2016 Ongoing MOTY List: Crane vs. Cage vs. Muertes

20. Jeremiah Crane vs. Cage vs. Mil Muertes Lucha Underground 6/26/16 (Aired 10/18/17)

ER: My god the insanity! This match delivered beyond what I was hoping for, turning into an epic big boy X-Division spotfest, that also had tons of blood and crazy weapons usage and really ended up ranking among the best of the crazy LU brawls. This would have been awesome without the weapons, just three big lugs working stiff and crashing into each other, but the weapons were crazy and the spots around them nuts. So you get Crane's great yakuza kicks, you get all three crashing to the floor like big Nitro cruisers (Crane with his great low-pe, Cage with a big flip dive, Muertes diving off the tope), Muertes slams Crane shoulders first on a chokeslam, Cage drops people with his awesome driver combos, all great stuff. Once Crane brings in a heavy trash can then all hell breaks loose. Everybody takes rough can shots, Crane starts gushing blood, Crane gets chokeslammed through a table on the floor, and back in the ring Cage keeps bouncing around like he's 100 lb. less, pulling off a big rana and a perfect Asai moonsault (and Muertes pulls off a flawless spinning headscissors on the floor, so these guys are all just the lightest heavyweights). Things get crazier and grosser when Crane slams a bunch of wooden stakes right into the top of Cage's head. I've never seen anything like that before. It's like two dozen chopsticks were just sticking stright out of Cage's head, with blood starting to leak out down the sides of his head. My god. He even takes a DDT to hammer the stakes DEEPER into his head. What the hell, you guy!? Muertes goes through a sheet of glass and comes up covered in blood, but they decide to go for ultimate crazy and we get Crane getting superplexed off the top THROUGH Muertes and a couple tables. Holy cow. The singles match portion (with Crane eliminated) between Muertes/Crane was a nice cooldown, with two big tiring dudes beating each other up. I dug their strike exchange, love that Muertes snap powerslam, and love Muertes getting the win to return to dominance. He really should be the top monster in the fed, but damn I really love Cage in LU. Awesome battle of the Kongs.

PAS: Lucha Underground has a lot of things about it I think are really stupid, but they do these kind of maximalist brawls really well. This match had a lot of stuff in it I normally hate, big guys flying around like crusierweights is often really irritating, I normally hate matches which require long set ups for car crash spots and that skewer spot (which Eric has never seen before? That thing is in a million dumb death matches) is usually geek show stuff which takes me out of a match, but in this case all of it worked. The flying worked because these guys are all weird comic book monsters, and it is impossible not to love the beauty of that headscissors is hard to deny. The three way aspect of the match allowed all the setting up of stuff to work, because we still got action when people were constructing, and the skewer spot felt less like some hipster side show spot and more like the kind of thing a psychotic murder would do in a fight with two movie monsters (like this match was Frankenstein vs. The Wolf Man vs. Ed Gein).  This calmed down a bit during the one on one section, and I really think we needed a more violent finish then a flatliner on a chair, but glad to see that LU can still break out the Mil Muertes classics.


2016 ONGOING MOTY LIST

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE MESIAS