homicide is possibly the best wrestler who also has a bunch of bad performances. He's so hot and cold. Within this match he's out of place and completely in his element. Xavier and Jeez looked bad. This was the worst I've seen Xavier look, even though he got better down the stretch and I've liked other stuff I seen from him, and he still took some big (maybe too athletic) bumps here. I don't know if I've ever seen Jeez before, and I do not want to see him again. He looked bad in almost every part he was in, other then hitting a springboard stomp right into the lower abdomen of Xavier. Every other part he looked awful, with some truly putrid strikes throughout, strikes that fell short or looked slow and soft if they did land, he was constantly out of place for stuff, looked like he had never taken juniors offense before. My god he looked bad. Julius Smokes was fucking insane. I love Park matches and old Pierroth matches where there are long belt whipping sessions. And here's Smokes running around with his belt and his towel, whipping everyone who wasn't Jeez, and showing his bare fucking ass the entire time. Julius Smokes shows more ass in this match than Mathilda May in Life Force. His belt was a NECESSARY accessory to his outfit, and he sacrificed it just to get in some whippings. All while showing so much ass. 

But Teddy Hart was that flat out savior of this match. He comes out dressed in something a wrestler would wear to a Pajama Jam, and proceeds to inject all the chaos into this match, and punches everybody as hard as he can in the forehead. All of his strikes look so damn great in this match, stiff body blows and rough shots to the face, and he makes every move he takes look painful as hell, even if it's not. He gets hit with a bunch of nasty chairshots, shit to the back of his hands and his fucking ankles, gets his leg and ankle and foot slammed in between a chair, Homicide weakly shoves a clothing rack or something at Hart and Hart makes it look like he got hit by a Yugo and got his fingers slammed in a door. He continued throwing nothing but great strikes, it made me really want to see more matches between Hart and other guys who can throw hands. This match started with the crappiest slop juniors exchange you've seen, reached stiff vaguely unprofessional brawl in the middle, and then ended with slightly less offensive but sorta stupid flipping piledriver juniors wrestling. It somehow worked both as sleeze fed pain pill crowd brawl, and a parody of Japanese jerk off juniors learned behavior east coast early 2000s indy debris.

ER: Well, while I didn't love every part of the stuff I watched, JAPW delivered goods that still felt like JAPW, and that's really all that I wanted. They've been one of my favorite feds since the tape trading days, and they still bring that sloppy, stiff, wrestling for wrestling fans vibe, which is the reason we'll continue to seek out new JAPW and review old JAPW. The Teddy Hart match had too much good shit to not include it on our 2018 Ongoing MOTY List, so we threw it on down towards the bottom. Teddy Hart, gunslinger, y'all.