Posts Tagged ‘wrestling docs’

Southern Discomfort

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

Nope, this is not a sequel or rebuttal to Walter Hill’s SOUTHERN COMFORT, and it’s not a withering expose of labor unrest at the Southern Comfort liqueur factory. SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT is an hour long documentary about a night of indie wrestling in Alabama made in 2000 by Fred Olen Ray, a director I thought only did no-budget movies with babes and dinosaurs and shit like that. Although much more upbeat than THE WRESTLER or the Jake “The Snake” Roberts portion of BEYOND THE MAT this is that same world, the bonebreaking for small crowds and small pay in high school gyms.

The Iron Sheik is the superstar of the bunch, doing a good job of not seeming drpessed that he went from 19,000 fans at Wrestlemania in Madison Square Garden to 400 at the Saks High gymnasium. But the stars are all wrestlers I never heard of before who as far as I can tell have mostly never achieved much more fame than this and in their interviews never imply that they want to. They’re happy working regular small town jobs and then on the weekends putting on a mask and throwing people around.

The interviews don’t go too deep, and many of them stay in character, but it’s still a great visual record of a world most of us have never seen. It’s wholesome but ugly – lots of hairy, fat bodies sweating in the 100 degree Alabama heat. The crowd boasts a complete collection of every redneck stereotype ever invented, especially the one about wrestling fans thinking wrestling is real. Some of them get in heated arguments with the bad guy wrestlers, looking incensed, their eyes about ready to pop out of their heads like Nerf darts. Two of the bad guys successfully egg the crowd on about being rednecks, and one of them even pulls it off while wearing a Jim Beam t-shirt and Hank Williams Jr. headband. They still don’t seem to catch that he’s just trying to get a reaction out of them. Both fans and wrestlers sport hair styles that must’ve been holed up somewhere where they never heard that the ’80s ended. (more…)

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Lipstick and Dynamite

Thursday, August 25th, 2005

Well I should get this out of the way upfront, there is no actual dynamite in this movie, or explosions of any literal kind. What this is is another wrestling documentary. It is not nearly as good as BEYOND THE MAT or my favorite, HITMAN HART: WRESTLING WITH SHADOWS, because it’s done mostly in that tv special kind of way with talking head interviews and Ken Burns style photo montages. (There is not all that much footage of the era they focus on.) But it’s a different and interesting angle on the wrestling topic. This one is all about lady wrestlers, told through interviews with a group of elderly women that used to do the deed back in the golden age.

Most of these women looked like b movie stars when they were young, but they were tough ladies with names like Gladys “Killem” Gillem, and as we know from the other wrestling documentaries, even if it’s fake, it’s a dangerous sport/artform/opera that destroys the body of pretty much anybody who does it long enough to be successful.

These are real interesting characters and they tell real interesting stories about the old days. They would have one guy in charge who sounds almost like their pimp, who would try to screw them both figuratively and the other figuratively. They talk about the days when it was actually illegal for women to wrestle and what it was like to go out there and do it anyway. Raging against the machine. And there’s a tragic story about a young girl who actually died during a match. Her opponent is still around to be interviewed in the movie and even though it wasn’t her fault, she seems to still feel guilty about it.

One thing they’re frustratingly vague about is the actual workings of a match. They talk about not being able to beat the head of the league’s girlfriend because they would get in trouble – so are they pretending the matches were real? Or were they fake but the outcome was improvised? I mean wouldn’t they already know they were gonna lose the match? It’s not really clear. (more…)

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Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

Not long ago I reviewed a VERY fucking excellent wrestling documentary by the name of Beyond the Mat. That was a picture about the Mick Foley, Jake “The Snake Roberts”, Terry Funk and some other wrestlers, exploring what it is that drives these whacked out motherfuckers to destroy their bodies and endure torturous pain every night for silly entertainment. All of the stars of the movie are fascinating and I almost would’ve liked to see a whole movie focusing on just one of them.

Well little did ol’ Vern know that there already WAS a picture focussing on one wrestler, a Canadian by the name of Bret “The Hitman” Hart, who was WWF tag team champion in the ’80s and world champion for quite a while in the ’90s. Bret doesn’t have the tragic dimension of a Jake “The Snake” or an aging Terry Funk, but what he does have is a great story and I would say that this picture is arguably even better than Beyond the Mat, which is saying alot.

I don’t know if there is an award like this but I think whoever made this picture should get a Lucky Motherfucker Award – Documentary, based on the fact that they set out just to do a story about Bret Hart and by accident happened to be filming him during a time which, as one film critic said, “is like a god damned SHakespeare type tragedy.” As a Film Writer I would have to agree with that. This is the story of a man born into wrestling – his dad is a wrestler, all of his brothers are wrestlers, all of his sisters are married to wrestlers. But Bret was destined to be the brightest star of them all, becoming for many years the most popular wrestler in the world and, according to the documentary, declared the most famous Canadian in the world. Which I guess isn’t saying much but still, give the canadians a chance I guess.

Bret was a dude who loved heroics, and although I remember him being a bad guy in the ’80s, he was known as a straight laced Good Guy when he was champ, and that is one of the themes of the picture – good guys and bad guys. Bret loved being a good guy who beat bad guys, and was distressed when wrestling started to change in the ’90s, and guys like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin – who cheated and sprayed beer around and flipped off the crowd, like bad guys – became crowd favorites. The WWF organizational type folks asked Bret to become a bad guy, and he didn’t want to. So what they worked out was an interesting thing where Bret would be a bad guy by telling the audience what he really believed – that americans are a bunch of jackasses for glorifying characters like Stone Cold. (more…)

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Beyond the Mat

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

Now to be honest I am not usually the type of dude to go to the documentarian type pictures. In fact, I never even seen one before in my life unless you count watching the news on TV. But this Beyond the Mat was playing at one of the multiplexes in my area so I decided to broaden my horizons and what not. Turns out there were a few others trying to broaden their horizons, because this was the type of crowd that yells “YEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!” when the Freddy claws pop out of the guy in the X-Man preview, and who randomly yell out little jokes from the south park cartoons, you know, to be funny.

This is a documentary about the real lives of professional wrestlers, and I will tell you straight off the bat this movie is great even for those of us who don’t watch wrestling or south park. I mean I like the Roddy Piper pictures as much as the next guy, I’ve watched a little grapple here and there, but I don’t know what the fuck a mankind is or the rock or whatever. I mean who knows. It doesn’t matter.

Right at the beginning the movie explains yes, wrestling is fake, no, wrestling fans don’t think it’s real. But then it goes on to show just how devastating this “fake” sport is on a man’s body and in some cases his soul. It is a business that even more than football or prostitution chews up your body and when you’re old spits you out like a loogie never to think about you again. Because I mean think about it, how long do you think about a loogie after you spit it out, not very long.

There are about four major storylines in this movie. One is about Mick Foley who I guess wrestles as Mankind, Dude Love and Cactus Jack. But in this movie he’s a normal chubby guy who lives with his wife and adorable daughter and son. He is very nice and even normal and he always dreamed of being a wrestler. But it scares his family to always see him drenched from head to toe in his own blood after a match, saying, “Daddy’s okay, daddy’s okay, don’t worry about daddy.” (more…)

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