Paragon Pro Wrestling 7/18/15 Review

We start with a real clunky backstage segment with a guy who is the owner? Management? Authority? Chubby guy in a suit? talking with his hands a LOT about how he needed to be here because with a main event like Gangrel vs. Tyshaun Prince, "a LOT of people are here". He then cuts to a video of Hammerstone & Chamberlain winning the tag titles, and then comes back and talks with his hands a lot while missing his cues and trying not to look at the camera.

1. Mikey O'Shea & Ethan HD vs. Hammerstone & Chamberlain

I had never seen any of these guys before. O'Shea is a large bald Irish fat guy, like Will Sasso with Smashmouth facial hair. I wish his fat guy offense had more heft. For some reason fat guys throwing chops looks weird. Like...just club them with your giant fat body. He also worked from under too much. I wanted to see him steamroll. Ethan HD is your indy workrate guy, doing flipping slingshot ranas and kickpad offense. As most of these modern workrate guys he bumps a clothesline well and occasionally has decent strikes. The flipping rana did look nice, and keenly set up Hammerstone catching him with a powerbomb from it later. Hammerstone mostly looked bad. He's a Thor looking guy who has the lamest missed strikes you've seen. He worked HD a lot (who is smaller) so it was a lot of cat mouse with Hammerstone having to miss a lot of strikes, and all of them would have missed by a mile even if HD hadn't been dodging. They all looked horrible. Chamberlain really didn't get in much but ironically was my favorite in the match. Threw a nice falling clothesline and did some real nice apron work. At one point he choked out HD behind the refs back and it was a glorious cheat to win from the apron choke. It was pro wrestling. Match was fine, meant to put over tag champs Hammerstone and Chamberlain.

2. Joey Ryan vs. "The Gentleman Brawler" Eric Right

Right gives out a fake handlebar mustache to a child at ringside. That's actually a nice little touch. This match was a nice little TV match. Right is a little schticky but makes it work better than I would have guessed. He throws nice uppercut punches, works in moves I miss like atomic drops and a good aggressive headlock (say 0.5 on the Dundee scale). Joey Ryan is a good guy for this fed, comes off so much better on TV than a lot of the waxed/oiled short brown hair WWE types. This was simply worked with Ryan controlling with stomps and decent punches, feeding into Right's comebacks. Ryan won with a spear, which was odd. I'm not a big fan of that as a finish, let alone with two guys the same size.

3. Nick Price & Kevin Kross vs. The Whirlwind Gentleman (Remy Marcel & Jack Manley)

A lot of gentlemen in this fed, apparently. Whirlwind Gentlemen are basically your Vegas LMFAO types with bad suits and bad big hair and colorful sunglasses, coming out to Peter Gabriel's "Steam" (which admittedly fits great with douchebag babyface charisma, almost like the FBI coming out to that BeeGees remix). They aren't very good, and it's a bummer they're being pushed as a big deal when a guy like Kevin Kross is cooler in every way. This was really strange as they've been hyping the Gentlemen with 3 weeks of video packages, and then the match was worked with Price and Kross dominating the whole match, and WG only winning by banana peel roll up after Lisa Marie's botched interference. I mean, if you want to push a team, actually DO IT. Don't make them look like total weenies in their first televised match. All the match made me want was more Kross throwing dudes at awkward angles.

4. Gangrel vs. Tyshaun Prince

Disappointing match that ends in a DQ. Instead of doing a heavyweight brawl they worked it cat and mouse with Gangrel dodging the larger Tyshaun's attacks. Except Gangrel is not very fast, so it was a very lethargic cat and very tired chubby mouse, with a hands on the ref finish. Bleh.

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Paragon Pro Wrestling 7/11/15 Review

Paragon Pro Wrestling is like Too Many Cooks, in that there are about 9 false starts before the show actually starts. There are several commercials for Paragon Pro Wrestling that air successively, and each time you think you're just seeing the intro for the actual show, but then there's another commercial for the show, and suddenly you're two White Russians deep and you're wondering when the fuck the actual show is going to start. There are just an endless amount of PPW commercials featuring every wrestler on the roster, set to AC/DC's Thunderstruck, and you're like "Well surely the show is starting NOW" and then it's just another trick and another video package advertisement for the show airs and just when you think you've had enough..........you get presented with a Darin Corbin match against a 45 year old vampire (but what's 45 years when you're immortal amirite!?).

1. Darin Corbin vs. Gangrel

Presently Gangrel looks like what RATT's dead guitarist would have looked like present day, if he hadn't died of AIDS. I love the announcers here as they really capture the vibe of off-strip Vegas, saying that they saw Corbin earlier in the day loading up on garlic pasta at the Italian buffet "but it doesn't appear to be helping him against the Vampire Warrior Gangrel". You gotta know your characters, you gotta know that you tape all your shows in front of 85 people in Sam's Club Casino, and these guys understand every wrinkle of this dry fucking desert town.

Just like last week the audio sync is off, so the thud thud thud of men stomping across a mic'd ring don't come close to matching up to the footwork of the actual match, so instead we get the appearance of two men fake fighting while an avant garde drummer just hammers out of time beats. Gangrel throws a great corkscrew elbow drop. Corbin has nice form on a missile dropkick. Gangrel catches a crossbody off the top and swings Corbin into the Impaler DDT for the shockingly satisfying finish.

2. Nick Price vs. "The Gentleman Brawler" Eric Right

Eric Right is the hipster mixologist I mentioned from last week's battle royal. Recently I had to serve MY COUNTRY and do jury duty for two whole days (didn't even get to interview, just had to sit through everybody else getting interviewed), and there was a hipster also waiting to be interviewed as well, wearing suspenders and sporting a delicately styled handlebar mustache, while reading a book on how to home brew. That felt a little too on the nose to me. It felt like a Chuck Lorre adaptation of a hipster waiting to serve on jury duty; the kind of guy who brings his vintage Royal typewriter to the coffee shop to work on his screenplay. Eric Right is not quite there, but it feels like he should strive to be there. Go all the way with it. Right does less modern hipster dressing vintage, and aims for more "guy working at 1920s printing press who enjoys himself an occasional scrap". He has a bottle of cure-all tonic that he uses for an amusing hulk up spot. That kinda thing.

And I dug this. Right throws nice punches which is a good trait for a "Gentleman Brawler" to have. His hooking rights look good and his left jabs look nice. Price is more of a Caleb Konley type in a fed that has Caleb Konley, but he worked a nice heel routine here, choked Right nicely (at one point hanging him in a tree of woe and really laying in his boot under Right's chin). They do an actual nice double clothesline spot, Price commits on a missed elbow drop, the announcer allude to Right's finisher being a top rope fist drop (which would skyrocket Right up my list of personal favorites) and Right takes a nice bump after Price yanks his leg mid fist drop attempt. This ends in a DQ which is meh, but I liked everything that happened between the bells.

Joey Ryan is doing another hotel room promo when he's again interrupted by housekeeping. He throws down moves on her (while wearing trunks and a towel) and when she says "look I'm just here to clean the towels" he takes his towel off, tosses it over her head and says "Then wash this. It's FILTHY." Hilarious.

3. Riea Von Slasher vs. La Rosa Negra

Von Slasher is Canadian and built like Mickie Knuckles, Rosa is from Puerto Rico and has been around for awhile, wrestled a bunch for WWC and IWA but has been working stuff like Shine the last few years. This wasn't bad but it didn't really feel like they had much of a plan. Slasher has size and a good large build, but doesn't really work as nasty as it looks like she would. Her strikes weren't too impressive but watching it FELT like they should be. I dunno. They work a really fun wristlock/monkey flip chain sequence, but things fall apart a bit when Rosa way overshoots on a sunset flip (and really why go for a sunset flip on someone who has 80 lb. on you anyway?), then we get a Lisa Marie Varon run in that leads to a roll up finish and it just kinda petered out. Rosa has good energy and showed some polish (really liked that twitch speed she showed on her avalanche) but this felt like it should have been better.

4. Jessy Sorensen vs. Caleb Konley

This was a serviceable workrate kickpad modern indy main event. This was probably the best I've seen Konley look, but sadly Sorensen had a real clunky showing. It's like he kept literally tripping over his own feet, and forced Konley to have to freeze time a few different times. Example: Konley gets tossed into the corner and Sorensen charges, Konley gets the boots up, Sorensen is supposed to catch them and spin Konley's legs through the ropes, but Sorensen whiffs on the catch so that Konley has to leave his legs stuck forever out, until Sorensen finally grabs them and does the spot as planned. There were other moments like that, with Konley hung out to dry waiting for Sorensen to get his act together. But Konley held this together nicely and really deserves credit for making this as watchable as it was. He threw some fun strike combos and mixed them up nicely to avoid the whole "I forearm you, you forearm me, we both make screaming double jack off poses". Instead Konley would throw a snug left forearm, mix in a nice body shot, spin with a nice back elbow, etc. All his shots looked good. At one point he caught Sorensen with some great body shots as Jessy was getting back in the ring. But it looks like this fed has chosen Sorensen as their guy, which I kind of get. He has a build, he's young, he's clean. But he also appears to be very much not good.

This week's show was a massive improvement over the debut show. This was a plenty entertaining, quick moving hour of wrestling right here.

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