FOUND FOOTAGE FRIDAY: FRED OLEN RAY'S ALL STAR CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING??

 

Freddie Valentine/Terry Funk vs. Mando Guerrero/Cincinnati Red ACW 3/24/00

MD: On paper, I wanted some iconic Terry vs Mando encounter. We don't really get that as the first half of this is Mando out of the picture (Attacked before the match? Late due to traffic? An unannounced substitute?) so it's instead an absolute two-on-one mauling on Cincinnati Red. The math on that isn't exactly right as Terry Funk, as present in the moment as any wrestler could possibly be in an ACW ring,  counts for about six men and Freddie Valentine, as nonchalant as can be, counts as around a quarter of a man. All of Terry's stuff looks credible and brutal. The camera cuts back to Freddie at one point and barely comes back to see Red sprawled on a table, his hair jutting out of his head, obviously wrecked. Terry somehow throttles the life out of him just moving him around the ring. Meanwhile, Freddie hits him with the tamest chairshots and a goofy neckbreaker variation as he sort of idles around the ring. We do get something of an iconic moment as Mando finally arrives, whacking Terry in the back with a trashcan over and over. Meanwhile, Valentine casually glances at the carnage and decides to just laconically pound on Red to the beat of the slow jazz running through his brain that no one else can hear. Things fall apart from there, but Terry's intensity never flags even as Valentine glides through the match. It's a bizarre scene but somehow just makes Funk seem all the more mythical (Funk as Ares and Valentine as a skeezy Dionysus?) for the contrast, even just as he's holding his arm in victory post match. 

ER: Terry Funk is 56 and putting on a performance worth the ticket price. Fred Olen Ray's Freddie Valentine looks like a leather-sporting Mike Graham, but with the good sense to not have flame tattoos. Cincinnati Red comes out to Judas Priest's "Breaking the Law". Low effort. When I'm getting Cincinnati Red on an LA indie show, I at least expect Afghan Whigs while eating out of a Skyline can. Represent your town. A fan gets a real reaction and threatening swagger from Funk when he yells out that "They call him Funk because he stinks!" Funk is really violent with Red. He really punches the shit out of him and throws his full arms into swings, and hits a DDT with actual power, like he was doing a shoot DDT. Freddie is an entertaining non-trained guy with a nice elbowdrop (because he just drops his entire body onto people). He also has one of those clotheslines that lands under the breasts. 

Mando makes his presence felt by really bashing Funk with a trash can and then an old hotel conference room chair. Mando runs the ropes so slow. He runs the ropes so slow that the force he gets behind his dropkick is jump scare shocking. This man looked like he was running using somebody else's legs, and then drill presses a chair into Valentine's head with a dropkick from a near standing position. There aren't many genres of wrestling I love more than men in their late 40s to late 50s working too stiff with each other. Valentine throws a fireball with a sound effect, Funk puts on an real spectacle throwing a couple dozen chairs around, just a perfect indy wrestling main event. 

Barbed Wire Match: Freddie Valentine vs. Mando Guerrero ACW 6/2/00

MD: I don't often watch barbed wire matches, but when I do, I'm not necessarily looking for the gore and the gristle but for the geographic limitations created by the barbed wire and how wrestlers deal with that. There are sort of intrinsic possibilities therein too, so long as they don't go right into the blood. Here, they started on the mat, wrestling this like it was a NWA title match or something. It made sense as the center of the ring and specifically the center of the mat was the only safe place. It was fairly even until Valentine tried whipping Mando into the ropes (and therefore the wire). Mando stopped himself but that opened him up to a big move from Valentine, one that probably wouldn't have been so possible so early in the match otherwise. That's the sort of stuff that's interesting to me.

Also interesting was Mando's two big comeback moves. I don't know where he picked it up, but he hit diamond dust twice, once off the turnbuckles and once in the middle of the ring to reverse a move. Baffling? Out of place? Pure Mando? All true. They did a pretty good job using all of the plunder organically within the match. Nothing seemed too contrived. There were spots where a chair was utilized similar to a Vandaminator but at least they tried to toss it back and forth at each other first. There was a ref bump but it was because he was pressed in the corner and he ate a nasty straight punch from Mando. That led to a visual fall for him, an object slipped in by the valet (kind of silly in an environment like this), and a cheapshot leading to Mando losing the match. As bizarre as the Diamond Dust was, there were some other strong visuals here. Manny bled buckets from his forehead and Valentine was bloody all over his body. When he scored the final pin, his arm was trapped in the barbed wire around a table so that was something you don't see every day. Mando got some shots in after the bell, but given the stip, Valentine got to stand tall in victory (just the sort of victory where you're trailing a barbed wire board stuck to you as you try to gloat on the mic). 

ER: I thought this was really good. Fred Olen Ray directed Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, and he throws better worked punches than you would expect him to throw, and they look even better aimed at Mando's bleeding head. Mando is wearing real genuine street fight gear, and looks incredible, like a visible background construction worker in They Live. He's got work boots and knee pads over jeans and the perfect sleeveless shirt with belly folding over belt buckle. The man looks like a man who's dangled legs off an I-Beam while eating a ham and cheese from his pail.  He gets immediately into the They Live spirit by punching Valentine in the kidneys a bunch while holding him down with a knee, but this whole fight is good. The blood is good, the barbed wire teases were good, and the actual fighting was good. Mando breaks out two different Diamond Dust variations, which was still a really new thing in 2000. His standing version was fairly ambitious for a non-wrestler and a man in his 50s, ending with a dangerous enough landing that the live mic commentator was unsure who got the worse of it. I would go to any local indy running a jeans and sleeveless t-shirt barbed wire match with a couple of old mustache guys and it wouldn't come close to being as good as this one. You don't go into a match with two old guys expecting to see someone suplexed through barbed wire and chairs, even IN a barbed wire match. Super Indies killed the low budget genre filmmaker vs. Mexican GLOW trainer main event. 

Exploding Barbed Wire Boards: Freddie Valentine vs. Crayz ACW 7/28/00

MD: When done well, these things are all about possibilities and limitations, anticipation and payoff, and the inherent danger of the gimmick. Two matches in and it's pretty clear Valentine understood all of this pretty well. Here, the boards (explosive, with barbed wire) were in the corners, so they could move around a bit more to start. They went into the corner pretty quickly, building the anticipation, but Valentine, at least from a kayfabe level, was able to capitalize on the wariness and hesitation more than Crayz who put all of his eggs in one flesh-tearing, explosive basket. That allowed for a low blow and a whip into the opposite corner. The first explosion was a dud but that worked for the match. It let Valentine both take over and use the barbed wire board remnants as a weapon moving forward, which was pretty clever. After beating him around the ring for a bit (including with another object from the valet), Crayz managed a desperate reversal into another corner. This time the explosion went off and he got a quick pin soon after. You buy it due to the explosion (and the previous dud) but the match would have probably been better served by that starting a big, bloody comeback and everything hinging on a third toss into a corner as part of a more expansive finishing stretch. The counterpoint there is that it creates an almost shoot-style type of expectation with the crowd moving forward that a match can end at any moment due to the danger of the gimmick.