Mike Reviews Indy Wrestling

Happy Friday Everyone!

We’ve got some CHIKARA today, as I happen to have Dark Ciberknetico on DVD, so I decided to review it. The Main Event sees Die Bruderschaft des Kreuzes taking on rudos and technicos alike in a big 16 person Cibernetico bout. Elsewhere we’ve got future WWE/AEW wrestlers Johnny Gargano and Brodie Lee in singles matches.

For those not au fait; CHIKARA is basically “what if wrestling were actually a comic book?” with the wrestling matches essentially filling in for the fight scenes. It’s a family friendly lucha styled product heavily inspired by comics, so any fans of more traditional Pro Wrestling might find it a bit jarring.

There’s also the small fact that there was seemingly all kind of controversies coming out regarding the promotion during the Speaking Out movement, which a quick Google search will locate for you. I can understand that putting off anyone from watching the product today, however, there were people who worked there who weren’t total monsters, and some of them are working on this show, so their work possibly shouldn’t be tarnished by the actions of others. I’m not going to get snippy at anyone who would think otherwise though.

You can view the full card for The Dark Ciberknetico by clicking below;

CHIKARA The Dark Ciberknetico Card

Happy Crunching Friday Everyone!

We’re staying in the UK this week for a show from the FWA (Frontier Wrestling Alliance) as they present Crunch 2006. I actually decided to review this one because I was perusing an old edition of Power Slam Magazine and this show was covered in the results section. I thought it sounded like an interesting show and had a look to see if I could find it anywhere. Thanks to the FWA Files we’ll be able to watch this one, with Pac and Katarina Waters/Winter/Katie Lea being the two names most recognisable to you without much knowledge of the British Wrestling Scene from this timeframe.

You can view the full card for Crunch by clicking below;

FWA Crunch 2006 Card

Happy Friday Everyone!

I’ve got a bit of an obscure one for your today with Screensport Satellite Wrestling, which was a wrestling show promoted by All Star Wrestling that aired on the Screensport channel. Screensport was a satellite sports network from the UK and Europe that existed from 1984 up to 1993 when it merged with Eurosport. Like Eurosport; Screensport used Professional Wrestling as nice cheap show to fill up time, and a few of the shows have found their way to YouTube

We’ve got, amongst others, both Johnny Saint and Rollerball Rocco on this episode of Satellite Wrestling, so hopefully we’ll have some good matches.

You can view the full card for this episode by clicking below;

Screensport Satellite Wrestling #5 Card

Greetings Grapple Fans!

We’ve got some more Professional Wrestling from ITV World of Sport for you today, with Peter Kaye (the wrestler, not the husky British comedian), Steve DiSalvo and Davey Boy Smith all making appearances this week

As always, the ITV Wrestling website is a good place to visit if you’d both like to learn more about classic British Wrestling, and also a place to watch some of the matches, as they have links to quite a few of them there available for you to stream with just a simple click

Greetings Grapple Fans!

We’re back today with some more Professional Wrestling on ITV World of Sport. Big Daddy is in tag team action, Alan Dennison is in the opener and the Main Event sees Dalibar Singh and Ray Steele going at it. We’ve also got score updates from all the big football matches of the day, with Aston Villa and Man United being the focus

The ITV Wrestling website is a good place to visit if you’d both like more info on British Wrestling and also a place to watch some of the matches as they have links to quite a few of them

Greetings Grapple Fans!

We’re heading back to 1982 for some Classic British Wrestling today, as we take a look at the match that aired on the same day as the 1982 FA Cup Final. This was a regular event for a while, where the ITV coverage of the FA Cup Final on World of Sport would have one or two wrestling matches attached to it as well. These matches actually helped ITV win the ratings battle against the BBC sometimes, as both channels treated the FA Cup Final as one of the TV events of the entire year (it was kind of like the Superbowl or Stanley Cup Finals for you American and Canadian readers who would like a comparison). This did lead to a bit of a myth that the wrestling beat the FA Cup Final coverage in the ratings one year, but in reality ITV just beat the BBC that year. Wrestling was part of ITV’s World of Sport coverage on the day, so it was part of the overall package but really it was the football match itself that was getting folks to tune in to World of Sport and the wrestling was just the garnish on the side

The ITV Wrestling website is a good place to visit if you’d both like more info on British Wrestling and also a place to watch some of the matches as they have links to quite a few of them

Cheers to Conor for the cracking feature image

Happy Inter Species Friday Everyone!

Today we’re watching Love Hurts, a show from Inter Species Wrestling. ISW is a wacky promotion from Canada where Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn, Evil Uno, 2.0 and others would sometimes ply their trade.

Love Hurts features Owens in the Main Event taking on Uno and a Zombie. That’s not a sentence I was expecting to type anytime soon, but there were go.

Let’s see if Love Hurts also hurts the eyeballs

You can view the full card by clicking below;

ISW Love Hurts card

You can watch along on the official ISW YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2eRSBgCdJg

Happy Ultra-violent Friday Everyone!

Today we’re returning to CZW for the first time in a while, with Best of the Best IV. Best of the Best was CZW’s attempt to show that they weren’t just blood and light tubes, as they’d have a more wrestling focused tournament based around the sort of high flying and technical based action that a lot of the other big independent companies were doing at the time.

The format of the tournament sees the First Round matches being Three Way Dances, where one wrestler will get eliminated and the two surviving wrestlers will then come out later on for a Quarter Final.

We’ve got Jack Evans, Homicide, Roderick Strong, Alex Shelley and Petey Williams amongst others in this one, so there should hopefully be some good wrestling, although the show itself is LONG coming in at over four hours. I ended up doing one big review rather than breaking it up into two reviews, but I was tempted to do the latter at one stage.

You can view the full card for Best of the Best IV by clicking below;

CZW Best of the Best IV Card

Happy Major League Sunday Everyone!

I reviewed the previous MLW show from this taping, and the new one just hit YouTube, so let’s take a look at Never Say Never. We’ve got Tom Lawlor fighting actor Paul Walter Hauser in a cage, which isn’t a sentence I expected to type this year, but 2024 be what it is yo.

You can view the full card for Never Say Never by clicking the link below;

MLW Never Say Never 2024 Card

Happy Weekend Everyone!

I caught bits of the last MLW show on YouTube and I quite enjoyed it, so I thought I’d have a look at their recent Blood & Thunder show, as that’s on YouTube also.

I’m not massively up to date with the roster and storylines, so let’s see how well MLW can get newer viewers up to speed.

You can view the card for Blood & Thunder below;

MLW Blood & Thunder 2024 Card

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

Reviewing something new today, with Jersey Championship Wrestling, which is a brand that operates under the banner of Game Changer Wrestling I believe (So Al Ollie will be happy to see this one at least). JCW Fully Loaded 2022 has actually been uploaded to GCW’s YouTube channel, so I felt I might as well watch some free wrestling to see what JCW is all about.

I’m going into this one almost completely blind without much knowledge of the promotion or the roster, but I’ll be using CageMatch.net in order to find out some backstory on some of the wrestlers. I suppose it’ll be a good test at how easy it is for a first time viewer to get into the product though I suppose.

You can view the card for this even by clicking below and you can view the event on the Tube of You by clicking HERE

https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=341385&page=2

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

We’re taking a break from rebooking after my most recent arc, so I’ll be filling the time on Wednesday with random things for a bit, starting out with 3PW Three Men & a Bodybag. 3PW stands for Pro Pain Pro Wrestling (I’m sure it’s Hank Hill’s favourite promotion) which was a Philly based company ran by Blue Meanie and Jasmin St. Claire.

They really didn’t know what they wanted to be, as sometimes they’d do ECW hardcore stuff, but then they’d bring people like Jerry Lawler and Curt Hennig in for old school AWA styled matches, thus meaning the promotion never really had its own identity. Say what you want about a company like CZW, but it certainly occupied its own niche with its mix of wild Ultraviolence and high flying cruiserweight styled wrestling, whilst ROH had the best technical wrestling in the area as well as strong storyline stuff to keep people coming back for more.

3PW just didn’t stand out in a very competitive local market and it only lasted for three years. 3PW did enjoy some reasonable exposure in the UK though, as they were one of the companies picked up for the much missed Wrestling Channel we had on satellite TV over here. They would actually make a bit of an effort with it as well by having two commentators do intros for the show every week before cutting to clips from recent events.

Three Men & a Bodybag has a mixture of classic ECW guys such as Sabu and Sandman, with the rest of the crowd made up of younger indie workers. If you’d like to watch along with me as we view this one then feel free to click HERE.

You can view the card for the event by clicking below;

https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=96590&page=3

Happy Saturday Everyone!

We’ve got Terry Funk’s Wrestlefest this week, an event that you may have heard of before if you’ve ever watched the movie Beyond The Mat. This was supposed to be Terry Funk’s retirement show, as he’s managed to get the WWF involved meaning that Mankind and Bret Hart will be here, along with some wrestlers from Japan and ECW also.

For some reason the version I have omits one match, but I’ve found it on a certain video streaming site so I’ll include it just because I’m fascinated to see if it’ll actually be any good.

You can view the full card by clicking below;

Card with guide « Terry Funk Presents Wrestle Fest: 50 Years Of Funk « Events Database « CAGEMATCH – The Internet Wrestling Database

Feliz miércoles a todos!

I’ve never really been a big Lucha guy but CMLL has been putting up some matches on YouTube on their official channel so I decided to give one of them a watch to see if I enjoyed it or not.

I don’t really know much about the roster or even really the main intricacies of the style, but maybe some of the more Lucha versed can fill us in down in the comments section and the rest of us can kind of learn along together with one another?

It might be fun or it might be an absolute disaster. Let’ see which!

Happy Friday going on Saturday Everyone!

You get a bonus extra review this weekend as I was intrigued to check one of these shows out and decided to review it for good measure.

As far as I’m aware, Bloodsport is more of a UWFi/BattlArts styled show where they try and do shoot style pro wrestling. I’m partial to a bit of that now and then so this felt like a natural show for me to order.

I’m going in blind, so let’s see how they do at getting a newcomer up to speed. This is the first GCW show I’ve ever ordered I believe. It’s interesting that they have so many different arms where they provide different styles like this.

Happy Ultra-Violent Saturday Everyone!

I decided to review some Combat Zone Wrestling for the heck of it seeing as I’ve had this one in my collection for years and I remember mostly enjoying it back in the day. CZW from this era is kind of a guilty pleasure for me, in that it does have some good wrestling sprinkled throughout but it’s also a pretty low-rent and sleazy product a lot of the time.

The big story coming into this one was that a Heel group known as the High Five (Or “Hi-V” as they spelt it, because as mentioned CZW was a pretty skeevy company a lot of the time) made up of Trent Acid, B-Boy, Johnny Kashmere, Nate Hatred, Adam Flash and The Messiah are trying to essentially take over the company, so CZW original John Zandig has brought back some of the classic CZW ultra-violent wrestlers to back him up in a big Cage of Death match.

S’up everyone!

I discovered Catalyst Wrestling (Formerly Capitol Wrestling) during the first lockdown here in the UK as they had a slot on something called the Showcase channel. They sadly don’t seem to have a presence on UK telly anymore but you can watch their regular show over on YouTube for free.

I’m becoming quite the fan of Colby Corino and he does regular work for them, so I decided to check out one of their recent shows from September this year seeing as he’s in the Main Event and all. I think he’s been doing some stuff for the NWA as well and also had an appearance on 205 Live, so he’s definitely worth keeping an eye on, especially if you were a fan of his dad’s work like I am.

Some of the peeps at Catalyst actually reached out to me and gave me a promo code for this show for review purposes, so thank you to them for that, but I think the show was only £0.72 UK anyway, which isn’t a bad price to pay for 2 hours and 21 minutes of wrestling in all honesty.

If you like the sound of this show then I’ll post the link for YouTube channel as well as the link for this particular show below if you want to see some of their stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/c/CatalystWrestling/videos

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/stealthisshow

Alright Squirrels!

Transatlantic Wrestling Challenge was something put together by NWA: Hammerlock back in 2000, with the idea being that it’s 8 wrestlers from Britain and 8 from America in a big tournament. I wasn’t actually able to watch it back in the day as it was shown on ITV 2 and this was prior to Freeview and whatnot, so if you were like my family didn’t have satellite or cable telly, then you were stuffed.

Someone has uploaded it to YouTube though, so I’ll review an episode of it this week and if ya’ll enjoy it then I might return to it at some point. There are only six episodes I think. If you want to watch along with me then you can do by clicking right HERE.

Greetings Friends!

This week we’re going back to On The Mat, an NWA affiliated show from New Zealand that was mostly built around “Maniac” Mark Lewin. I enjoyed it well enough last time and the episodes are only half an hour long, so it’s not like it’s going to eat into too much of my time.

If you’d like to watch along you can do so by clicking right HERE

Wow, I think even the SEGA Saturn had a more successful launch over here in the West than the European Super League did!

Brother brocore suggested this one in the comments a couple of weeks back so I decided to give it a go. I’m not sure on the exact date of this show, and I’m not sure the uploader even is either, with 3^rd of August being a guess on their part. Dave Newman has already had a bash at reviewing a show from this company, and you can read what he thought of a show from June 1986 by clicking right HERE

I’m not entirely sure on the backstory of CCW, but this features Rocky Johnson and Jimmy Snuka, so it at least has some star power if nothing else.

Anyway, let’s watch some chuffing wrestling