I’m trying not to overdo the horror movies during these times of dread, but I feel very strongly that I didn’t fit in enough Slasher Searching this October. In order to be the change I want to see in the world I intend to continue the mission periodically, free of holiday constraints. So today I have for you a double-header of wrestling themed horror movies. I thought it was a good gimmick when I reviewed WRESTLEMANIAC 16 years ago (!), but I didn’t realize until scrolling Tubi recently that it’s a whole subgenre now.

WRESTLEMASSACRE (2018) is a slasher movie of the SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT or Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN variety in that it follows the killer and gets into his psychology before he goes on a rampage. I guess it’s more of a grappler movie than a slasher movie, since he mostly kills with his bare hands. (But sometimes hedgeclippers.) Randy (Richie Acevedo, “Vendor (uncredited), SUPERFLY) is a timid Cuban immigrant who works as a landscaper but dreams of becoming a wrestler like his dad (Nikolai Volkoff).

Randy seems nice, but he’s a hopeless perv. He gets caught peeping on a client’s giant pierced boobs through the window as she takes a shower, and her husband (clearly a wrestler) catches him and beats him up on the lawn. Another client, Becky (Rosanna Nelson, GHOULISH TALES) tries to be nice to him to make up for her douchebag husband Owen (Julio Bana Fernandez, KILLER CAMPOUT) being racist to him, but then Randy decides he’s in love with her. There are many awkwardly acted dialogue scenes about this storyline before it really gets into the horror.

Meanwhile, Randy gets fired for being caught on a security cam jerkin it, so he decides to try to go to wrestling school. The guy he talks to at the school is really insulted that he came without an appointment, saying, “You don’t just walk in and get an audience with the Boogie Woogie Man!” But then the Boogie Woogie Man (Preston Quinn) makes an example out of Randy by challenging him and easily beating him in front of everybody. (This acts like wrestling is real fighting, like the old wrestling movies.)

The sets and filmatism are rudimentary, mostly shot in people’s bland living rooms and backyards, with occasional weird flourishes like when Randy imagines a televangelist (James L. Edwards, ROBOT NINJA) talking to him through the TV or a demon appearing to him. The dialogue is way too much for the amateur cast to handle, but I guess I respect the ambition. There are random comedy parts, awkward attempts at Tarantino-esque dialogue, tangents that give little backstories to side characters (a friend who works as a rideshare driver who’s getting sued by a passenger who took a shit in front of a school and he needs money to buy his wife breast implants?)

I get the sense it’s written comedic but performed serious, neither quite working. But it’s fun how many of the parts are clearly played by people from the wrestling world. I didn’t know who any of them were except Nikolai Volkoff, so there’s no fandom involved in my reaction – they just have a colorfulness that adds flavor to a low rent movie like this. Owen owes money to a crime boss named Mr. Valentine (Nicholas Yoder II, SHRIEKSHOW), whose enforcers I guess include Tony Atlas, and they’re clearly doing their wrestling and wrestling manager shtick as they threaten him. They have some actually funny dialogue sometimes, complaining that they have to be dealing with him when they were supposed to be seeing Phantom of the Opera or going to Chili’s.

Then Randy snaps and it switches to musical montages of him tearing body parts off of the people he thinks wronged him. I’m not sure what the boob lady did to him, but he tears out her tongue. I see too many Slasher Search movies that just have some fake blood, so I gotta take my hat off to the more elaborate gore like the weed-wacked face, the head stomped flat, the bisected head and the guy he strangles with intestines. It’s pretty much all played with a straight face, but ultimately gets pretty TOXIC AVENGER, like when he says “I’ll show you spineless!” and reaches down and somehow rips a guy’s spine clean out of him.

It’s a very crude movie but kind of fun, partly because Acevedo (a real life second generation wrestler who took on his father’s mantle of The Cuban Assassin in the ring) makes a sincere attempt at making you feel pity for this slow, bashful loser before he turns into a maniac-Tor-Johnson type stumbling around growling. The best thing about the movie is that he cuts off some faces and other parts and sews them into the shape of a championship belt.

Director Brad Twigg’s many other films include MILFS VS. ZOMBIES, TRASHSPLOITATION, 10/31: PART 3 and CRACKCOON. It’s another one of those filmographies that proves that real exploitation factories are out there cranking them out, whether the world notices or not.

I actually didn’t find WRESTLEMASSACRE on streaming, it was a DVD. One I did find on Tubi though was HERE FOR BLOOD (2022), directed by Daniel Turres (TERRY’S CAR GETS STOLEN) and written by James Roberts. It’s a way more polished movie that stars Shawn Roberts (no relation) as indie wrestler Tom O’Bannon, who’s barely getting paid at work and his girlfriend Phoebe (Joelle Farrow, SECRETS IN S SMALL TOWN) needs to study for an exam so she gets him to fill in for her on a babysitting job. He claims “Guys don’t babysit, girls do,” but she won’t accept no for an answer. (He also seems pretty old to be dating a college student, but I’m not the judge of them.)

So Tom goes to the house, promises to stepdad Gil (Michael Therriault, CULT OF CHUCKY) and mom Barb (Tara Spencer-Nairn, WISHMASTER 4: THE PROPHECY FULFILLED) that he’s not a creep, and watches after their daughter Grace (Maya Misaljevic, voice of “Frieda” on various recent Snoopy cartoons). She mostly just plays video games, but they manage to have one heart-to-heart about the death of her father.

What he doesn’t know is that there’s a cult planning to “ascend,” whatever that means, by sacrificing Grace and Phoebe to extra-dimensional entities called The Eternal Ones. The cultists invade the house wearing white Halloween masks and Tom does his duty as babysitter, protecting the kid, with bloody results.

One of the invaders (TNA wrestler Channing Decker?) has the fashion of a Sting-type wrestler, going shirtless with a leather jacket, leather pants and studded codpiece. He also likes to lay on the hood of his car posing like a pin-up of The Crow. Later he has a living severed head friend called “The Head” who is the founder of their cult but seems to do nothing but eat people and yell “FEED MEEEE!” (voice of Dee Snider, PEE-WEE’S BIG ADVENTURE). Another one (Marqus Bobes, “Dynamite Zombie,” SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD) wears a mask upside down (but with the eyeholes in the correct place) so when he hangs down to look under the bed it looks right side up. Creepy. That guy does a litle better than the one played by Jesse Buck (“Geek #2,” NIGHTMARE ALLEY). Tom peels the mask off him and presses his face to an oven burner. Later there are chunks of skin still burning on the oven, and the guy runs around with a gruesome coil mark on his cheek (sometimes pulling pieces off for snacks, Chop Top style.)

I guess the leader of the cult is called The Jackyl (Glen Michael Grant, PHASE IV [the Brian Bosworth one]). He has a carved wooden thing in a nearby barn that he uses to summon The Eternal Ones or whatever to possess the people Tom kills and keep fighting. Now the upside down mask guy’s eyes glow, and he can lift Tom up by the neck with one hand even though he’s regular sized.

This is definitely a horror comedy – the dialogue is very jokey, lots of stuff about him trying not to swear in front of the kid, Phoebe not wanting him to kill them until one calls her a whore, etc. Some of it’s cute, some of it too forced, though pretty much all well delivered by Roberts. I found an interview where he said the script reminded him a little of ARMY OF DARKNESS; there’s a touch of that, though also it’s kind of like those “big tough guy takes care of a kid” comedies like MR. NANNY or THE PACIFIER.

The humorous dialogue here is pretty spotty (Tom really doesn’t need to be so dumb) and many scenes have all the cinematic style of a Hallmark Christmas movie. But the gore gags are better than I expected. There’s a great joke where a head gets chopped off, there’s a long blood geyser pumping out of the stump. It stops, and the music stops. Then suddenly the spurting starts up again, so the music comes back. Also I like the throat-chewing puppet head.

My favorite part is when Tom does elbow drops on a zombie and mooshes his whole head in, but mostly wrestling is just there as an explanation of his physique. I wouldn’t mind some suplexing and jumping off things like it’s the top rope. On the other hand, like WRESTLEMASSACRE it benefits from having weird wrestler dudes playing characters not explicitly meant to be wrestlers.

Most importantly, Roberts is a compelling comedy/action lead. I assumed he was an actual wrestler, because he’s huge and has the tough guy presence of one, but apparently he’s really just an actor who I’ve seen in LAND OF THE DEAD, DIARY OF THE DEAD, RESIDENT EVIL AFTERLIFE/RETRIBUTION/FINAL CHAPTER (as Arnold Wexler), xXx: RETURN OF XANDER CAGE, and more. He makes a good protagonist though.

Ladies and gentlemen, the winner of this contest, not an important discovery, but a pretty fun random Tubi selection: HERE FOR BLOOD.