Pro Wrestling Revolution Workrate Report 5/2/15

1. The Grapplers (Grappler III & VI) vs. Los Campesinos vs. Anarkia & Cazador del Alma vs. Los Chicanos (Memo Cuevas & El Pistolero)

You know you're hilariously bad at pacing your TV show when the show starts with ring entrances, then has to take a commercial break in the middle of the ring entrances, only to return for the rest of the ring entrances. I mean damn, guys. But you know? This match was actually quite good. Sometimes their multi mans can be kind of a mess, and this was still kind of a mess but had plenty of good. The Grapplers looked really good here. They're Rik Luxury and Bay Area vet Bobby Hart under masks with their long ponytail braids popping out the back. They're both the biggest guys in the match, but that doesn't stop them from breaking out some large dude topes. Hart has some cool offense and nice presence, his Psycho Driver looks crushing and rightly gets a pinfall, and I dug him slingshotting Anarkia into an ace crusher. He and Luxury bump around nicely for bigger guys. The dive train in this was a nice one, Anarkia especially had a nice one getting backdropped to the man pile. Oddly the match felt a little clipped, which would be amusing if they clipped the match but showed full ring entrances. Pistolero only got in towards the end, and other things felt rushed or skipped. Some of the match was designed to put over new valet Sada Simone who is a curvy pretty gal who apparently was on a TV show called The Real L Word, which existed, and she was on it. I don't know if it was reality or scripted reality or a drama or what. But she was on it. It is kinda funny to book a woman as distracting and foxy to men, when she's most famous for being a lesbian. The distraction spots were all clunky, through no fault of her own. The finish comes when a Campesino has Cuevas pinned for the likely win, but boneheaded referee Tom Castor stops counting the pin to tell Sada to get off the apron. I'm....unsure why he couldn't have finished counting the pinfall, as she was several feet away on the apron and not affecting the finish in the least. But then of course, as a tecnico, that Campesino has to threaten to forcefully tongue kiss Simone, while the announcer creepily chants "Beso". This leads to him losing. Woof. Still, with this fed it's best to ignore as much of the braindead stuff as possible and try and enjoy the good, and this match had more good than most. A bunch of big dives, really good performance from the Grapplers, some fun armdrags, and some decently paced action (until the too-quick eliminations).  This may have actually been the quickest paced match I've seen from this fed. Normally there is a lot of cliched rudo stalling, or ref shenanigans, or just guys that aren't good at working fast. Here they made good use of having a lot of fresh guys, as multi man matches always should. A pleasant surprise.

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Pro Wrestling Revolution Workrate Report 12/27/14

More matches from the 6/8/14 Watsonville show, more hilarious use of paid time. Show starts off with a 3 minute Mariachi promo, then him standing in the ring while a loooong Mexican fight song plays in its entirety, then La Migra comes out and beats him down, and then commercials, and then more wrestlers get their full entrance for a match, and then they cut looooong promos. And our first match of the half hour program ends up going on 17 minutes into the show. Last week they had advertised Mariachi vs. Sanders mask vs. hair, but I assume with so little time left in the show that all we'll end up getting is that opening "Mariachi stands in ring while music plays". Think about that. Let's break it down. Let's say they get their time REALLY cheap. I have no idea what paid TV time on a Saturday morning costs, but let's say for this exercise it costs $200 per half hour. Now 8 minutes of that half hour is commercials, so really it's $200 for 22 minutes. You showed a guy standing in the ring while listening to a Mexican fight song for 150 of your 1,320 seconds. That means IF you are paying $200 per half hour of programming, then you just paid over $20 to air that. This kind of time wasting blows my mind.

1. JR Kratos & "El Chicano" Memo Cuevas vs. Los Campesinos

Well, this match happened. It was kind of clunkily structured as we start with a long heel-in-peril segment with both Campesinos working over Cuevas. I have seen one other not good match with Los Campesinos, and here they looked somewhat better but still sloppy. They both throw really ugly and poorly timed armdrags. I would have been somewhat hesitant to blame the armdrags on both of them, as Cuevas could have been responsible for taking them poorly, but they threw them this badly in the other match I saw them in. Again the promotion is obviously billed as lucha libre, but nothing in this match (or most of their matches) would ever be mistaken for lucha style. This match was just bad American indy wrestling. Campesinos may dress like luchadors, but they aren't fooling *THIS* guy. They just do a bunch of bland dropkick/arm drag/arm wringer spots. They basically wrestle like an AWA jobber tag team. Kratos is a big local guy I like a lot, and he got some fun moments of throwing Los Camps around (big deadlift fallaway slam is impressive, as Los Camps weren't tiny guys). Cuevas was more of a sneaky heel but he doesn't really have schtick, he just had to run into Los Camps (often) poorly timed double teams. He took their implausible double arm lift slam finisher with speed and impact. This whole thing just wasn't much.

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