Lucha Libre USA: Masked Warriors Workrate Report, 10/22/11

Man, it's been a helluva ride.

I genuinely like Rebecca Reyes as a backstage interviewer. She knows when it's appropriate to take the spotlight, and she makes some pretty good facials.

1. Petey Williams vs. Charly Malice:

Kevin Kelly: "Stick around, because Petey Williams is up next!"

That has to be the worst hook to keep viewers watching since "Rocky Romero has a microphone!". Hey burglar, can you just wait right there while I go get my gun? I think I used to like Charly, but I assume he's suffered a lot of injuries over the years as he moves pretty slow here. I remember him splatting to the floor off a ladder (table was set up WAY too far away) in a AAA match, and I'm sure he's still feeling that one. First part of the match is greatest indie hits played slower, but match actually picks up before the commercial break with Charly snapping off a nice rana and then hitting a real fast dive, then Brewer comes out, then Petey Williams demonstrates more of his horrendous transition ability. The guy just has no clue how to get from one spot to the next, and when things ARE strung together, it works less naturally than an Eliminators spot. Just awkwardly moving into position, or telegraphing moves so insanely ahead of time that things just look strange. I'm gonna say it, Petey Williams isn't somebody that I would call good at pro wrestling.

Funny backstage segment with La Parkito and Pequeno Halloween arguing very fast in spanish, while Rebecca tries to translate. I thought the minis were good here and Rebecca made a bunch of funny faces. Her and Halloween were also wearing awesome matching cholo-on-Easter bowling shirts....and it turns out there were actually going bowling. So there's a bowling montage set to doo wop music. Parkita doing La Parka dancing to celebrate a strike is one of the better uses of La Parka dancing I've seen.

2. Magno vs. Jon Rekon:

Rekon is the debuting Jon Strongman who legit looks bigger than I've ever seen him here. Rekon at least hits full force on a shoulderblock. A lot of muscled up dudes tend to puss out of their shoulderblocks (likely due to a fear of tearing their pec, shoulder and triceps muscles all at once). I actually like Strongman's punches, too. Guy moves reallllll slow, though. Fun spot with Rekon clotheslining Magno to the back of the head off an attempted springboard. Eh. Match could have been much worse. Strongman looked worlds better than Petey.

3. Tinieblas Jr./Oriental vs. Rellik/Sihdeestychoh vs. San Juan Kid/PR Flyer:

Match was real fun and arguably the best match in the WHOLE 2nd season (!) of LLUSA. Starts out with London doing some sequences against Lyndon/Kendrick, so you know that was awesome. Rellik...may not be the elite-level worker I made him out to be in those other two write-ups. He was alright here, and threw a couple nice superkicks, but man did he stand around awkwardly while waiting to take offense. Tinieblas was definitely a pleasant surprise during these few episodes. I've seen him live a couple times and he was kinda lousy, but he was pretty good on these shows. Bumped well, really liked his rana, seemed a lot more motivated than other guys on this show. Trainwreck dive spot was good, Corleone threw a nice punch when he came out to fight Lizmark (and then wrapped him up in his own cape!), and then Tini/Oriental become the LLUSA tag champs FOREVER.

Man, maybe I should stop reviewing CMLL on Gala and LATV, since my reviews have been the kiss of death to ROH on HDNet and now this. Where will it end!?

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Lucha Libre USA: Masked Warriors Workrate Report, 10/15/11

Turns out it will be even easier to write up the complete TV run of this fed's 2nd season than I had originally thought. I would have to be either really lazy or really unmotivated to not finish up a whopping 3 episode run. LLUSA, your 2nd season was the Emily's Reasons Why Not of Saturday morning cable wrestling. I'm pretty sure more episodes of Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer made it to air.

1. San Juan Kid/PR Flyer vs. Oriental/Tinieblas Jr.:

Well, this was about as good as you'd hope a 4 minute match interrupted by a commercial would be. The PR team is Louis Lyndon and Flip Kendrick, who I like. Tini is way bigger than the PR team but he makes it work alright here, taking two big bumps to the floor and taking a Lyndon headscissors really well. It's good to see Oriental on my TV again. Lyndon is a better version of Brian Kendrick (hot tag offense looks better, better forearms, cool jumping knee instead of that flimsy flippy heel kick thing) and Flip Kendrick hits a couple big dives. 2 minutes on either side of a commercial ain't much, but what are you going to do?

Something about me likes Rebecca Reyes' on-the-nose backstage reporting style, as she tries tracking down the interfering hooded ninja from the previous match (oh yeah, previous match ended with a couple of hooded ninja's running in), is too late as one of them leaves in a speeding car...but she finds his cape, walking us through all of the motions. "I'm trying to chase down this hooded ninja....he just escaped into that car....hey, what's this, a cape? What are these initials on the cape...S.L.?"

I'm sure a fed who gives regular TV promo time to John Walters and Petey Williams every week is a fed who really wants to stay on TV for the long haul. I like how both of them need to act like heels, so they actually rub their chins when they're plotting something. They saw some sort of elementary school production of a Dudley Do-Right/Snidely Whiplash short and thought the 5th grader playing Snidely wasn't playing it "broad strokes" enough for most of the audience to get.

2. Siddyzteecko vs. Marco Corleone:

This...could actually be fun. And Corleone hits a hard shoulderblock that knocks London upside down, and it looks awesome. That's kind of the story of the whole match: Corleone hits a variety of shoulderblocks and clotheslines, and London does flat back bumps for them. I'm pretty sure London's only piece of offense is throwing Corleone into the post while he's distracted by Rellik. Corleone instantly recovers and it's more back bumps for London. Corleone hits his big springboard clothesline, hits a no hands running dive over the top onto London, Rellik and Lizmark Jr. London takes a spectacular bump, getting pushed off the top rope and crashing head/neck first on the apron and onto the floor. But it really never got super interesting because it was so damned one-sided. The rudos attack and Shane Helms runs out for the save. Was this stuff taped a year ago? Rellik takes a fast bump to the floor. I'm calling out Cubsfan on his irrational Rellik hatred. Dude is easily one of the top 10 jacked white guys in LLUSA.

Was being paired with Rebecca Reyes the main reason why Pequeno Halloween left CMLL to join this fed?

3. Hair vs. Mask!! RJ Brewer vs. Magno:

Magno actually makes a rope flip moonsault look like it has impact. That's impressive. Most guys rotate too fast and hit their ankles into the mat before their body lands. Magno's landed really even and looked good. Brewer takes a nice bump over the top, catching his feet and landing painfully on his hip (catching feet seemed somewhat planned, btw). Post-commercial break is all about Brewer holding chinlocks and doing suplexes while Magno seems most concerned with pulling his shirt down over his tummy. Magno does the Chaos Theory German suplex and I always like how that looks. Brewer goes sprawling in a nice way from it. Brewer throws a nice punch with a chain for a pinfall, but the ref finds the chain, restarts the match and Magno wins. Brewer gets his hair cut. It appears like it's been like 2 weeks since his last hair cut, so this was probably pretty convenient for him. This was OK. About what you'd expect, really.

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Lucha Libre USA: Masked Warriors Workrate Report, 10/8/11

This was on TV and my DVR picked it up, so why not. They have some minis I like and I used to dig Corleone.

Lizmark Jr. out with a promo to start! And man, Charly Manson footage is all over this show. Isn't that guy going to be in prison for many years? Lizmark is awesome on the stick because he talks just like Antichristo. Lizmark hired a guy to paint a portrait of him at ringside tonight! So he's going to go start posing! So that means Sydistiko gets the mic. Sydistiko is really bad on the mic. So he talks a lot.

1. Magno/Rocky Romero vs. Treachery (Rellik/Sydistiko):

Oh man, and the announcer says what everybody wants to hear, "Rocky Romero has a microphone!" It goes about as well as you imagine it would.

Sydistiko is Paul London and holy lord 2 minutes later he is still horrible on the mic, now made worse by having a mic duel with Romero. He does a bunch of "crazy" laughing and while I don't think anybody does that well, London does it worse than most.

Everybody in the ring to start and it isn't very good. Announcers keep calling the ring "the hexalateral ring". That probably won't catch on as much as "The Octagon", and I am bummed they did not try and carve out their niche with a two-sided ring, but oh well. Call me crazy, but Rellik actually looked good for large parts of this. Everybody in it looked awkward a lot of the time, but Rellik looked...the least awkward. He threw nice low clotheslines, made Romero look good by taking all his ranas and armdrags great (including one nice bump where he threw Romero up for a flapjack and Romero swung it into a rana). Yeah, Rellik made Romero offense look really good, and that has to count for something. He also made a Romero clothesline look hard and made his preposterous Sliced Bread variation look good, so Rellik is my new favorite LLUSA worker. Romero hit a nice fast dive on London but then the last 2 minutes totally fall apart, some ninja interferes and kicks a chair into Rellik's face, who gets up moments later to do a rope run sequence with Romero anyway. Magno hits a nice corkscrew splash off the top for the win. Rellik all the way, baby!

RJ Brewer/Petey Williams promo! Their stable is called "The Right" which sounds...problematic. Brewer is a real old 30, and Petey Williams of all people talks about how much it makes him sick seeing these circus performers disgracing his sport. I'm positive that you can go to any small local circus, and every performer in it will show more performance acuity than Petey Williams. My family and I went on a cruise to South America years ago, and there was a misled white teenager on board with really bad dreads, who spent most of the trip practicing with his devil sticks. On the final night of the cruise the on board entertainment is "Talent Show" using volunteers from the passengers. Some frat boys did an acapella Boyz II Men song (seriously), two teenage girls from Texas did a dance routine to the song "Lightning Crashes" by Live (seriously), and that misled white teenager with bad dreads did a "performance" with his devil sticks with no music, minimal pre-planning, or any actual stick juggling skill. And he showed more chops performing in front of crowds than Petey Williams does.

Video is shown of Rebecca Reyes marrying Pequeno Halloween, then secret footage is shown of Tigresa Caliente roofying her drink, which made her forget getting married to Halloween. She sounds really disinterested as she does voice over of the footage: "Oh, you know what? She's putting something in my drink! I bet you that's why I didn't remember anything." I assume she sounds so disinterested because - being with Matt Hardy - she's likely had any number of things slipped into her drink and/or bloodstream that she just assumes this is what people do. I hope she's more convincing on the witness stand than she was during her VO work.

2. Pequeno Halloween/Tigresa Caliente vs. Octagoncito/Mascarita Dorada:

Tigresa has a weirder HGH belly than Scott Steiner. She seriously appears to be pregnant here. Announcers: "There is no woman alive who is built like Tigresa." I'll be honest you guys, you may find this hard to believe, but Tigresa ruined the match. I know if I was in the back laying out a match that featured three really good minis, and one uncomfortably shaped uncoordinated woman, I would write it out so that the uncoordinated woman was in the ring for every second of the match. Mini Halloween looked GREAT in this, though. I think the CMLL minis have suffered a bit this year without him as a base anchoring the rudo teams. Here he bumps all over (including the awesome Halloween bump sliding under the bottom rope) and really is just a perfect base for Dorada. I don't know if I've ever seen something more awkward than Tigresa working spots with Dorada. That had to be a rib. And speaking of ribs, Tigresa does a horrifying kneedrop to Octagoncito that appears to land full force and had to have hurt BAD. Then Rebecca gets in the ring and her and Tigresa work shirt tearing spots for what seems like many minutes. But hey...Pequeno Halloween worked like Pequeno Halloween!

Marco Corleone comes out and destroys Lizmark Jr.'s painting that he's had commissioned this evening. The announcers are stunned. In a week or two when someone brings out a cake, I assume they'll all unwittingly stand next to it with plates waiting to get a slice.

3. Petey Williams vs. Super Nova:

Heyyyy this was a Petey Williams match. He has a weird way of taking a big bump, and making it look like it didn't hurt at all. Here he gets thrown over the top and crashes to the floor, but it looks about as painful as stepping off a curb. Petey works the leg and it's just not very good. Then Nova gets a good comeback spot, until randomly just stopping the comeback after a spinning heel kick, selling doing the move just as much as Petey sells taking the move. Both of them, just lying there, for a loooong time. Super Nova adjusts his pants a lot. Match ends at some point.

Post match we get Magno and Brewer exchanging challenges for a mask vs. hair match NEXT WEEK! I take the clippers to my hair, and Brewer's hair is somehow shorter than mine, so that will be a blast!

So...Rellik? I liked Rellik?

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