Very early on in the first year of Swampflix, I reviewed a bad-on-purpose horror comedy called WolfCop, about a werewolf who’s “half man, half wolf, and all cop”. I remember having fun with the absurd novelty of that film’s premise and throwback 80s aesthetic, but I also remember finding the plot-heavy journey to those pleasures to be frustratingly tedious. A decade later, not much has changed. WolfCop director Lowell Dean has a new straight-to-Shudder horror film called Dark Match that repeats all the exact highs and lows of his werewolf-cop movie, except now mapped to the milieu of 1980s regional pro wrestling circuits. Infinity Pool & Possessor cinematographer Karim Hussain makes great use of Dark Match‘s late-80s setting by submerging its hyperviolent pro wrestling matches under a thick layer of VHS haze, often shooting its actors in uncomfortable, drunken close-ups like an unexperienced videographer operating the era’s bulky cameras for the very first time. The story also works its way up to a fun, bloody bar-napkin premise once it lures its minor pro wrestling promotion out to a backwoods cult compound for untelevised death matches, which turn out to be a Satanic ritual involving novelty weapons themed to Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water. The problem is that it’s a long, trudging journey to the over-the-top joys of that core premise, repeating all of the sins and virtues of WolfCop along the way.

If there’s anything that’s improved about Lowell Dean’s high-premise genre exercises in the past decade, it’s in Dark Match‘s tonal progression towards sincerity. Wrestling hall-of-famer Chris Jericho hams it up as the rural cult leader who’s engineered the death matches that liven up the third act, but he’s mostly included as a prop. Aisha Issa stars as our POV wrestler, Miss Behave, who’s the most talented grappler on her promotion’s roster but has to play heel due to the small-town racism of the venues they entertain. A stunted career spent putting over bubbly blonde white women leaves the Trinidadian cynic in an eternally rotten mood, which makes her sharply aware of the sour vibes at the Satanic cult’s pro wrestling sleepaway camp long before the death matches’ decapitations & disembowelings. The resulting tension falls somewhere between a straight-to-streaming knockoff of Get Out and a straight-to-streaming knockoff of Green Room, paling in comparison to either overt reference point. Thankfully, the four killer wrestling bouts at the center of the film liven things up with some true, gruesome novelty, and the sincerity of Miss Behave’s journey to that violent escalation prevent it from devolving into winking, smug irony. Unfortunately, those matches make up less than a third of the total runtime, and the remaining scenes of sincere drama are effectively dead air.

For a much more efficient, satisfying version of what Dark Match is going for, check out the 2011 novelty horror Monster Brawl, which simulates a feature-length pro wrestling Pay-Per-View where all of the combatants are Famous Monster archetypes: a werewolf, a mummy, a zombie, a Frankenstein, etc. However, please keep in mind that everyone I recommend that movie to absolutely hates it. Dark Match only truly comes alive during its gore-gimmicked pro wrestling bouts, having obvious fun with the visual textures of vintage TV broadcasts of the sport (despite the implications of its title). Monster Brawl maintains kayfabe for its entire runtime, never breaking from its TV broadcast premise for jags of dramatic tedium. That fully committed format leaves a lot more room for supernaturally violent in-ring action, which is the only reason an audience would stream one of these novelty horrors in the first place. Given that Monster Brawl is loved by seemingly no one but me, maybe it doesn’t matter that Dark Match falls short of its fully-fleshed-out ideal. Maybe all that matters is that, like Lowell Dean, I’m still wasting my time on disposable trivialities like this ten years since our last passing moment together. Regardless of whether the movies that bond us are any good, we are brothers in schlock.

-Brandon Ledet