wrestling

See No Evil (2006)

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see no evil

three star

campstamp

“Look into their eyes, can’t you see the sin?”

I approached See No Evil, one of the first films produced by World Wrestling Entertainment, the same way I approach most WWE programming lately: with lowered, realistic expectations. No one expects character development, plot progression, or Academy Award winning performances from a WWE produced slasher flick helmed by a former porn director. We expect lots of gore & bad acting and, thankfully, this modern B movie delivers both in abundance.

See No Evil’s paper thin plot centers around a group of eight delinquent teens who are sent to an abandoned hotel in hopes renovating it into a homeless shelter. Their punishment goes beyond manual labor when Jacob Goodnight, played by WWE superstar Kane, starts putting his hook through various parts of their bodies. The premise is absurd and you might ask yourself a few questions while watching: Why are the lights and water on when the place has been abandoned for years? Why are the teens given mops and brooms to renovate a giant hotel when it looks like it would take a team of hundreds? Asking this kind of questions is pointless because once Goodnight starts piling up the bodies you’ll have forgotten them. Sure, the sets are dreary and derivative of films like Hostel & Saw, the dialogue awful, the characters uniformly unlikable. Yet, despite all that, See No Evil has a sick charm because it knows exactly the kind of film it is and doesn’t pretend to be anything more.

It’s not hard to spot the allusions to other, better horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre & Friday the 13th, but See No Evil‘s gnarly death scenes, the kind of scenes that make you squirm on your sofa & put your hands over your face, still stand out for their sheer gruesomeness. Besides your standard impaling and eye gouging, we are “treated” to a few images I wouldn’t want to spoil. The movie even has its clever moments like Goodnight rigging a bell trip wire to the hotel’s beds, alerting him to any fornicators, and his inevitable demise, which is as gruesome and ridiculous as any I’ve ever seen. Kane doesn’t have much to say but he does bring a presence to the role and at 84 minutes the film doesn’t outstay its welcome.

So, despite its genre trappings, WWE’s first slasher film is a success and a pretty damn fun watch. That’s if you don’t have weak stomach and are enticed by seeing a professional wrestler gouge people’s eyes out.

-James Cohn

Ready to Rumble (2000)

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wrasslin

three star

campstamp

The Royal Rumble is the last major pro wrestling pay-per-view before Wrestlemania. It’s a chaotic, cluttered mess of an event, and one of the highlights of the annual wrestling cycle. My friends & I partied hard for this year’s Rumble, filling a tiny apartment with chips, dips, liquors, “royal rum balls” and drunken shouting. It was a blast until the disappointing, telegraphed conclusion to the main event, an inevitability that had the crowd both in our living room and on the TV screen openly booing. Knowing what was coming before the Rumble even started, I psyched myself up with a ludicrous YouTube clip of an infamous wrestling incident in 2000 that was met with its own open ridicule: the time professional goofball/actor David Arquette became WCW’s World Heavyweight Champion.

A wrestling fan himself, David Arquette knew an actor becoming the WCW World Heavyweight Champion would not go over well with the crowd. He reportedly protested the angle, but WCW’s booking insisted it would be great promotion. The product they were pushing? Arquette’s pro wrestling comedy Ready to Rumble, a massive critical and financial flop. Although it failed in its time, Ready to Rumble has gradually proved itself (through its mere existence) as a time capsule of a bygone era. It’s a strange relic of wrestling’s unexpected late 90s, early 00s boost in popularity. The fact that WCW felt it could justify a $24mil production alone frames the film as culturally significant, even if they were ultimately proved wrong. Their preposterous plan to promote the film by making Arquette a real life heavyweight champion makes the movie a truly singular oddity. Usually, if a wrestling promotion is going to push a film career, like with Hulk Hogan or The Rock, they promote from within. Bringing a Hollywood outsider (a real life fan or not) into the ring is not without precedent, but handing them the belt is beyond ridiculous and not something fans will suffer quietly.

Another strange facet of the Arquette debacle was his relationship with actual pro wrestler Diamond Dallas Page. In Ready to Rumble DDP plays the heel, the villain to Arquette’s unlikely hero. In the real WCW ring they were tag team partners. The inconsistency is even more bizarre when you consider that Oliver Platt played the film’s fictional face, wrestler Jimmy King. If you were trying to logically promote the film in a WCW match, the natural choice would be for Platt (as Jimmy King) to wrestle DDP on television in a quick, one-off promotion. Platt, despite being a legitimately talented actor, seems to consistently be slumming it in his choices of roles, so a 5 minute promotional wrestling bit doesn’t seem all that out of the question. Instead, WCW opted for a long-form angle featuring David Arquette (as David Arquette) becoming their undisputed champion, a decision that suggests a lack of respect for the sport & its fans, including Arquette himself.

In isolation from its ridiculous real-life promotion, Ready to Rumble displays a humble reverence for pro wrestling as a sport, falling clearly on the mark side of the mark/smark divide. The movie opens with claims that pro wrestlers are “the greatest athletes of all time” and “heroes of history”. These “superior athletes, superior men” are given plenty of screen time with the kind of overstated cameos that take an audience’s adoration for granted. Appearing here alongside DDP are the likes of “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Sting, Goldberg, Booker T, “Mean” Gene Okerlund, and a few other big industry names, including a brief glimpse of a young John Cena. There are a few smarky admissions, like wrestlers discussing choreography during matches and an unusually violent Martin Landau playing a Stu Hart stand-in, but for the most part this is a world where wrestling is both real and real important.

The movie’s major misstep is in its long stretches outside of the wrestling ring. The road trip segments of the film are overloaded with gross-out, non sequitur, teenage boy shenanigans: porta-potties, horny old ladies, and toothless hicks all played for unfortunate humor. There are some transcendent moments to be found in this frat house amusement, like Rose McGowan’s hot to trot wrestling fan engaging in “bedroom matches” and a van full of flatulent nuns performing a cover of “Running with the Devil” that’s less Van Halen and more The Roches, but for the most part it’s flat & forgettable. It’s the exact brand of dumb fun that plays well in a wrestling ring, but fails to translate well to the big screen.

I’m not sure that the film’s comedic failure is necessarily a bad thing. Ready to Rumble is unashamed of being a mindless trifle, marketable only to an audience already receptive to pro wrestling & complete garbage, a rather large audience at the time of its production. There’s a working class veneer to the film, complete with a Kid Rock soundtrack and Insane Clown Posse t-shirts. Arquette’s protagonist is the son of a cop who works in sanitation, loiters in front of corner stores, and dreams of meeting his favorite pro wrestler. He & his buddy rough house at their menial jobs and fantasize about executing wrestling moves on their bullies. It’s a pandering approach to comedy, but at least it’s closely familiar with the audience it’s catering to.

In the film’s promotion, however, all of this goodwill for pro wrestling fans was destroyed by Arquette’s championship victory cheapening the (already cheap enough) WCW title. 15 years later, that heartfelt betrayal plays more like a bizarre historical footnote, one with a feature film attached. Arquette’s championship may have helped ruin Ready to Rumble & WCW as financial enterprises in the year 2000, but it also gave them a strange longevity in cultural significance. It’s an occasionally funny movie with a thoroughly ludicrous context & execution that’s still worth scratching your head over in 2015.

-Brandon Ledet

Marks & Smarks: No Holds Barred (1989) & The Wrestler (2008)

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wrasslin

Definitions pulled from Wikipedia’s glossary of professional wrestling terms:
-“Mark”: a wrestling fan who enthusiastically believes that professional wrestling is not staged.
-“Smark”: a fan who is aware of and interested in the backstage and non-scripted aspects of wrestling; a portmanteau of “smart” and “mark.”

Last night I attended my first live pro wrestling event, a months-long goal fulfilled. Despite the distinctly tame vibe of the crowd, I decided to misbehave. Couldn’t help myself. I got drunk, cheered for heels like a jerk, and shouted things that disturbed the 10 year old boy sitting in the row ahead of me. A few rows behind me, another ten year old was also yelling ridiculous taunts, but his were much funnier & more insightful than mine. I was thoroughly upstaged. Around a third my age, this kid had a preternatural comprehension of the sport that he thankfully shared with the neighboring crowd in short, high-pitched bursts. The kid ahead of me would be genuinely upset if he were in earshot. I know I upset him myself. I was sandwiched between a young mark and a smark, two different wrestling worlds clashing on either side of me.

I think it helps to appreciate both sides of the coin to experience the full potential of pro wrestling. Losing yourself in the characters & the soap opera drama is just as important as the in-the-ring athleticism. The violence wouldn’t mean as much without the camp. On the other hand, the context of the practical, behind-the-scenes operations of the sport gives deeper meaning to the in-the-ring storylines. It’s a scripted sport, but scripted in the style of reality television: the reality & the fiction are inseparable. One feeds off the other. A well-rounded fan needs a solid admiration of both.

Searching for this balance in pro wrestling cinema leads me to the bookends of the modern wrestling movie. 1989’s Hulk Hogan vehicle No Holds Barred perfectly captures the nature of mark mentality in the infancy of the current Vince McMahon era. 2008’s The Wrestler, by comparison, is a smark’s dream: an authentic look at the brutal truths of pro wrestling as a career. Together, help paint a complete picture, the fiction & the reality, one feeding off the other.

No Holds Barred (1989)
Although No Holds Barred was far from the world’s first pro wrestling picture, it was the first film produced by the World Wrestling Federation (now WWE). It would take over a decade after its release for Vince McMahon’s juggernaut wrestling promotion to form its own movie studio, so in this way No Holds Barred was ahead of its time. This was the only way it was ahead of its time. Miming the late-80s Schwarzenegger action movie format as much as the budget would allow, No Holds Barred was a blatant attempt to launch the movie career of Hulk Hogan, who had already dominated the “sports entertainment” world and was looking for his next conquest. The first sounds you hear in the film are the voices of Jesse “The Body” Ventura & “Mean” Gene Okerlund, who had come to define the era’s ringside announcing. The film’s head villain is character actor Kurt Fuller testing an almost exact prototype of his career-defining role as a television network scumbag in Wayne’s World. No Holds Barred is in every way a product of its time.

Keeping in line with the 1989 perspective of pro wrestling, before the internet’s obsessive nitpicking of the sport, No Holds Barred is firmly on the mark side of the mark/smark divide. Hulk Hogan’s character Rip Thomas is a superhuman beast in the ring and out. He leaps to incredible heights, destroys cars with his bare hands, and dismantles “bad guys” to an 80s “rock music” soundtrack, all while wearing a costume befitting of a superhero biker. In a world devoid of subtext he is a hero without flaw, an incredibly smart brute who’s dedicated to his charity work, the kind of guy who inspires lines like “Rip’s word is his bond” even when he’s not in the room. The entire movie exists to make Hulk Hogan look impossibly good. He’s a saint, a “good guy”.

Objectively, the movie is not very good. In fact, it’s awful. There’s some guilty pleasure to be found in its campy action movie spectacle, like when Rip force-feeds a rejected bribe to Kurt Fuller’s television executive and quips “I won’t be around when this check clears.” It’s also funny to think that Vince McMahon produced a film that indicts the evil nature of megalomaniac network executives, because, well, he’s a megalomaniac network executive. For the most part, though, the movie is shoddily made of generic kids’ stuff: jokes about “dookie” and slobbering hillbillies, world-class mean-mugging from immense muscle men, “good guys” beating up “bad guys”. It’s a movie you have to love for its savage idiocy, not in spite of it.

More importantly, it’s a document of a different time, a swan song for the era of the mark.

The Wrestler (2008)
A drastically different approach, Daren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler is an objectively good movie. I’d even go as far as to call it a masterpiece. Applying the modern online smark mentality to pro wrestling, Aronofsky turns the backstage repercussions of sports entertainment into a Greek tragedy. Unlike Hogan’s Rip Thomas, Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson is a real human being outside the ring. Well past his glory days, Randy struggles with health, finances, and personal relationships badly damaged from years spent on the road. In-the-ring injuries have increasingly severe real life consequences. In one particularly gruesome scene medics remove staples, glass, etc. from Randy’s skin as the camera cuts back to show how they got buried there in a horrific hardcore match, a bloodthirsty crowd chanting “You sick fuck!” in the background. As the pain periodically hits him throughout the film, the intense sound design cues you in with high-pitched noises to match his wincing. Referring to himself, Randy “The Ram” says “I’m a broken down piece of meat. And I’m alone. And I deserve to be alone.” Time proves him right. This is far from the marked-out world of Rip Thomas.

Aronofsky’s attention to authenticity is a remarkable achievement here. As I said before in my list of top pro wrestling documentaries, Randy “The Ram” feels like wrestlers we know, wrestlers like Scott Hall & Jake “The Snake” Roberts. Smarks would take particular interest in the way the movie depicts wrestlers planning spots before matches, laying out a basic framework within which they can improvise. The movie also addresses blading/juicing, steroid abuse, boozy bouts of self-medication after matches, shady promoters and minuscule pay. Randy directly refutes claims that wrestling is “fake” and shows off his scars as proof. Part of why it hurts to watch him despair over the old action figures, Nintendo games, and 80s monster ballads that serve as relics of his former fame is that it feels all too real. There are people who live like this.

Of course, an accurate portrayal of pro wrestling is seated somewhere between these two extremes, just as I was seated between two wildly different children last night. Without the glam showmanship, juvenile humor or outrageous superheroics of Rip Thomas, Aronofsky’s version of wrestling is a grim, lethal ordeal. The wrestling of No Holds Barred is an idealistic child’s macho fantasy. From The Wrestler’s viewpoint, it’s more like assisted suicide. To take in the full scope of the bizarre, idiosyncratic, self-contradicting superhero spectacle of the brutal sport, you have to appreciate both perspectives. You have to look through the eyes of the mark and the smark. Drunken yelling also helps.

-Brandon Ledet

Wrestling for Jesus: The Tale of T-Money (2011)

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wrestlingjesus

twohalfstar

The very last pro wrestling documentary I watched when assembling my Top Ten list for the genre was GLOW, the story of an over-the-top 80s glam wrestling promotion that saw brief success on television. Wrestling for Jesus was a jarring, smelling salts follow-up to GLOW. It pulled me out of GLOW’s glitter-covered reverie only to wake me on the small-town poverty side of wrestling. This is the wrestling of backyards & gymnasiums, where audience members were likely to have attended high school or at least church with the performers. Where the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling bragged about how they were the greatest show on Earth, the men of WFJ thought themselves to be, you know, pretty good and some of them would even like to maybe get paid a small sum of money for risking life-altering injuries in the Lord’s name.

The wrestlers who express interest in making a modest amount of money for their time and compromised health are secular defectors of the Wrestling For Jesus promotion. WFJ, as a non-profit organization, accepts donations for their live events, but those donations are directly given to the church. The events themselves are an extension of church in a way. Performers’ promos boast about their ability to spread the gospel & sermons are delivered from the ring after matches. These men are wrestling solely for Jesus, to bring new followers into their faith through sports entertainment, not to make money. As far as recruitment tactics go, it’s a fairly convincing one.

However, participation in WFJ isn’t entirely selfless. At the very least the WFJ community helped the titular T-Money overcome the grief surrounding his father’s suicide. T-Money’s triumph over his grief may have been short-lived, but he basically thanks WFJ (an organization he runs with his wife) for saving his life. As the film progresses, his WFJ-aided recovery gradually reveals itself to be one step on a long road that would see rougher patches (like his own suicide attempt & a domestic violence arrest). T-Money sounds conflicted at times about whether he believes WFJ is a positive or negative long-term influence in his life, confessing that sometimes he hides his true personality in the community’s presence. It’s likely he’s also hiding his true self in the camera’s presence. The refusal to follow this thread of thought to a satisfying conclusion is the documentary’s fatal flaw.

There’s a sense that T-Money is on the brink of a personal epiphany that the movie doesn’t stick around to discover with him. When one of his fellow WFJ performers breaks his neck in the ring, T-Money is moved to tears in his proclamation that he wishes it was his own neck that had broken instead. The injured wrestler appears to be pleased with his time in WFJ, believing he had sacrificed his body to a noble cause. T-Money appears less convinced, but the movie doesn’t follow him long enough (or push him to speak honestly enough) to find out what that means.

Unresolved ending aside, the filmmakers do a fine job of remaining objective when they could easily have made their subject look foolish or evil. That objectivity doesn’t exactly shield the Christian wrestlers from the incongruity of infusing religion into a sport built on camp & violence, but it does allow them to be sympathetic even as the phenomenon feels increasingly bizarre. Wrestling for Jesus was far from the most essential wrestling doc I’ve seen in recent months, but also far from the worst. WFJ‘s Achilles heel is that its fascinating subject could have made for a much better movie if only the filmmakers had allowed it more time to develop & pushed for more honesty. If director Nathan Clarke couldn’t afford to dig deeper, his film could have at least benefited from some of GLOW’s outlandish hubris. There’s nothing like some old-fashioned self-aggrandizing to cover up a lackluster wrestling program.

Wrestling For Jesus is currently streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime.

-Brandon Ledet

Brandon’s Top Ten Pro Wrestling Documentaries

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wrasslin

Between a few friends’ recently renewed enthusiasm for professional wrestling & my own recent introduction to the wrestling-heavy comic book series Love & Rockets, something happened in me last September: I started watching again. I’ve easily watched more pro wrestling in the past four months than I have in the last decade. A young fan during the sport’s famed Attitude Era, I lost my enthusiasm sometime in high school, a loss I now regret. Not keeping up with wrestling over the years meant missing out on large doses of my favorite two elements in popular media: camp & violence.

Approaching the sport as an adult, however, camp & violence weren’t entirely enough. I also craved context, something I never questioned as a teen. In addition to the countless matches I’ve watched in recent months, I’ve also been greedily consuming documentaries on the sport. The following list is the most helpful films I’ve found in my search for context. Together, they combine to explain to outsiders just what makes wrestling so fascinating & how it evolved to become the violent, campy spectacle it is today.

1. Beyond the Mat (1999) – Widely considered the Citizen Kane of the genre, Beyond the Mat is more of a love letter to the sport than an objective documentary. The 90s vibe is potent here. Vince McMahon is drunk on the power the Attitude Era has afforded him (a level of power he hadn’t tasted since the 80s). The close friendship detailed between hardcore legends Mick Foley & Terry Funk is movingly sincere. The devastating Jake “The Snake” Roberts scenes could conceivably have been research material for Aronofsky’s masterful film The Wrestler (right down to the troubled relationship with his daughter). The narrator’s urge to explain the basic appeal of a sport he loves, a sport that to many people “isn’t real” feels antiquated, but it’s more than forgivable given the time of production. If you’re looking for a beginner’s guide to appreciating pro wrestling as entertainment, this movie is a great place to start. If you already have any affection for the sport you will still love every minute of it, even when it makes you feel like shit.

2. Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows (1998) – While Beyond the Mat documents the state of pro wrestling at the height of the Attitude Era, Wrestling With Shadows does a fine job of defining exactly what made that specific era so distinct. Wrestling icon Bret Hart struggles within the film to reconcile his own 80s-minded ideals of what the sport should be (especially in how it’s viewed by children) with the extreme late-90s direction it was going. There’s also some essential insight into Bret’s father, Stu Hart’s “The Dungeon” training room and the infamous Montreal Screwjob incident involving Bret. Both topics are interesting in how much the camera reveals as well as what it withholds. Is there more to the story than what we’re told? Hard to tell, but it’s still very informative even when mysterious. Unfortunately, Wrestling With Shadows also boasts the worst soundtrack I’ve ever, ever encountered in a documentary (a depressingly common problem with the genre). It’s a truly laughable distraction in an otherwise entertaining movie.

3. I’m From Hollywood (1989) – Andy Kaufman’s posthumous “documentary” (more of a mockumentary, really) about his wrestling career is unambiguously an angle, a continuation of an in-ring storyline. In the 80’s Kaufman fashioned himself an infamously effective heel by proclaiming himself the Inter-gender Wrestling Champion and challenging women in the audience to step up as his opponents. This escalated to a very public feud with wrestler Jerry “The King” Lawler that both men sold beautifully. It’s both amazing & unsurprising how well pro wrestling fit into Kaufman’s fucking-with-your-reality style of comedy. In its finest moments I’m From Hollywood is a document of how the demented, proto-Tim Heidecker genius Kaufman utilized the sport as a form of high art. It works best when interviewees like Jerry Lawler & the late Robin Williams are committed to the joke, as opposed to folks like Tony Danza who refuse to play along.

4. GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (2012) – A few of the docs on this list play into the self-aggrandizing of wrestling promos that make their subjects sound like The Best Thing Ever. The GLOW documentary excels at this showy brand of self-promotion that’s so inherent to the sport; it really does make GLOW look & sound way better than it could have conceivably been. This makes sense, considering the 80s wrestling company/television show it documents (“the only all-female wrestling show there’s ever been”) was firmly invested in the entertainment end of “sports entertainment”. The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling could wrestle, no doubt, but they mostly started as amateurs (hopeful actresses & models) roped into the business in boy-band levels of commercial-minded schemes & manipulation. The story of GLOW is the story of a brief, unlikely cultural phenomenon fueled by 80s glam, over-the-top camp, novelty rapping, and genuine beasts & bad-asses. All of this precious material is backed up by a wealth of televised footage to support the interviews & the best soundtrack of any film on this list (provided by outsider post-punk geniuses ESG).

5. Barbed Wire City: The Unauthorized Story of ECW (2013) – It’s difficult to find a truthful, comprehensive look into the legendary Extreme Championship Wrestling promotion among the various failed attempts. Barbed Wire City is a godsend of a corrective to that problem. Easily the best take on the subject to date, it features interviews from both world-class shit-talker (and morally-questionable businessman) Paul Hayman and the very people he built up & arguably screwed over. Barbed Wire City also postures ECW as the wrestling equivalent of the Roger Corman Film School, where talents would develop ideas & characters in a gritty environment before moving onto the big leagues (to the organization’s demise). It distinguishes itself from other docs in the genre by featuring interviews with old-school ECW fans (including a dorked-out Billy Corgan) who helped make organization special just as much as the performers did. Its actually-listenable post-rock soundtrack also assists in making it a godsend among its peers.

6. The Unreal Story of Professional Wrestling (1999) – A (mildly-condescending) history of old-school “wrasslin”, The Unreal Story explains how pro wrestling adapted from traveling circus to television mainstay. Although Steve Allen’s snarky narration in this TV doc prevents it from achieving the heartfelt love-letter status of Beyond the Mat, it does a great job of giving the evolution of the sport a historical context. My favorite outlandish claim from The Unreal Story is that Egyptian hieroglyphics depicting wrestling came with ancient promos that included insults threatening to make opponents “bleed before the Pharaoh” . . . brother. Not only is this history lesson informative (especially in its profiles of old greats like Gorgeous George & Ricki Starr), but it also offers a strange perspective of a time when 90s media did not know how to handle the Attitude Era’s sudden surge in popularity except to look backwards.

7. Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling (2004) – A fascinating profile of the pioneer crop of 1950’s women wrestlers, it’s mostly comprised of modern interviews fleshed out with brief clips of televised matches, photographs, stock footage & era-defining television clips from game & variety shows. I’ve seen a few lackluster wrestling documentaries that are put together this way, but Lipstick avoids mediocrity by giving a mic to women who rarely get to speak at length & covering a subject that rarely gets its due time in the spotlight. It also serves as an interesting account of how pro wrestling evolved from the traveling carnival circuit to television, making it a sort of companion piece to The Unreal Story. At the very least, it’s like spending 90min kicking back a six-pack with the world’s coolest, most foul-mouthed old biddies.

8. Scott Hall: The Wrestler (2011) – A 20min ESPN short recommended for those who aren’t depressed enough by Jake “The Snake” Roberts’ story arc in Beyond the Mat. Documenting “Razor Ramon”/Scott Hall’s struggles with substance abuse, his own role as an absent father and the damage pro wrestling has inflicted on his body & his mind, the intimacy of this movie will destroy you. For folks seeking fame & recognition within pro wrestling, this doc should serve as a reminder to take care of themselves in the process.

9. MTV’s True Life: I’m A Pro Wrestler (1999) – This trifle boasts some valuable locker-room footage from the Attitude Era that serves as a strange time capsule of both a period when wrestling was a white-hot commodity and when performers Chyna & HHH were white-hot romantically. Most importantly, though, there’s some essential insight into the toll the training process can take on a fresh body as well as the dedication it takes to survive that toll. The short-form doc is a tryptic depicting life before, during, and after pro wrestling fame, a surprisingly balanced & thoughtful approach, considering it’s an MTV production.

10. Pinfall (2011) – An even more focused look at the pro wrestling training process than the True Life episode mentioned above, this small-scale short follows British wrestling fan & amateur filmmaker Adam Pacitti as he attempts to train for a wrestling match in just one month’s time. Pacitti initially enters the process with the wrong mentality & wrong physicality (especially in regards to his belief that he could properly train within a month) and is relentlessly punished for his naivety. In its most valuable contributions to the genre, the film offers both a unique look at the exact training patterns new wrestlers must follow as well as the disconnect between the hubris of what a fan believes they can accomplish in the ring & the harsh realities of a sport outsiders don’t believe to be “real” at all.

-Brandon Ledet