pro wrestling

Signature Move (2017)

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I remember Jennifer Reeder’s surrealist high school melodrama Knives & Skin harshly dividing the audience at Overlook Film Fest in 2019, with the more macho Horror Bros in the crowd grumbling that it was the worst film they’d seen all fest and with other scattered weirdos gushing that it was the best.  Personally, I dug it, especially for the way it warped the teen-friendly Lynchian melodrama of early Riverdale by submerging it in a hallucinatory Robotrip aesthetic.  I wasn’t especially surprised that Knives & Skin confused the more rigidly horror-minded section of the crowd, though, since it’s a Laura Palmer-style murder mystery that doesn’t care as much about the murder as it cares about teen-girl bedroom decor and eerie vocal choir renditions of 80s pop tunes.  Hell, even my own reaction was confused.   I left the theater thinking I had watched a messy but ambitious debut feature from a boldly stylistic genre nerd.  I was wrong.  Reeder had not only made a name for herself as a prolific short filmmaker on the festival circuit, but she also had already completed her first feature in 2017’s Signature Move.  And now having caught up with that debut, I’m as confused as ever.  After the slow-motion, high-style freakout of Knives & Skin, I was expecting a lot more visual panache out of the straightforward, Sundancey romcom that preceded it.  I still don’t have a clear answer to the question “Who is Jennifer Reeder?” Maybe I never will.

Signature Move stars Fawzia Mirza as a closeted, thirtysomething Chicagoan who hides her lesbian social life from her first-generation mother, an agoraphobic shut-in who spends all her time watching Pakistani soap operas and needling her daughter about marriage.  As an act of private rebellion and stress relief, Mirza secretly trains as a professional wrestler between dull dayshifts working the desk at a law office.  She also sneaks around the city’s lesbian bar scene, where she meets a much more out-and-proud love interest played by Sari Sanchez.  Her new girlfriend lives a freer, more honest lesbian life, having grown up with an actual professional wrestler as her mother – an open-minded luchadora named Luna Peligrosa.  As one woman struggles to reveal her true self to her conservative parent and the other refuses to regress into the closet, conflict ensues.  From there, there isn’t much to Signature Move that you can’t find in any 90s festival-circuit romcom or, more recently, any streaming-era sitcom.  Even the lesbian-scene setting isn’t especially distinctive amongst similar, superior titles like Saving Face, Appropriate Behavior, The Watermelon Woman, or whatever was the first queer romcom you happened to catch on IFC before Netflix “disrupted” (i.e., gutted) the original purpose of cable.  I suppose there’s some value in documenting the food, fabrics, art, jewelry, and bootleg DVDs of Chicago’s Muslim & Latinx neighborhoods as our two mismatched-but-perfectly-matched lovers negotiate their new relationship, but in some ways those moments of cultural window dressing almost make the film more anonymous among similar low-budget comedies that pad out the programs at Sundance & Outfest every single year.

If there’s any detectable trace of Jennifer Reeder auteurism in Signature Move, it’s in the inevitable climax where Mirza’s shut-in mother bravely ventures out of their shared apartment to witness her daughter’s pro wrestling debut at what appears to be a lucha-drag hybrid event akin to our local Choke Hole drag-wrasslin’ promotion.  There’s a heightened artificiality to that queer-dream-realm wrestling venue that Reeder would later intensify & expand in Knives & Skin until it consumed an entire fictional suburb.  Otherwise, I can’t say I found much to either praise or pick apart with any fervor in Signature Move, which is just as straightforward & unassuming as Knives & Skin is uncanny & confounding.  It’s a cute enough movie on its own terms, though, and there can never be enough media celebrating how gay wrestling is as a microculture.  Otherwise, it appears that I time-traveled in the wrong direction when trying to get a firmer handle on Jennifer Reeder’s signature aesthetics as a director.  Her two follow-up features after Knives & Skin—last year’s Night’s End and the upcoming Perpetrator—are both supernatural horrors that promise a lot more room for the high-style, low-logic playfulness that caught my attention at Overlook than this cookie-cutter indie romcom was ever going to deliver.

-Brandon Ledet

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

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It’s impossible to distinguish which version of Ed Wood I think of as a personal hero: the alcoholic crossdresser who lived a tough life as an underappreciated outsider artist or the much sunnier, apocryphal version of him presented in Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic.  Either way, Ed Wood is undeniably a great film (despite how some of its casting choices may have aged), second only to Pee-wee’s Big Adventure as Burton’s career best.  It was surely my first exposure to Wood’s art & legacy, priming me for a genuine appreciation of the kind of enthusiastic D.I.Y. filmmaking most modern audiences mock as “so bad it’s good” schlock. Before Burton’s loving, reformative biopic polished up Ed Wood’s reputation, his biggest claim to fame was being posthumously burdened with a Golden Turkey “Award” for The Worst Director of All Time in the 1980s – mainly for his career-defining opus Plan 9 from Outer Space.  Personally, I don’t believe Wood was capable of making The Worst Film of All Time.  Wherever his work may have suffered from improper funding or technical ineptitude, Wood vastly overcompensated with a chaotic, personal passion for the artform.  Despite being locked out of proper studio filmmaking channels, Wood’s stream-of-consciousness writing style and delirious sense of self-confidence led to some of the most spectacularly bizarre self-financed genre pictures of his era.  The actual worst movies of all time are dispassionate, impersonal, unmemorable bores – movies Ed Wood was incapable of making.  Whether I only believe that because of his myth-making biopic is something I’ll never be able to fully decipher; I happened to be born late enough in the game that Burton’s hagiographic version of Wood reached me before the dweebs at The Gold Turkey Awards could poison my brain.

Plan 9 from Outer Space was never my personal favorite Ed Wood flick (that meager honorific belongs to Glen or Glenda), but it’s easy enough to understand how it became his most widely known.  If nothing else, its gleeful genre-nerd mashup of Atomic Age sci-fi tropes, celebrity vampires, graveyard-set zombie attacks, and pro wrestling monsters is enough of a pop media overload to distract from what it lacks in financing or technical skill (as if those weren’t also a highlight in their own way).  Whereas Glen or Glenda was a self-portrait of his life as a closeted crossdresser, Plan 9 is a self-portrait of his life as a genre movie fanboy.  Both films were written in a manic, straight-from-the-id haste due to their budget constrictions, exposing the bargain bin auteur’s naked psyche without petty concerns like narrative logic or good taste blocking the view.  Originally titled Graverobbers from Outer Space, the film’s basic concept of space aliens commanding an army of Earth’s undead was always going to be a mash-up of Atomic Age sci-fi & zombie movie tropes.  It’s the way Wood crammed his social circle of Hollywood “weirdies” into that basic genre mash-up that really explodes the film into post-modern delirium.  Without explanation or internal justification, this aliens-and-zombies novelty picture suddenly involves celebrity vampires Bela Lugosi & Vampira, a guest segment of the locally televised astrology program Criswell Predicts, and the gargantuan pro wrestler Tor Johnson – all essentially playing themselves with no real relation to the alien graverobber plot.  The film was pitched to independent investors as a way to cash-in on then-recent newspaper reports of UFO sightings in Hollywood.  Instead, it mutated into a collection of all the assorted pop culture ephemera that made Ed Wood fall in love with Hollywood as an aspiring, underfunded filmmaker; all that was missing was a few cowboys airlifted from a serial Western.

Besides its genre-melding collection of aliens, zombies, vampires, and pro wrestlers on a single graveyard set, I think the main reason Plan 9 is more popular than Glen or Glenda is that it moves at a slower, quieter pace.  It’s perfectly calibrated for MST3k-style live commentary in that way, making it a much likelier candidate for drunken Midnight Movie screenings and “so-bad-it’s-good” mockery.  Glen or Glenda pummels the audience with a scatterbrained editing style & an overbearing narration track that leave little room for any individual image or idea to be scrutinized before it moves on to the next.  By contrast, Plan 9 is in no rush to get anywhere, feeling more like a Halloween-themed hangout film than a proper creature feature.  There’s plenty of time for audiences to point & laugh at the visible strings that hold up its model-kit UFOs, or the cardboard cut-out gravestones that tip over whenever bumped into, or the lighting’s alternation between night-day-night settings within a single scene.  It’s the kind of “bad movie” that invites the audience to feel superior to the material at hand, which is especially attractive to teenage cynics who are first starting to get into low-budget schlock.  I’m getting to the point in my life where that above-it-all MST3k mockery no longer appeals to me.  These types of unskilled, underfunded novelty films read more to me as quirky Outsider Art than they do some kind of subprofessional embarrassment.  By that standard, Ed Wood is truly one of the greats, having made several D.I.Y. messterpieces that were personal to his interests as an artist & as a Hollywood weirdo but still endure as crowd-pleasing party films a half-century later.  The experience of watching Plan 9 from Outer Space is too fun for it to be “the worst” of anything, no matter how clumsy Wood was in his rush to get something on celluloid before his budget ran dry.

I’m grateful to the Tim Burton biopic for introducing me to Ed Wood as a filmmaker and a personality.  I’m even more grateful to Rhino’s mid-90s Deluxe Ed Wood Boxset of the films covered in the Burton version of his story, collecting Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster, and Plan 9 from Outer Space on three VHS tapes bound in a fuzzy pink angora slip case.  I lost track of my copy of that boxset years ago, as I let go of the tape-eating VCRs that were collecting dust on my TV stand.  It’s been easy enough to buy those films individually on DVD in the decades since, but they’re long overdue for the cleaned-up HD restoration treatment that so many low-budget genre films are lavished with on the niche Blu Ray market these days.  The pink angora slip case is optional, but it gets stranger every year that the unholy trinity of American schlockteurs—Wood, Wishman, and Meyer—are all missing from the vintage media restoration market.  I wonder if my genuine appreciation of Ed Wood’s art is solely a result of growing up in the exact 1990s sweet spot: after Burton rehabilitated his earlier reputation as The Worst Director of All Time and Rhino had released his Greatest Hits as an easily accessible boxset presented in an up-to-date format.  That was almost three decades ago; we’re long overdue for another Ed Wood career refresher, starting with a proper physical media release for the movie that made him infamous.

-Brandon Ledet

Godzilla vs Megalon (1973)

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The last time WrestleMania came through New Orleans, I indulged in a few of the smaller satellite shows that popped up around the city, including one put on by an extremely nerdy promotion out of NYC called Kaiju Big Battel.  Sitting in a brightly lit auditorium after midnight, watching a kaiju-themed wrestling show with a shockingly sober, wholesome crowd, was a one-of-a-kind delight — an experience I doubt I’ll ever be able to fully replicate.  The wrestlers were mostly costumed in giant plush outfits—dressed as hamburgers, 1950s robots, literal dust bunnies, and cans of soup—smashing each other into the cardboard cities that decorated the ring they used as a goofball playground.  I guess it’s possible to take an unfavorable view of an American company boiling down the kaiju genre to such broadly silly terms, considering its heartbreaking origins as an expression of post-nuclear Japanese national grief in the original Godzilla.  However, the further I dig into the Godzilla canon in recent months, the more I’m starting to realize just how faithful the Kaiju Big Battel brand of novelty wrestling is to its Godzilla roots; it’s just calling back to a later, decidedly kid-friendly era of Godzilla filmmaking detached from the giant lizard’s grim-as-fuck origins.

If there’s any one Godzilla movie that could be blamed for cheapening the monster’s brand with broadly silly slapstick comedy, it’s likely Godzilla vs Megalon.  Thanks to an ugly pan-and-scan transfer with an English dub that was allowed to temporarily slip into the public domain, it’s the Shōwa era Godzilla film that was most widely available to the American public for decades — lurking in creature-of-the-week television broadcasts, gas station DVD bargain bins, and MST3k target practice.  Godzilla vs Megalon appears to have a dire reputation as a result, diluting the larger Godzilla brand with misconceptions that the series was always dirt-cheap and aimed at little kids’ sensibilities.  I can’t personally attest to the quality of that much-seen pan-and-scan edit of Godzilla vs Megalon, but the Criterion restoration that’s currently steaming online is both beautifully colorful and wonderfully goofy. It was obviously a rushed, cheap production, but the kaiju battles have a distinct pro wrestling charm to them that makes for great late-night viewing, transporting me back to that Kaiju Big Battel show in the best way possible.  I can’t say the movie doesn’t deserve its reputation as the bottom of the kaiju media barrel, but now that the more important, prestigious Godzilla films are widely available in their original form, I think there’s a lot more room for audiences to appreciate the film’s delirious, Saturday Morning Cartoon silliness for what it is.

The humans-on-the-ground plot of Godzilla vs Megalon feels like repurposed scenes from a 1970s live-action Disney espionage comedy, by which I mean they’re not very memorable or worthy of discussion.  What’s really worth paying attention to here is the pro wrestling booking of the monster fights.  The film is a tag team match.  In one corner, we have the debut (and final) match of Megalon, a profoundly idiotic beetle worshiped by the underwater occultists of Seatopia.  In the other corner, we have the movie’s face: Jet Jaguar, an Ultraman rip-off robot with an insanely wide grin — also appearing in his debut (and final) match.  Neither contender is enough of a draw to carry the movie on their own, so they’re paired with charismatic tag team partners to help get them over with the crowd.  Megalon is paired with Gigan, a much lesser robo-Godzilla derivative than Mechagodzilla, whose non-presence essentially turns this into a squash match.  Jet Jaguar, of course, is paired with Godzilla, a legitimizing tag team partner whose popularity should have been able to forever endear his new robo-friend to children everywhere.  That proved to be an unsuccessful gamble in the long run (Jet Jaguar was never seen or heard from again), but Godzilla appears to have fun trying.  He performs here with the broadly expressive physical language of a wrestler playing to the backseats in a packed auditorium, aiming for big laughs and even bigger wrestling maneuvers that any kid should be delighted cheer on from the crowd.

To its credit, Godzilla vs Megalon does vaguely motion towards the eco-conscious concerns of larger Godzilla lore in its early goings, pitting both the kaiju and the underwater sea cult against us surface humans after our nuclear tests pollute the atmosphere.  The film isn’t earnestly about those themes, though, no more than it’s earnestly about Godzilla or Megalon.  This is Jet Jaguar’s show through & through, as evidenced by the grinning robot closing out the show with his own badass theme song — the same way pro wrestlers replay their entrance music while they lift newly-won championship belts in victory.  Jet Jaguar was created specifically for the film as contest entry from a small child (explaining the not-so-vague resemblance to Ultraman), which is a pretty blatant excuse to sell new kaiju toys & merch.  Because the production was rushed, underfunded, and marketed specifically at little kids’ sensibilities, there isn’t much destruction of towns or cities (outside some crudely inserted stock footage from better-funded Godzilla films), so most of the monster action is staged in an open field, away from the necessity of expensive miniatures.  The result is basically the movie version of Kaiju Big Battel: dudes in goofy costumes body slamming each other in fits of broad, slapstick humor.  It sucks that the kaiju genre was once only associated with that kind of silly novelty entertainment, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t entertaining, especially now that the more serious end of the genre is more widely respected and readily accessible.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #122 of The Swampflix Podcast: WCW World Heavyweight Champion David Arquette

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Welcome to Episode #122 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee revisit actor David Arquette’s two-week reign as WCW World Heavyweight Champion, a bizarre real-life story bookended by two disparate feature films: Ready to Rumble (2000) & You Cannot Kill David Arquette (2020). Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Bonus Features: Monster Brawl (2011)

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Our current Movie of the Month, the low-budget horror comedy Monster Brawl, might be the absolute worst movie that I wholeheartedly love. That’s partly because it mimics the structure & rhythms of a pro wrestling Pay-Per-View instead of a traditional Movie, which requires the audience to adjust expectations to the payoffs of that format. A one-time-only deathmatch tournament between famous monster archetypes in a haunted graveyard to determine “The Most Powerful Ghoul of All Time”, it’s staged as if it were a real-time Pay-Per-View broadcast of an actual pro wrestling event. Monster Brawl‘s feature-length commitment to that structure can be alienating if you’re not immediately tickled by its absurdity, which proved true for most of The Swampflix Crew. This turned out to be an extremely self-indulgent Movie of the Month selection on my part, as no one else in this polluted swamp seemed to have a good time with it. Whoops.

As a result, recommending further viewing to anyone who enjoyed Monster Brawl and wants to see more movies on its shamelessly trashy wavelength is somewhat of an empty exercise. It appears that no one enjoys Monster Brawl, outside maybe appreciating the creature design for the bayou-dwelling eco terrorist wrestler Swamp Gut. Regardless, here are a few recommended titles if you—improbably—loved our Movie of the Month and want to experience similar goofball horror comedies that traffic in the same grey area between creature feature & pro wrestling PPV.

Santo vs. The Vampire Women (1962)

No discussion of the intersection between pro wrestling & cheap-o horror would be complete without the masked luchador Santo. A wrestler so beloved in Mexico that he was practically a folk hero, Santo’s in-ring celebrity was exported to the big screen in over 50 feature films, many of them within the horror genre. I can’t speak to the quality of the majority of Santo’s cinematic output (much of which was never translated to English), but I can heartily recommend his most financially & culturally successful picture: Santo vs. The Vampire Women. It’s a film that’s most well recognized in the US for being featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but it’s a fun pro wrestling-themed Halloween Season watch even without that ironic mockery (especially without, honestly).

Amusingly, Santo vs. The Vampire Women mostly keeps its horror & its wrestling separated in the plot. Santo is hired by a worried father as a kind of bodyguard to protect his vulnerable daughter who is being actively recruited by a vampire coven, as the luchador comes from a long line of ancestors who are sworn “to eliminate evil of all kinds.” Unfortunately, the professional demands of being a popular sports entertainer means that Santo is often too “busy” to help keep the daughter-stealing vampire women at bay, as he’s often tied up with a wrestling match he can’t get out of. The novelty of the film’s wrestling angle exists almost entirely independently from the main action, which means that the story has to stop dead still to make room for the on-screen luchador matches the same way a porno’s story stalls for lengthy depictions of sex.

Even so, the Satanic ritual imagery & buxom vampire coven are so Cool on their own that this would be a solid horror cheapie even without the novelty of the wrestling angle. Anyone with an appreciation for pro wrestling pageantry and Poverty Row knockoffs of Universal Horror classics should have blast with the spooky-campy atmosphere established here. And maybe it’s for the best that it kept its wrestling & its plot separate, since Monster Brawl synthesized those two elements into a single structure-defining gimmick and practically no one enjoys it.

Mortal Kombat (1995)

Monster Brawl is not the only gimmicky fight tournament movie that I love more than I likely should. I also have a huge (likely nostalgic) soft spot for Paul WS Anderson’s big-screen adaptation of the gory button-masher Mortal Kombat. Much like how Monster Brawl structures its story around a Pro Wrestling Pay-Per-View, the Mortal Kombat movie goes out of its way to maintain the tiered tournament structure of its video game source material. It’s a little better funded than Monster Brawl and a little less committed to their shared gimmick (the official fights don’t start until 40min into the film in this case), so in comparison it stands out as a slicker, more accessible variation on the same deathmatch tournament theme.

Instead of fighting to determine “The Most Powerful Ghoul of All Time”, the combatants of Mortal Kombat compete “to defend the realm of Earth” from an “emperor sorcerer demon” who seeks to subjugate & steal the souls of every living being. The humans who enter this interdimensional deathmatch tournament (Mortal Kombat all-stars Sonya Blade, Johnny Cage, and Liu Kang) face off against evil creatures much less culturally overfamiliar than the Universal Monster knockoffs featured in Monster Brawl — mostly demonic ninjas with black magic control over elements like fire, ice, and … shapeshifting reptiles? Much like how Monster Brawl has its clear stand-out monster with Swamp Gut, however, the real star of Mortal Kombat is the four-armed mutant freakshow Goro — a beautiful blend of clunky animatronics and shitty mid-90s CGI.

The best argument for Mortal Kombat being a superior precursor to Monster Brawl is the way it keeps the audience’s energy up throughout, mostly by periodically re-playing its insanely high-BPM techno theme song as a constant pep-up. A hissing Christopher Lambert also hams it up for the camera as the wise “lightning god” Raiden in a way that stands out more than any single performance in Monster Brawl, which is more about playing on familiar archetypes than establishing anything novel or nuanced. If you found yourself amused by the premise of Monster Brawl but frustrated by the execution, Mortal Kombat might be the slicked-up, smoothed-out version of the film you were looking for.

Septic Man (2013)

Monster Brawl is not the first time director Jesse T. Cook has let down a member of The Swampflix Crew. In the earliest months of the blog, James published a two-star review of Cook’s feces-themed creature feature Septic Man, in which a sewer worker is trapped in a contaminated septic tank and subsequently transforms into a hideous turd monster. James wrote, “Watching a filth-covered man roll around in a septic tank for an hour and a half didn’t turn out to be as fun as I expected. […] Septic Man had the potential to be like a darker Toxic Avenger but instead has none of Troma’s charms and ends up being every bit as bad as its premise would imply.” He goes on to call the film “drab”, “ugly”, “depressing”, “boring” and, most bluntly, “crap.” Naturally, after subjecting everyone to what turned out to be a miserable experience watching Cook’s previous film, I felt that it was my turn to suffer Septic Man myself as penance.

James was right and wrong. Septic Man is only 80 minutes long; it’s also crap. It’s like a dispatch from an alternate universe where Troma got into the gritty Eli Roth-era torture porn game. I dare say I was charmed by it, though. The way the grunt sewer worker is financially pressured to keep working during a water contamination pandemic only to be transformed into a hideous Poo Beast just happened to hit me at the right time, considering the parallel labor exploitations of the COVID age. The gradual Turd Monster transformation was also surprisingly solid as a practical effects throwback (although he’s obviously nowhere near as loveable as our beloved Swamp Gut; no one is).

If I’ve learned anything from this exercise it’s that I have terrible taste and cannot be trusted, especially when it comes to the oeuvre of Jesse T. Cook. This blog is a septic tank of bad takes, and I am but the filth-mutated man trapped inside it.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Monster Brawl (2011)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Boomer, Britnee, and Hanna watch Monster Brawl (2011).

Brandon: This summer, every major American sports conglomerate—the NFL, the NBA, MLB, etc.—publicly debated whether it was safe to restart operations as the COVID pandemic stretched on months beyond what was initially projected. This debate was unnecessary in the world of “sports entertainment“, however, as pro wrestling companies like WWE, AEW, and Impact! never shut down operations in the first place. Continuing a notoriously shitty history of exploiting their roster for maximum profit (see: lack of employee benefits for wrestlers because of their dubious status as “contract workers”), WWE has maintained consistent weekly broadcasts and monthly Pay-Per-View specials while COVID halted the rest of the entertainment industry. Unsurprisingly, the company had a breakout of coronavirus cases among its staff in late June and still continued weekly broadcasts without interruption. While it would have been impossible to maintain operations without any risk of COVID outbreak (imagine opponents wrestling while somehow also maintaining a six-foot distance), there have been some performative measures to make WWE’s broadcasts appear “safe”. The eeriness of watching wrestlers perform in empty arenas, in front of LED screens of webcam-wielding fans at home, or for their enemies on the other side of a plexiglass barrier has been a fascinating symptom of our dystopian times. The real gem of COVID-era pro wrestling, however, has been WWE’s increased reliance on pre-taped, off-site matches.

While the COVID pandemic has made pro wrestling even more immorally dangerous for its workers, it’s also made pro wrestling more cinematic. The over-the-top, deliriously silly pageantry of wrestling that attracts me to the “sport” in the first place has been especially heightened this year. We’ve seen #SwampFight matches set in haunted wetland shacks straight out of True Detective, Season 1. This year’s Money in the Bank Pay-Per-View featured a #CorporateLadderMatch: a vertical fight from the lobby to the rooftop of WWE’s corporate headquarters. My personal favorite was the #FireflyFunhouse match: a darkly surreal, Lynchian descent into the troubled psyche of John Cena, possibly the single greatest wrestling segment of all time. The rules of reality have been entirely broken & disregarded in favor of delivering the most memorably entertaining matches possible, which is something I wish this proudly unreal “sport” pursued more often. While these pre-taped, off-site pandemic matches have been a freshly exciting development for modern pro wrestling, they don’t feel like a total anomaly. I’ve not only seen similar matches within pro wrestling broadcasts before (mostly in Attitude Era segments set at funerals & boiler rooms and in the Hardy Boyz’ recent “Broken” series for Impact!), but they also distinctly recalled a little-loved B-movie from 2011 that I hold near & dear to my stupid little heart: Monster Brawl.

Monster Brawl is a one-time-only pro wrestling tournament between famous monster archetypes, held in a haunted graveyard to determine “The Most Powerful Ghoul of All Time”. It’s staged as if it were a real-time Pay-Per-View broadcast of an actual pro wrestling event, with comedian Dave Foley & genre film veteran Art Hindle providing live action commentary as traditional ringside announcers. Competitors with generic famous-monster gimmicks like Werewolf, Zombie Man, Lady Vampire, Mummy, and Frankenstein (“Technically, it’s Frankenstein’s Monster, if you want to be a dick about it,”) fight to the death in a standard-issue wrestling ring in the middle of a spooky graveyard straight out of a 1950s B-movie. Scratch that; it’s a set straight out of the #BoneyardMatch at this year’s pandemic-altered WrestleMania, wherein real-life famous monster The Undertaker buried opponent AJ Styles alive in a pre-marked grave. I don’t know how to convey how awesomely stupid it is to watch classic monster archetypes murder each other in a wrestling ring if that premise doesn’t automatically speak to your sensibilities the way it does to mine. When I see a Louisiana-themed Creature from the Black Lagoon knockoff named Swamp Gut who’s mostly made of trash and is pissed off about wetlands erosion, my heart just sings. I do hope that audiences outside this exact B-movie/pro wrestling fandom Venn Diagram could at least appreciate the film’s commitment to the bit, however. It establishes a very simple famous-monster-deathmatch-tournament premise upfront and never steps outside of those parameters to win over any potential detractors.

This might be the absolute worst movie that I wholeheartedly love. That’s because it mimics the structure & rhythms of a wrestling Pay-Per-View instead of a traditional Movie, which requires the audience to adjust their expectations to the payoffs of that format. Everything I love & loathe about pro wrestling is present here: the over-the-top characters, the exaggerated cartoon violence, the infuriating marginalization of women outside the ring to Bikini Babe status, all of it. It’s a pure joy to see (generic versions of) the famous monsters that I also love plugged into that template, especially when the announcers underline the absurdity of the scenario with inane statements like “For the first time in professional sports, folks, we’re witnessing the dead rising from their graves to attack Frankenstein.” That combination delivers all the deliriously absurd action I’ve been enjoying from COVID-era WWE programming without any of the behind-the-scenes worker exploitation spoiling the mood. In fact, it looks like it was genuinely fun to conceive & film, judging by the loving care that went into the detailed character designs of the monsters and the unembarrassed commitment to the Pay-Per-View broadcast gimmick.

Hanna, while we’ve all been known to enjoy a cheap-o horror movie or two, you’re the only other member of the crew who watches pro wrestling with any regularity, so it’s probably safest to start with you. Was there anything particular about the spirit of “sports entertainment” that you saw accurately represented in Monster Brawl? How well do you think the film mimics the feel of either current or classic wrestling broadcasts – then, now, or forever?

Hanna: I should preface this by saying that I am the kind of wrestling fan who likes the idea of the Repo Man, so I realize that my opinions about what makes wrestling appealing may not be shared by the majority of the Sports Entertainment community. Apart from the athleticism and the glorious spots, wrestling makes me happiest in its highest moments of theatricality and absurdity. I also love horror movies, and I’m especially interested in global horror mythologies. In theory, this movie should have been a dream come true for me; I was so ready to love it, but ultimately it fell flat (in part due my extremely high expectations).

Unfortunately, I think that Monster Brawl’s fatal flaw is its monsters; for a movie focused on wrestling and goofy monster tropes, I didn’t find the characters that compelling. For the most part, the monsters didn’t fulfill any of the three criteria that generally attract me to wrestlers: they weren’t dramatically engaging, they weren’t scary, and they weren’t funny. You could argue that it’s hard to establish the kind of character investment that WWE has years to build in an hour and 29 minutes, but the pure glee that Swamp Gut instilled in me kills that argument (the Swamp-speak diatribe against pollution is one of my favorite movie-watching moments from this year). He’s the only character with a unique or memorable identity, the only one that I found myself rooting for – and he gets squashed by a werewolf! Despicable booking. How did they get the other monsters so wrong? How did a slimy pile of green swamp trash have more charisma than a vampire?

It’s absolutely possible that I’m being too hard on this movie; I don’t think it intended to be a masterpiece. Still, I was so disappointed at the untapped potential in the premise. I at least would have enjoyed it more if the camp had been turned up a few notches. What did you think, Britnee? Did the Monster Brawl monsters resonate with you? I know that you’re a sucker for theatricality, so did this film pique your interest in wrestling?

Britnee: Monster Brawl is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. I really do enjoy watching wrestling because I’m a sucker for all things tacky and trashy, but I honestly don’t watch it all that much. I’ll watch clips online or watch a match or two when I’m indulging in someone else’s cable, but that’s pretty much it. Monster Brawl really felt more like a wrestling match than a movie, but could it be that wrestling matches are actually more like movies than I thought?

The part of the film that I kept going back and forth on were the monsters. It was like a Spirit Halloween store threw up on the screen. I actually enjoyed the cheap looking costumes and makeup effects because it really went with the B-movie vibe, but the biggest disappointment was the lack of creativity with their characters (except for Swamp Gut, of course). Like Hanna, I really wanted the monsters to go all out and have fun with their characters. Most of them just made gross scary noises and boring comments to one another. I was laughing immediately at the Witch Bitch character when she was introduced in the film’s beginning, but as time passed, she just became so boring. I wanted her to do insane witchy stuff during her battle with Cyclops, like brand a pentagram on his head or shove a broomstick up his ass.

The lack of creativity with the monsters was the only negative thing about this movie for me. Otherwise, it really was an all around good time. The tiny details in some of the stories were super funny, like the Mummy character being called a MILF (Mummy I’d Like to Find). Those little cheeseball moments reminded me why wrestling is great.

I know that the format of Monster Brawl is that of a wrestling tournament, but I wonder if the film would have been a little better if there was some sort of focused plot. For instance, what if there was more of a focus on just one of the monsters and their journey within the tournament? Boomer, did you enjoy the film adapting to the mold of a wrestling match? Or would you have preferred something different?

Boomer: It would appear that I am the only MotM-participating Swampflixer who has no interest in wrestling whatsoever. It’s not that wrestling didn’t try to grab hold of me with all of its might: my fifth grade class went completely apeshit for WWE while the rest of the world was getting into Pokémon and Animorphs (both of which were forbidden at our evangelical school), and there was even a tie-in promotional episode of Star Trek: Voyager in which the not-yet-famous-as-an-actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson appeared as … an alien cage fighter (it’s bad, although Jeffrey Combs is a delight as always). But despite all the pageantry, the sweaty homoeroticism, and the constant barrage of subliminal (Voyager), liminal (constant advertising and even airing on Sci-Fi/Syfy; a half decade period of Austin 3:16 shirts for sale in every store in America), and superliminal (being forced to watch wrestling events at elementary and middle school sleepovers) advertising, I was never all that interested. I can tell you that I know the names Chyna, Sting, and of course mainstream/mainstream-adjacent figures like Hulk Hogan, John Cena, and Dwayne Johnson, but until this moment I was unaware that there are two famous “The Undertaker(s),” and, don’t judge me, but I’m more interested in the monster truck. I knew of Jimmy Hart, but only as the former trope namer for “Suspiciously Similar Song” on TVTropes. So the fact that this follows the format of a big Pay-Per-View match is news to me, but isn’t surprising, because the cultural touchstone that I couldn’t stop thinking about was Celebrity Deathmatch, which I would often see portions of while waiting out the clock for Daria to start. It followed a pretty similar trajectory; I didn’t really care for Celebrity Deathmatch either.

Of the things that others have mentioned liking about the film, I also enjoyed the overall cheapness of the costumes, which did in fact feel like they were kitbashed together from a Spirit Halloween or the seasonal section of a Savers or Big Lots; the unblinking eye on the Cyclops was particularly endearing in its “Let’s make a movie, gang!” aesthetic. It was a wise idea to intersperse these throughout the film before each match instead of frontloading the movie with all of the narrative elements and then devolving into the wrestling scenes. It took me over two hours to watch this 90 minute feature because every time a fight started, my eyes glazed over and I completely dissociated from the experience, my mind alternating between flashbacks to those sleepovers and my desire to be doing anything else while Jesse Simpson and Matt McCulloch re-enacted the moves that they saw on screen. I had to deliberately remind myself to pay attention, rewinding to make sure I hadn’t missed some element that would give me something else to write about in this segment other than Voyager, reciting segments of Roger Ebert’s review of North, and my boredom. As a longtime fan of Swamp Thing (both the character and the terrible eighties TV show), I did get a kick out of Swamp Gut, and I liked how his introductory segment was framed like a TV documentary show from a formerly-respectable-but-not-so-much-anymore station. I also really liked the potential of Witch Bitch, who could have been a lot of fun. The idea of a time-displaced Colonial Era witch finding meaning in the ring could have made for an interesting story, like a Million Dollar Baby-Eater, but her introductory segment took a turn for the very mean spirited almost immediately, and her early defeat made it clear that she was more of a placeholder than someone worthy of investing time in the characterization of.

I did like the aforementioned “Frankenstien’s monster if you’re a dick” joke, though. I’m glad that, even nearly ten years ago, everyone was already tired of that pedantry. It reminds me of this, one of the best Onion articles from the time when they were making satire and not just predicting the next horrible thing this administration was going to do.

Lagniappe

Britnee: I would love to see more of Swamp Gut. He needs his own movie where he wrestles swamp-polluting douche bags. This is what will save the planet.

Hanna: Like Brandon mentioned, this wouldn’t have been a wrestling movie without some Bikini Babes. One is completely dedicated to the part of cheering on the monsters (or at least marginally enthusiastic), and the other looks like she’s mourning her career in the cemetery.

Boomer: In the recent podcast where Brandon and I talked about A Tale of Two Sisters, I admitted that I know I tend to be the most negative Swampflixian, although I still adhere to the maxim that enjoying something is more interesting than hating it. But now, at long last, with everyone else finding something to enjoy here and me being completely miserable, I am glad to have finally paid my debt for forcing everyone to watch Live Freaky, Die Freaky, which was universally reviled. I can rest easy now.

Brandon: I knew recommending this movie would be risky, but I’m glad we can all at least share in our love for Swam Gut. It also seems like the movie is somewhat successful in “working” the audience the way a real-life wrestling promotion would. Getting us heated over Swam Gut’s loss immediately after falling in love with his eco-terrorist politics is classic pro wrestling booking. It’s even something that’s been recently echoed by Daniel Bryan’s “Eco-Friendly Heavyweight Champion” angle on WWE — playing heel by plainly voicing his heartfelt climate change concerns.

Another great example of this is the way the two women wrestlers are booked in the intergender matches; it’s frustrating to watch Witch Bitch lose so viciously to Cyclops in the first match, but that tension makes Lady Vampire’s victory over Mummy in the very next round all the sweeter. I find that keeping the monsters simple & generic allows the audience to quickly get invested in those broad archetypes’ failures & successes. They’re instantly familiar to us and, thus, easy tools for emotional manipulation during the matches. That’s A+ in-ring storytelling in my book.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
November: Boomer presents Passion Fish (1992)
December: Britnee presents Salome’s Last Dance (1988)
January: The Top Films of 2020

-The Swampflix Crew

Masked Mutilator (2019)

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Masked Mutilator checks off a suspiciously high number of my personal-interest boxes for a project that seemingly materialized out of thin air. A no-budget backyard slasher cheapie about mid-90s pro wrestlers and late-2010s podcasting? I’m not sure I didn’t conjure this movie into existence in the middle of a powerful dream, since it’s essentially a jumbled collection of nouns that rattle around in my brain all day anyway. All that’s really missing is a few drag queens & a Xiu Xiu soundtrack. The truth is, though, that the film has been gestating for 25 long years before finally being completed in 2019, so its out-of-thin-air mystique is a total illusion. Initially filmed on 16mm in the mid-90s and eventually bookended with a digital-age frame story in the 2010s (thanks to crowdfunding via IndieGoGo), Masked Mutilator is a fairly typical backyard horror cheapie that’s only made worth discussion because it’s been dislodged from its place in time. There’s almost no way the movie would be half as fascinating if it weren’t for its bizarre multi-decade production “schedule,” and even then it’s not all that remarkable. This is basically Shirkers for Idiots (like me). There’s no denying it has a great hook in its premise and an interesting context as a recovered object, but it’s terminally inessential.

The modern digi-grade frame story involves, as all masterpieces of Le Cinéma do, a podcast recording. Survivors of a fictional 1990s tragedy guest on a true-crime podcast about “Group Home Killings,” recalling the hyper-specific talk radio program “Why Do Boys Kill Their Mothers?” in Psycho IV. This setup is a convenient contextualization of the 16mm footage to follow, which makes up a bulk of the slight 76min runtime. While the podcast conversation stokes gravely serious topics surrounding the abuse of vulnerable teens in group homes, it comes to little surprise that the no-budget slasher plot it’s setting up in flashbacks doesn’t explore these times with any genuine concern or curiosity. An ex-luchador who was blacklisted from his industry for killing an opponent in the ring resurfaces as an unlikely counselor in a group home for teens. His violent past makes him the prime suspect when the teens under his care are picked off one by one at the hands of a muscly killer who wears his old wrestling gear, with his luchador mask now functioning as an executioner’s hood. The mutilated teens are too generic to especially care about (defined by such personality traits as Heavy Metal, Nunchucks, and Horny). The gore is too cheap to be gruesome and too restrained to be fun (despite the film being an early credit for SFX television personality Glenn Hedrick). The identity of the true killer is embarrassingly obvious long before its reveal. The only remarkable aspect of the picture, then, is that it exists – which truly is a feat for any film, to be fair. Movies are hard to make, especially when you’re just hanging around the living room with your friends (as appears to be the case in this instance).

I likely would have been able to overlook the low-energy aimlessness of this doomed project if I had been familiar with the pro wrestlers involved in its production. Brick Bronksy, Jim “The Tank” Dorsey, and Doug Yasinsky weren’t anywhere near my radar despite their involvement with massive promotions like WWF in their heyday. Even so, I was still amused to see these gigantic muscly men crammed into the tiny kitchens & living rooms of this group home location. I also appreciated that the kills were somewhat wrestling-specific, as the luchador executioner character crushes & punches his teen victims to death with brute force (before chopping them up for the incinerator in the film’s sparse moments of genuine gore). With some recognizable pro wrestling personalities, some Matt Farley-level joke writing, and slightly more grotesque violence, this might have been an abandoned relic turned cult classic. Instead, it’s only recommendable for the more hopeless fans of pro wrestling & no-budget slashers, total goners (like myself) who’d have no self-control to avoid it based on the luchador-horror premise – if not going as far as having donated to its crowdfunding campaign to complete it in the fist place. I was never especially thrilled by this recovered artifact from minute to minute, but I still maintained a “Good for them!” attitude towards the filmmakers throughout for having finally completed it, especially since their niche interests apparently overlap so extensively with my own.

-Brandon Ledet

Cassandro, the Exótico! (2019)

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It wasn’t until the last five years or so that I really started digging into the intricacies of pro wrestling & drag as artforms, and so it was immediately apparent as I studied them in tandem that they’re remarkably similar – to the point of functioning as two sides of the same gender performance coin. The pageantry, melodrama, glamour, caricature, and pantomimed exaggeration of gender traits shared between these two longstanding entertainment traditions is extensive, to the point where if you watch them both for long enough, pro wrestling and drag become indistinguishable. I used to naively believe that comparison to be a somewhat novel observation, but of course I was far from alone in noticing it. Recent drag & pro wrestling hybrids like the local performance art promotion Chokehole, the NYC podcast crew The Nobodies, the third season of Netflix’s GLOW, and the “WTF! Wrestling’s Trashiest Fighters” episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race have all covered this territory far more thoroughly & thoughtfully than I ever could, but even they were far from the first drag-wrestling pioneers. Wrestlers like Goldust & Gorgeous George have been incorporating drag pageantry into their in-ring personae on American television for decades. Also, unsurprisingly, the Mexican luchador tradition has its own version of this crossover in its subset of flamboyant gay performers known as Los Exóticos. And to help solidify the exóticos’ place in the pronounced drag-wrestling overlap, there’s now a feature-length documentary profile of that scene’s biggest star, Cassandro, who’s been wrestling in full glam makeup since the late 1980s.

Unfortunately, Cassandro, the Exótico! isn’t especially interested in exploring this contextual, historical background of how its subject fits into these drag & wrestling traditions. Instead, the documentary profiles Cassandro as he is now in the late 2010s: worn down, mangled, and yet still enthusiastic to entertain anyone who’ll lay eyes on him. We follow “The Liberace of Lucha Libre” through the highs & lows of his late in-ring career: the high-flying flamboyant spectacle of his pro wrestling pageantry and the quiet, painful recovery from those abuses in the privacy of his sparse home in Juarez. The most historical insight you get into Cassandro’s prominent role in the exóticos tradition is in his occasional anecdotes about how he got recruited into the luchador business as a young man and his collection of still photographs from that heyday. The movie is more largely about Cassandro as he exists in the present. We get to watch his private vape pen & makeup routine as he glams up to kiss & destroy his more traditionally macho (and gay-panicked) opponents in the ring. We’re taken on an intimate tour of his gorgeous ring-gear wardrobe, which clashes drastically with his barebones home in the desert. Also, unavoidably, we’re weighed down by Cassandro’s exponential list of scars, surgeries, and gnarled body parts – the toll of the business for any long-term wrestler, whether or not they perform in drag. It would likely help tremendously to know Cassandro’s backstory before wandering into this swan song documentary on his final days as a performer (I know I personally benefited from hearing his lecture on los exóticos culture at Tulane University this past Mardi Gras), but this year-in-the-life portrait of a highly-specific person is still invaluable all the same.

There are some bold, glaring filmmaking choices from director Marie Losier that can distract from the built-in fascination of Cassandro’s over-the-top persona, and your appreciation of the film might depend on how well you can adjust to her methods. This is much more of a Pretentious French Art Film than a fluff documentary piece, with Losier often imposing her own presence onto a story that could likely do without it. She shoots Juarez and South Texas like the fantastic landscapes of an alien planet in a sci-fi film. Cassandro himself often comes across like a mystical, otherworldly creature in that abstraction, particularly in his private religious practices that mix Catholic & Native rituals with little distinction between them. I appreciate that she shot the documentary on actual celluloid, since its 16mm home movies aesthetic helps contextualize him as a kind of living historical figure whose drag-wrestling artistry deserves an eternal reverence. However, her wildly out-of-focus framing and harsh jump-cut editing style often feel like a filmmaker playing with a new toy instead of consciously serving the subject at hand. In another way, though, I can see why a story joining Cassandro this late in his career would be a little discombobulated and melancholy. The film becomes increasingly looser & less focused (visually & tonally) as Cassandro’s body degrades beyond repair in his final days in the ring before (what will hopefully be a permanent) retirement. It isn’t until Losier flashes back to the much sharper, more physically explosive performer Cassandro was just a couple years earlier at the start of the documentary that the full sad story of what we’ve lost as he reached his physical limit becomes clear. Even then, not all her creative indulgences can be justified as directly serving the text. Some of them clearly exist for their own sake, and it’s a distraction.

Thankfully, there’s already a more traditional, straightforward documentary the drag-wrestlers of lucha libre in the 2013 film Los Exóticos, which I look forward to catching up with to provide retroactive context for this picture. Still, as a standalone work, Cassandro, the Exótico! still satisfies as an intimate portrait of one of the most significant players at the intersection of drag & wrestling, a singular performer whose glory days are still distinctly visible in the rearview mirror. This blurry photograph of a documentary won’t be all the world has to remember him by (he’s still touring around as an entertainer & a public speaker, after all), so it’s okay that it mostly functions as a snapshot of his final, painful months in the ring (and a travelogue for Marie Losier).

-Brandon Ledet

The Wrestlers: Fighting with My Family (2012)

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I was initially skeptical of the recent, Stephen-Merchant-directed biopic of WWE superstar Paige, Fighting with My Family, even as someone who’s greatly enjoyed following her pro wrestling career. WWE’s involvement in the production led me to expect the Dianetics-level propaganda of revisionist history & TV commercial production sheen the company always applies to their hagiographic retellings of their own lore, which is more or less true to the film’s aesthetic. There’s just something about the its Disney Channel Original energy that clashes wonderfully with Merchant’s sharp comedic wit and the working-class crassness of the wrestlers it profiles, though, that gives it a surprisingly effective, compelling tone. There’s nothing that could have prepared me for the way Merchant worked that R-rated Disney Channel Original tonal clash to the film’s advantage, but I might at least have been less skeptical that Paige’s life story was worthy of the biopic treatment if I had first seen the BBC documentary that inspired it. Produced as a one-hour special for Channel 4, The Wrestlers: Fighting with My Family is a low-key, made-for-TV documentary that’s just as saturated with the tones and tropes of the post-MTV True Life reality TV doc as its later, fictionalized version is adherent to the safe commercial feel of WWE’s self-propaganda. In this instance, however, the story of Paige’s peculiar family dynamic and inspiring rise to power story is enough to make for a compelling picture against all aesthetic odds – just like in the biopic. The Wrestlers: Fighting with My Family is not quite as great of an achievement as its fictionalized follow-up, but it is the foundational text for that work – both inspiring its title and being included in clips during its end credits sequence for texture. Most importantly, it makes abundantly clear how Paige’s early-career story is fascinating enough to justify two separate, surprisingly successful movies.

The daughter of two Northern English pro wrestlers who once performed on television but now run their own local promotion in VFW hall-scale venues, Paige was groomed since birth to be a successful pro wrestler herself. Named Saraya after her mother’s in-ring character and commercially exploited by her parents as (in their own words) “eye candy” and “a product,” Paige’s traveling carnie lifestyle is fascinating whether or not you have an interest in pro wrestling as an artform. That familial dynamic only gets more bizarre as she emerges as the only breakout star among her inner circle, inspiring frustrated jealousy in her wrestling-nut brother and conflicted sentimental & financial pangs in her proud, but possessive parents. The Wrestlers has the exact opposite problem than the proper Fighting with My Family biopic; WWE’s strict press lockout keeps the cameras away from Paige’s tryout drama & professional training here, whereas the latter film focuses heavily on those backstage details in an image-controlled environment. Instead, the doc gets a more intimate and (by default) more honest depiction of Paige’s domestic life, as well as insight into the personal histories of her family. For the most part, the core story told in this documentary does carry over into its fictionalized follow-up, except the biopic has the advantage of backstage WWE access as lagniappe. However, seeing the 20-something Florence Pugh portray a fictionalized version of Paige does not give you an accurate idea of how much of a naïve baby she was when WWE signed her as a teenager. There’s something about seeing this young child shouldering massive familial responsibility and navigating deep-seated emotional resentments she has no fault in that comes through much stronger in this reality-TV doc than it does in the more convenient fiction, even if The Wrestlers is ultimately relegated to supplementary material for a much better film.

There easily could have been a scenario where Paige’s WWE career never took off and this one-off BBC doc could instead have developed into an episodic reality TV show. The MTV True Life aesthetics & gawking fascination with the wrestler’s peculiar family dynamic makes it feel like that was the original plan, that her WWE signing was a freak occurrence that threw everyone involved for a loop. That kind of midstream surprise (a swerve, if u will) always makes for a more compelling documentary, and Paige’s continued prominence in the WWE (which has not always been smooth sailing, to say the least) has only assured this one a cultural longevity it would not have achieved otherwise. At the end of the film, Paige promises she will change the shape of women’s wrestling in the company into something respectable beyond the T&A eye-candy roles performers had been relegated to for decades. She did eventually play a major part in achieving that goal, an accomplishment that helped justify blowing this story up to a feature-length biopic treatment. The Wrestlers: Fighting with My Family isn’t quite as substantial as that biopic, but it does provide additional, essential texture that only strengthens the biopic in retrospect – so essential that it’s featured in clips in that latter text. It’s especially illuminating in getting a grasp on just how young Paige was when she was trained for this business and was signed by the biggest pro wrestling company in the world, which drastically alters how we understand her accomplishments & her family dynamic.

-Brandon Ledet

Fighting with My Family (2019)

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Even though I’m a huge pro wrestling fan and Stephen Merchant’s dual credit as writer-director vouched for its quality, I did not expect to get much out of Fighting with My Family. WWE-produced content tends to have a slick, careful, personality-free approach to revisionist history when telling its own story, which usually prompts me to expect the eerie gloss of a Dianetics infomercial DVD rather than heartfelt cinema. Maybe it was that hyperactive skepticism that allowed me to have an intense, unexpected emotional reaction to this picture despite its unembarrassed commercialism and weakness for revisionist bullshit. This is the hardest I’ve laughed and the most I’ve cried in a movie I didn’t expect either from since 2017’s Power Rangers reboot (which was essentially a feature-length commercial for Krispy Kreme donuts). Aesthetically & craft-wise, Fighting with My Family feels like a poorly aged relic from the early aughts, a once-true story sanitized for wide commercial appeal. Yet, as an achievement in screenwriting, it’s a shockingly dirty, oddly inspiring rise-to-power story that somehow does the pro wrestler Paige’s early career & peculiar familial dynamic full justice, against all odds. The clash of its rowdy dialogue & commercial production sheen feels like an approximation of an R-rated Disney Chanel Original Movie – the exact kind of target audience grey area pro wrestling occupies in the real world.

Paige, born Saraya-Jade Bevis & originally wrestling under the ring name Britani Knight, is portrayed in this simplistic rise to power biopic by acting chameleon Florence Pugh (entirely unrecognizable from her breakout role in Lady Macbeth). Raised by professional wrestler parents (Nick Frost & Lena Headey), she was trained in the ring by her older brother as a family-supporting commodity, just like in any other clan of carnies. When she’s unexpectedly signed by the WWE to wrestle on international TV, Paige has to contend with two separate crises: one with her family and one with the outdated shape of the wrestling community’s inclusion of women. Her family is proud of her professional accomplishments, but also sad to see her go (along with the money she makes for their local promotion) and resentful that her wrestling fanatic brother was not also signed. As a pale mall-goth with a life-long pro wrestling fetish, she’s also at odds with how major promotions treated their female performers until recent years: as eye candy or, in her parlance, T&A. Paige’s major contribution to WWE, what makes her biopic worthy to fans in the wrestling community, is how her unconventional fashion choices & legitimate ring skills helped bring an end to WWE’s Divas era, where women were mostly hired as models & dancers to stir up fans’ libidos. She helped usher in the current so-called Women’s Revolution, where legitimate female performers from the indie circuit are being given an opportunity to wrestle in earnest. What makes Fighting with My Family impressive as a piece of writing, though, is that it never villainizes Paige’s family or the more conventional eye-candy babes she seeks to prove herself against. Nor does it let her off the hook for her shortcomings in handling these conflicts as a naive teen suddenly burdened with massive responsibilities. The movie offers empathy to every character its story touches while not at all shying away from their faults, which is just as important to its success as sketching out how influential Paige was in wrestling’s recent, gendered sea change.

Of course, anyone who’s already familiar with Paige’s WWE career should find plenty to chew on here while picking apart the film’s rearranged timeline & selective memory. Specifically, Paige’s career-ending injuries & backstage controversies are (smartly) excised here to make for a cleaner, more inspiring version of the truth. Yet, the movie surprisingly doesn’t shy away from including WWE pariah AJ Lee from the story of how Paige influenced a massive change within the Women’s Division, which Lee also had a major involvement in before she became a persona non grata within the company (although they do weirdly mischaracterize Lee here as an ex-model Bella-type instead of a fellow wrestling-nerd goth). For wrestling fans, these storytelling decisions (along with the company’s continued support & inclusion of Paige after her body gave out at a disturbingly young age) are an encouraging sign of changing times, and it feels great to see the upswing of that change reflected here in the context of Paige’s early-career accomplishments. I’d like to think Fighting with My Family works just as well for audiences who don’t care at all about wrestling, though. Stephen Merchant’s dialogue (and bit part cameo) is sharply funny. Paige’s familial dynamic as the sole breakout star in a clan of fame-starved wrestling carnies is objectively fascinating (and well-performed by Pugh). The film also makes a genuine effort to convey pro wrestling’s artistic & emotional appeal – both on the scale of communal VFW hall events and on the global stage of the WWE. I can’t guarantee that everyone will have as emotional of a reaction to the film as I did – both because of my personal interest in women’s pro wrestling and because I’m generally an emotional wreck. However, I can at least testify to the movie achieving far more than you would typically expect from something so aesthetically unassuming, given its cheesy guitar-riff soundtrack & Disney Channel sheen. The strengths of Merchant’s writing instincts & Pugh’s fully-committed performance are likely to catch you off-guard in tandem, forming one superb tag team.

-Brandon Ledet