Smugly reviews all of Lucha Underground (or at least tries to before it becomes hard to find on the internet due to takedowns and capricious copyright holders)

[SirSmUgly]

I also feel specifically with this All Night Long II Match that the stretcher job fakeout only worked on the crowd because they'd just seen Angelico get legit hurt, whereas at home, they almost glossed over it and we didn't see much other than Angelico rolling out of the ring and holding his busted elbow at home. The in-person crowd totally bought the fakeout because they got to see Angelico being legit hurt, but to pull off this same feeling for the crowd at home, they needed to do more lingering on legitimately hurt Angelico in post (as tacky as it might seem). 

...and maybe they should have rethought having Havoc come out to even the odds in Angelico's spot, or at least they could have shot an interstitial after the fact to show Havoc blaming Mundo for Angelico's elbow injury and getting insulted or physically attacked for it. 

But I suppose they didn't have time to adjust in post. 

Edited October 8 by SirSmUgly

[SirSmUgly]

Season 3, Show 21: “Sudden Death” or Like WCW Backstage Assault in that there’s pretty much only the same singles match type available for selection

• Alright, let’s continue to lucha our way through this show so I can get to the next thing that I want to review. Eventually.

 

• Recap: Prince Puma ain’t right after dying and being brought back, which is the plot of more than one horror film. Kobra Moon continues to keep Drago under her lizard-y thumb. And of course, this episode deigns to give us more Willie Mack versus Johnny Mundo because forty-plus minutes of it last week simply wasn’t enough.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: I like Prince Puma, but his “I’m crazy” acting as he has flashbacks while looking in the mirror is not good! Rey Misterio Jr. walks up to calm the guy down and tries to warn him away from Vampiro, whom Rey argues is maliciously controlling Puma. Puma accuses Rey and Konnan of doing the same thing, but Rey stays calm and tries to talk some sense into him. It doesn’t work. Puma leaves, and Vampiro blit-blurts into the room and warns Rey to stay away from Puma or he’ll get put in the dirt alongside Konnan. Then he blit-blurts out of the room. Oh, cool! Did he learn that from Catrina? Seriously, this is another signal that both Vamp and Catrina have accessed the exact same "dark magic" that Catrina accused Vampiro of using to bring Puma back from the dead. Rey is so upset by the death of his former fellow Filthy Animal (say that five times fast) and by Puma's wayward nature that he punches the mirror, shattering it into pieces. Kinda like Puma’s psyche. Metaphor!

 

• Striker and (a perfectly masking) Vampiro introduce the show. I like that Striker essentially says that they’ve got standby matches just in case the overtime period between Mack and Mundo doesn’t go All Night Long Again…Again. There’s a trios tag match and Prince Puma/Mil Muertes in a Boyle Heights Street Fight waiting on deck. Well, that’s definitely flashier than Buck Robley versus George Weingroff as your filler match when the main event ends early, now isn’t it?

 

• Let’s knock this Willie Mack versus Johnny Mundo All Night Long OVERRRRRRTIME period out first. I wish they’d just have had Mundo win on a screwy finish last week instead of running this straight back. Dario Cueto steps out of his office to once again express his hatred of ties – not a La Liga fan, huh, Dario? – and then reiterates that this is one fall to a finish, falls count anywhere. RING THE BELLLLLLLLLLLL

 

• OK, the timekeeper listened to Dario and rang the bell. While Mundo and Mack open with Mack surviving some weak Mundo forearms to earn a two count on a slam, I’m thinking about how LU has booked a Falls Count Anywhere Match and a Boyle Heights Street Fight on the same show, thus once again overloading us on wandering weapons brawls (with the occasional leap of faith). I’ve got an incredible amount of LU fatigue at this point, and it’s strange because I sat through two different Russo-in-WCW stints that were far worse than this in terms of quality. The only explanation is that there is some element of what LU is specifically doing that has quite suddenly burned me out. Like, right after Aztec Warfare III, this show lost me in a manner of episodes.

 

• I mean, at this point, Mack is slamming Mundo onto a pile of steel chairs while the crowd chants THIS IS AWESOME, and we’re like three minutes into the match. I think the one thing I can give to Russo’s WCW is that everything was kind of shit, and I feel like the shows were like I was looking through a kaleidoscope and flipping the lenses every second, but any given segment that was too much at least ended quickly. Meanwhile, this Mundo/Mack match is now essentially in minute 45, and Ricky Mandel and Sexy Star are once again out here interfering, and it’s just way too much but over a longer period of time that seems almost eternal to me. I feel bad that these guys are denting chairs and trash cans and I’m entirely bored by it.

 

• I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I had a history teacher who would correct his students who said that a piece of reading was “boring” by retorting, “The reading isn’t boring…you are bored by the reading.” That is to say the following: This match is objectively full of stuff that anyone could reasonably enjoy. I admit that the issue is within me. I suspect that having seen a lot of Russo-driven television fairly recently is the problem, actually, as this is just that stuff, but longer. P.J. Black just ran out here and got put through a table by Mack, for example. I’ve seen THE WALL, BROTHER go through about five hundred tables in the past year not to mention all the weapon spots that LU has centered over this watch-through, and so I don’t give a shit. It’s just another spot. It’s like popping for a chinlock.

 

• We’re over ten minutes into this match and over fifty into these two wrestling one another for the title, and I’m hopeful that we get a finish soon. Taya Valkyrie makes an appearance, so that’s new at least for Mack/Mundo, I guess, and then she helps disentangle Mundo from Mack’s grasp. Mundo hits a sunset flip powerbomb on Mack that crashes him into the pile of chairs that scores a three count and ends the match. Cool. We don’t ever have to do this again, right?

 

• Dario Cueto makes an in-ring proclamation about all the cool concepts that he came up with this season. He promotes the following concepts specifically: Dario’s Dial of Doom (that did rule), the Ultimate Opportunity (storyline fallout pending), and the Battle of the Bulls (it sucked real bad). I mean, not every concept is a winner, so Dario has had a pretty good year. Not a good enough year to be considered a “lucha libre genius” as he proclaims, but good! Dario says that he’s developed another dope-ass idea, then hypes his announcement of a new concept. He points to Melissa Santos, who hoists a trophy above her head, and announces the creation of the Cueto Cup.

 

• Santos enters the ring holding the cup, and when she once again raises it over her head, Dario snatches it from her and basically tells her to scram. Hilarious. Poor Melissa Santos. Can she not get a better job somewhere else in kayfabe? Is PWG not looking to hire? Anyway, this cup is given to the winner of a thirty-two person tournament; the cup winner also earns a LU Championship shot at Ultima Lucha Tres. Dario says that Johnny Mundo has remained champion so far, but that he might not make it to Ultima Lucha to face the cup winner because he will be defending the title on the same night that the cup winner is awarded (which is all implied to happen just before Ultima Lucha).

 

• Dario Cueto shares that he was thinking about giving that title shot to his brother Matanza, but Rey Misterio Jr. made Matanza look like a doofus who let the family down when he sent the monster plummeting through the storage closet roof a couple weeks ago, so Rey gets the title shot instead. I suspect that Matanza prevents Rey from winning and then faces him at Ultima Lucha, which means that Johnny Mundo might be champ most of the rest of the way through this season. I just want a strong babyface champ to reign for longer than a week. Puma was such a weak, manipulable champ (which is his character, to be fair, but which also made it hard to root for him). Fenix and Sexy Star had one-week reigns. Everything else in the Temple is so relentlessly dark that having a plucky fightin’ babyface champion win and hold the biggest title would be a nice change-up. Instead, we’ve had essentially two episodes with babyface LU Champions since the end of season one. Bummer.

 

• The Reptile Tribe attempts to win the Lucha Underground Trios Tag Team Championships from the Super Friends. For the sake of clarity, Drago is standing in the Super Friends’ corner – for now, at least – and Kobra Moon is the third partner in the Reptile Tribe. Aerostar does some aerial stuff and a bit of tumbling while I consider that Aerostar needs more seedy backstage interstitial time since he’s such an important part of the backstory to the greater Aztec War that is bubbling up underneath the surface. This match is inoffensive, but Aerostar does a great job of escaping a long face-in-peril segment and firing the crowd up with a wild-looking rana escape out of a Pindar top-rope powerslam attempt. It also looks contrived, mind you, as Pindar just lets the guy get his balance up there while standing on his shoulders, but whatever.

 

• Fenix leaps into the fray while Drago just stands there watching. Fenix is en fuego until he tries to attack Vibora outside the ring and ends up being tripped and hit with a Tombstone. Meanwhile, Aerostar tries to get a hot tag to Drago, who reaches his hand out…and then withdraws it, mists Aerostar in the face, and leaves him for dead. Pindar’s follow-up spinning facebuster out of a crucifix knocks Aerostar out; Kobra gestures Drago over to their side, and he joins them. Pindar, uh, tags him in? And Drago lands a top rope splash for three and the gold? Even though he came into the match as a defending champion on the other team? Bless your heart, WCW. Whoops, I typed that by accident. Bless your heart, Lucha Underground!

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Johnny Mundo wants some celebratory hampagne, but Ricky Mandel informs him that Taya hasn't put any on ice. Mundo wants to know why there’s not a celebration going, but that’s because, as Taya lets Mundo learn (after he finally got out of that long shower he tool where he completely missed like two whole segments) that Dario booked him in a title match against Rey Misterio Jr. Mundo is actually pretty funny here as he reacts. Mundo (in dead seriousness): “Ricky. Warm up the car. I need to get to my dojo.” Mandel runs off, and Mundo turns to Taya and, still deadly serious, declares: “I didn’t want the kid to see me nervous, but I’ll be straight with you: Rey-Rey is no joke.” It got a chuckle out of me. As did his “No time for pants” response when Taya asked him if he was going to put any on before getting into the car and being driven to his dojo.

 

• Let’s have ourselves a Boyle Heights Street Fight: Mil Muertes (w/Catrina) faces Prince Puma (w/the spectre of Dark Bishop Vampiro and also Konnan circulating in the back of his mind and I suppose also literal Vampiro at ringside). Mil turns to the top of the stairs to face Puma, who pulls an okey-doke by running down the aisle, entering the ring, and dropkicking Mil. It’s strange; Puma/Mil is a legitimate long-term rivalry in this company, but it doesn’t feel like one to me. Now Fenix/Mil, that’s a rivalry that they could start up again right now, and I’d be glad to see where it goes.

 

• We get a table break about a minute in when Mil spears Puma through one. It garners a HOLY SHIT chant, but we just saw a table break spot in the opener like thirty minutes ago, crowd. They do the same toss-into-the-ringside chairs spot that half these matches have. Look, I hate to treat this show like a Kevin Sullivan and J.J. Dillon-booked 2000 Thunder, but I’ll just tell you the finish and if anything notable before that finish happens. Does Puma destroying his knees by hitting an apron-to-floor 450 count as notable? Maybe it typically does, but considering Puma’s normal offense, it probably does not.

 

• You’d think by now that Striker would realize this much: If Vampiro is surprisingly quiet, that means that he’s got something to do with whatever’s going on in the match he's watching. Puma beats Mil with a shoe, who responds by TKO’ing Puma onto the mat-covered floor. This is probably an above-average crowd brawl for LU, but it simply doesn’t stand out much at all this season. They do all sorts of weapon spots and Puma leaps onto and off of structures. You know how it is. They actually fight into Dario’s office. Dario: “No, no, no, don’t fight in here. My [Cueto] Cup is in here. Get out.” Mil glares daggers at Dario, so Dario picks up his killin’ bull and threatens Mil with a head bashin’. See, that was notable. This show probably needed even more Dario than it gave us.

 

• Mil finally deposits Puma on the floor, then walks over to have a staredown with Vampiro. No violence between them happens – for now, at least. Mil gets Puma in the ring and scores a two count, but Puma elbows his way out of Mil’s Flatliner attempt and uses a trash can to take Mil to the mat. Muertes eats a few lid shots and then a Coast-2-Coast that smashes a trash can into his chest, but he kicks out of Puma’s cover at 2.9. Puma goes up for a 630 Senton and lands it, but he gets up and celebrates, which allows Catrina to enter the ring and clobber him with her mystical stone. She helps Mil up, but she doesn’t see Vampiro hand the downed Puma a brick. Muertes runs at Puma, who tees off and lands a brick shot that puts Mil down for three. That was decent because the workers in it are good, but it didn’t do enough to stand out from all the other crowd brawls this season.  

 

• Lots of WCW parallels in this week’s show. Maybe the fourth and final season’s back half will be analogous to the AOLTW version of WCW’s 2001? But that would make what I’m watching now analogous to 2000 WCW, which both explains a lot and also is in no way an exact comparison of quality so much as a comparative look at how each company experienced its ebbs and flows. 2.5 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

[zendragon]

While I think I'm a bit higher than you on LU general in ring style, I would be in favor of a wrestling minimalist revival. Having a Fall Count Anywhere and a Streetfight on the same show is a bit like Homer Simpson on the donut machine, I mean I like meatloaf but I certainly don't want to sit down to a seven course meal where it's all thats served 

 

[SirSmUgly]

Season 3, Show 22: “The Cup Begins” or C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!

• Let’s lucha. But first...

 

• …to tack on to zendragon’s point in the post above this one regarding how much the wandering crowd brawl overload can feel same-y, I would like to add my own suggestion that even if you’re doing two gimmick matches that go around the arena on the same show, there are ways to work a Falls Count Anywhere Match differently from a street fight. The thing is that the fallback is weapon shots and big spots all the time. I think LU has that peculiar post-ECW syndrome that promotions sometimes develop where they gradually are forgetting diversify their match layouts because they’re caught in a loop of “do big crowd brawl spot -> get massive reaction that sounds good on TV -> do big crowd brawl spot” and so on and so forth.

 

• If LU took that street fight last week and just had Puma and Mil punch one another until everyone bled, that would have stood out significantly from the opener between Mundo and Mack (and it would have fit right in with some of the bloody brawls that I’ve seen in lucha, though come to think of it, most of those have been CMLL bloody brawls, so maybe there’s a key difference in house style philosophy going on).

 

• Recap: The Cueto Cup begins tonight; the winner gets a fancy engraved cup and a shot at the winner of a Johnny Mundo versus Rey Misterio Jr. Lucha Underground Championship bout. Also, I thought the word nunca meant “never” in Spanish, but Drago used that word to refuse Kobra Moon's request that he join her, and yet last week, he did exactly that. Maybe Drago meant to say a lo mejor? Anyway, the Reptile Tribe are now Trios Tag champs after Drago’s betrayal of the Super Friends, which is probably a good thing for the titles because the Super Friends were in limbo precisely because of the Drago/Kobra storyline. And finally, the showrunners remembered that Black Lotus exists! We last saw her and her Black Lotus Triad ripping Pentagón Dark’s arms out of their sockets, if you’ll recall.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: A giant corkboard with a set of brackets and a title – THE CUETO CUP: VIOLENCE IS A VIRTUE – is propped up in one section of Dario Cueto’s office. Dario is carefully filling it out with names when someone enters his office. The matches that he’s got set up on the bracket so far: Aerostar versus Drago; Famous B. vs. Texano. See, this man is out here hoping for maximum discord. OK, actually having Aerostar wrestle Drago makes sense considering how Drago turned his back on Aerostar, but this man damn well knows that B. is trying to sign Texano to his agency. There’s no need to make this matchup whatsoever. Unless you’re an irascible prick like Dario, that is.

 

• Oh yes, the door. Without looking up from his work, he tells whoever entered to step right the hell back out of his office and knock, then await permission to enter. Pentagón Dark doesn’t take direction very well, though. He starts making demands, and a chastened Dario tries to keep him calm when he asks where Black Lotus might be. Dario flippantly notes that she left for Hong Kong again and that anyway, Penta started the whole feud. That is true. It also doesn’t calm Penta, who threatens to break Dario’s arm and then twists Dario's fingers when Cueto points at him and declares that Penta would be making a mistake to attack him. Dario tries to bargain his way out of the hold by putting Penta in the Cueto Cup. Dario’s even got a name card made up for him even though he expressed surprise that Penta is back in the Temple. Maybe it was a name card made especially for contengencies. Penta is mollified, but only for like two seconds because he says that if he doesn’t win the Cueto Cup and then the LU Championship, he’s going to be snapping Dario’s arm any-fuckin’-way.

 

• So, is that it for Black Lotus on this show, or like what? There’s a whole storyline between her and El Dragon Azteca Jr. that just petered out, and I’m not sure that if they ever come back to it, it’ll still have the intrigue that it did at the end of season two because of how much it has cooled off. I was really interested in it, but now Azteca is storyline injured from trying to kill Matanza and Lotus has once more gone away to China. And now that I think of it, were those initial flash forwards where Azteca Sr. was explaining the whole great Aztec war threat to Prince Puma actually flash forwards? They seemed to be explicitly foreshadowing a future meeting between the two, but Azteca Sr. died before that could happen. Maybe they happened before Puma started at the Temple, but that wouldn’t fit very neatly into a reasonable timeline – Puma has never been all that concerned about or seemingly clued into the greater scope narrative; he’s been tied up being the champion and then dealing with the aftermath of his title loss and Konnan’s death. I’m beginning to sense that at least a few of the big story arcs that were set up over the past two seasons might not get paid off at all, but I hope that my sense of things is incorrect.

 

• Matt Striker and Vampiro introduce the first night of the Cueto Cup, and yes, I did accidentally start typing Crockett Cup before I caught myself. Anyway, there are four matches on this show, so at least one will be a squash, likely Famous B./Texano.

 

• Mala Suerte is in a round one Cueto Cup matchup against Willie Mack. Mack’s name was placed on the board in the previous interstitial, but his opponent wasn’t filled in. However, he was in the same section of the bracket as B./Texano, so he’s probably got a date with Texano coming up in the second round. Mack and Suerte do some decent escapes for burly dudes to start. Vampiro mentions Dynamite Kid as a comparison, and yeah, this opening is like a strange little mashup of the first round of a WoS match and some basic lucha match opening moves done at a slightly slower speed than the under-200 pounders would do it. That was all novel, is what I’m saying, and is probably the most fun that I’ve had with a segment of an LU wrestling match in a bunch of episodes.

 

• One thing that I’ll also give this match is that instead of a back-and-forth weapon-filled bomb fest, it’s worked as though Suerte is a level or maybe two under Mack. It’s not ideally worked, mind you; they have a standoff after that opening exchange, for example, which is usually a sign of an evenly-matched epic, and Suerte probably gets a touch too much offense. Still, I appreciate that we’re probably getting at least two matches on this show in which the winning wrestler is clearly the better man and wins cleanly. In between spots of Suerte offense, Mack generally controls the bout, scores a slew of 2.5-and-ups, and runs over Suerte with a Pounce before dropping the Rabbit Tribe member with a Mack Stunner for three. Perfectly cromulent stuff.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Brian Cage pumps his biceps while wearing that power gauntlet. Dario Cueto is pleased to see Cage enjoying the gauntlet before moving the conversation toward Councilman Delgado and sharing that Delgado wants to celebrate Cage’s victory with him in his City Hall office later tonight. Cage doesn’t feel like visiting the guy, but Dario insists and leaves Cage holding Delgado’s card. I don’t think Councilman Delgado looks like a Lawrence, but that’s what his first name is. I’m calling him Larry.

 

• Someone dragged poor Argenis out of mothballs so that Pentagón Dark could kick the fuck out of him in a first-round Cueto Cup match. Give this show credit: We get more ordering. Mack was better than Suerte by a level or two, but the gap between Penta and Argenis is established much, much wider. Penta is merely irritated by a rare Argenis offensive success and immediately gets up from eating a rana to run over and Sling Blade Argenis before Argenis can even formulate a plan for following up. Again, this isn’t perfect; there’s a superkick exchange in this thing, for example. But it’s a nice reprieve from the past few weeks of Lucha Underground evenly-matched, wandering brawl, big move television. Sometimes, I just want to watch an episode of WWF Superstars, y’know? I’d hear Vince McMahon run through the lineup as the show started – Razor Ramon, the Mountie, Bret Hart, and a Shawn Michaels and Sherri interview – and know that I’d be getting a Razor’s Edge, the Hitman dissecting a hapless jobber, the Mountie and Jimmy Hart doing something to make me laugh, and a bunch of entertaining entrance music. Sometimes, that’s all you need. An hour's worth of jobber matches can be a comforting thing, like a bowl of pea soup on a cold day. 

 

• Anyway, Penta screws around and allows Argenis to mount a small comeback, but he superkicks Argenis out of an Ultimo Dragon-style top-rope headstand and then spikes him with a package piledriver for three. Penta seems like he’s not going to snap Argenis’s arm after the fact, but come on, we all know you are, dude. Just do it already. There we go; after some encouragement from the animals who populate the Temple’s audience, he goes ahead and snaps Argenis’s arm. See you in season four when we need someone to job to Jake Strong or whomever, Argenis!

 

• Texano should take this first round Cueto Cup matchup from Famous B. (w/Brenda) in a walkover. B. and Brenda are driving me up a wall with their terrible Texan accents. B. tells Melissa Santos to GIT when she fails to announce him as being from Texas. Anyway, B. wants Texano’s business, so he lays down and allows Texano to simply pin him. Texano covers, but he pulls B. up at two and then splatters him with a sit-out powerbomb to earn the three count. Brenda’s voice is driving me up a fucking wall. She smacks Texano on the ass and squeals GIDDYAP as he leaves, and yeah, I think he’s going to join B. eventually because he’s very into the extremely saucy Brenda.

 

• Hype video: I like Australians, but that accent never fails to throw me. Maybe it’s because I speak with the boring, formal, clipped American English of a Midwestern newscaster, but the Australian fella doing the voiceover on this video (who I think is the guy who filled in for Vampiro on color back at the first Ultima lucha) isn’t that far off from sounding like Famous B. attempting a tortured Southern accent. Random aside: Once, I was on vacation in a different country, and a friendly Australian family sat down. Australians are the only people who will randomly talk to you while they’re out and about at the same level of friendliness as Americans and Canadians do in my experience. Anyway, the mom of the group said hello, and when I smiled and said hi back, she turned to her kids and said “Ooooh, an accent.” NO, YOU HAVE AN ACCENT. HOW ARE YOU NOT HEARING THAT?!

 

• (Of course I didn’t say or seriously think that, dear reader.)

 

• Anyway, this video is hyping the Rey Misterio Jr. versus Johnny Mundo Lucha Underground Championship Match that is going to fill out a loaded future card because as I understand it, it’ll happen on the same show as the finals of the Cueto Cup.

 

• Alright, tonight’s main event and first-round Cueto Cup matchup pits Drago (w/Kobra Moon) against his series-long frenemy Aerostar. Drago is now in blood-red garb on account of he’s evil. I gotta be honest: Evil, slinking Kobra Moon is making me feel some kind of way. I’ve settled down and all, don’t worry about me. I’d never say this about Thunder Rosa, by the way. It’s the performance of this character (and also, I could listen to Kobra's speak Spanish in that accent all day). A very few women can nail the tiny sliver of overlap in the Venn diagram with the circles for “evil” and “hot,” and Kobra Moon is one of them.

 

• OK, enough of that. Let’s talk about one of the best midcard off-and-on frenemyships on this show as Aerostar and Drago hook it up again. I like Aerostar, but he has a lot of stupid offense with a bunch of extra nonsense in it. For example, in this match, he does an elaborate rope walk to land what is essentially a basement dropkick. Aerostar’s follow-up charge ends with Drago dropkicking him; Kobra cackles with glee outside the ring, and yes, her evil cackle is right in the center of that Venn diagram that I was talking about earlier. Kobra’s constant stream of chatter at ringside is the reward I get for managing to survive Brenda’s constant stream of chatter at ringside earlier in this show.

 

• Kobra kills an Aerostar rope run to halt the babyface’s momentum, and Aerostar soon gets counter-cuttered out of a dead drop crossbody attempt. This match, though, is more of the back-and-forth type. It’s fine, though; there aren’t tons of weapons and they mostly rely on dives and OMG, Aerostar pulls a Super Calo and badly overshoots a suicide dive; Drago tries in vain to catch him, but Aerostar smashes his face right into a chair as a fan tries to squirm out of the way. GODDAM. Aerostar does shit like this all the time, it seems to me. Kobra walks over and trips him again as he gets to his feet, then drops an elbow into his spine.

 

• Well, Aerostar nearly killing himself should put this match firmly into the plus column, but they end up going fifty-fifty almost immediately after that, which is a bummer. Drago should have had sustained control for a few minutes to sell how wildly damaging that previous Aerostar dive looked instead of trading moves immediately. Nothing means anything in this match except for the finish, and that sequence immediately after the dive cemented it. Aerostar tries a move steal and earns two off of Drago’s Tail of the Dragon. He goes back to that well, but Drago knows his own finisher and blocks it, then manages a Tail of the Dragon on Aerostar in response that does get three. Kobra instructs Drago to KILL [AEROSTAR] after the match, and Drago obliges. What, Fenix can’t come out here and back his buddy Aerostar up?

 

• Seedy City Hall interstitial: Brian Cage meets Councilman Larry Delgado in Delgado’s office. Delgado ain’t slick at all; he immediately hops to his feet when Cage enters and openly grins at the gauntlet that Cage is wearing, exclaiming: “Good, good! You can’t take it off. That means it’s working!” This sets off alarm bells in Cage’s Aztec god-addled brain, but Delgado tells him that he’s going to get more power soon. And then, Delgado says, their work will begin. Cage snarls and asserts that he doesn’t work for anyone, but Delgado brushes that off and tells him that he's been wasting his time with his gym bro lifestyle. No more lat presses and high-protein, low-carb meals for him! Cage is annoyed at this guy and goozles him, then bashes him nearly through his own office wall before realizing that the ‘roids…err, I mean, that the Aztec gods caused him to slip into a Scott Steiner-like rage (metaphor!). Delgado’s dumb ass keeps talking though; he accepts Cage’s apology, but condescendingly so by saying that Cage’s feeble little humanoid brain hasn't reached a state of godhood and is “still thinking like a man.”  But Cage is not a man, dammit! He’s a machine! Call him a man and he punches you so hard that your head explodes! Seriously, Cage punches Delgado so hard that Delgado’s head explodes, and the run of Lucha Underground appearances for Television’s Lorenzo Lamas is now over. It’s been a minute or two since we updated the Permadeath Count: 11 (Bael, Konnan, El Dragon Azteca Sr., The Three Nerdsketeers, Trece, Barrio Negro, Mister Cisco, Siniestro de la Muerte, Councilman Delgado). Welcome back to the reviews, Permadeath Count!

 

• This show broke a streak of sub-3 LU-CHA chants shows dating back to the fourteenth show of this season, the one with Penta wrestling a bunch of gauntlet matches against top-end Stardom talent, and joins that show as the only one after Aztec Warfare to reach that mark. It’s not the most definitive C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER that this show could have, and we still haven’t had a show that I’ve given 4 LU-CHA chants or more to since Aztec Warfare III back in the eleventh show of the season, but I enjoyed this episode well enough and hope that maybe bringing back some of the storyline elements that have been placed into the background over the past seven weeks of mediocre television will at least stabilize things going deeper into the back half of the season. 3 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

[SirSmUgly]

Season 3, Show 23: “Family First” or Freshly-Picked Marty’s Masturbatory Melissaland

• I think I’m at the point in my Lucha Underground watch where I understand what the watch-through has taught me about myself and my relationship to pro wrestling, and I wonder if the last 45-ish episodes of the show will do anything to change that by the time I wrap these up (probably early next year at this pace, yeesh).

 

• Recap: The big Cueto Cup tournament rolls on. Note that Pentagón Dark’s win is highlighted here specifically. I think we’re headed toward a Mundo --> Penta LU title change by the end of this season. It’d be a broadly great choice because Penta is extremely over with the Temple crowds and probably with the people at home considering how he turned this LU run into an AEW run that he then parlayed into a WWE run. But also, I’m not sure there’s anyone in this company that I’m personally fiending to see a top title run for outside of Rey Misterio Jr. I was kinda there on a Cage title run toward the end of last season, but he’s regressed as a worker this season. Speaking of Cage, he obliterated Councilman Delgado’s melon last episode with a single blow, like an Aztec-god-powered version of One Punch Man. I presume by now someone has found Delgado's body and also checked the security cameras at City Hall? Then again, considering how pathetic the LAPD has been at investigating things on this show, they might still be trying to locate City Hall so they can investigate Delgado’s death in the first place.

 

• Melissa Santos walks up to a muscle car all slinky-like to hit on Fenix, who is driving the car. Fenix gets around in the Temple, doesn't he? Missy Santos thinks that Fenix is going to win both the Cueto Cup tournament and her heart, pretty much, and she and Fenix walk off together in a somewhat-loving, somewhat-steamy mood. From a few yards away, that creepy fuck Marty Martinez glares angrily at his girl (she’s not his girl) being stolen from him (you can’t have stolen from you what you don’t possess) by that cad Fenix (by a guy who doesn’t know or care about this weirdo Moth and his need for a therapist). The Moth bashes his head into a window panel in anger. Yeah, that’s normal behavior that’s going to serve you well, Marty.

 

• Matt Striker and Vampiro introduce the matches that Dario Cueto has set for the next quadrant of our Cueto Cup bracket: Brian Cage versus Vinnie Massaro; Mascarita Sagrada versus Pindar; Marty “the Moth” Martinez versus Saltador; and Rey Fenix versus Mariposa Martinez. Did Dario get lucky with constructing a few of these matchups, or did he know that Fenix and Melissa were an item and so he clumped the Martinez sibs and Fenix in the bottom half of this bracket for maximum chaos? My hunch is that he just got lucky because he doesn’t seem to know that Saltador versus Mascarita Sagrada would have been the more chaotic pairing considering that Saltador thinks that Sagrada is the fabled White Rabbit who should lead him into a new era. A new era of copious drug taking, to be clear. Anyway, I doubt that Dario knows what’s going on with Sagrada and the Rabbit Tribe or Melissa Santos, Rey Fenix, and Marty Martinez because he’s so preoccupied with his plan of powering Cage up -> the return of the Aztec Gods -> ??? -> profit!

 

• Let’s see if Vinnie Massaro survives his match against Brian Cage. Why the fuck is Massaro dressed like a new age Brooklyn Brawler? I don’t know. Maybe he should wash that undershirt. Better yet, it’s ripped, so buy a new one. Massaro walks up to Cage and is like I’m-a gonna be-a an Italian mobster stereotype-a! and then he slaps Cage, who proceeds to slowly kill off Massaro. One note: Cage is not wearing the gauntlet while he wrestles, so I’m presuming that he doesn’t have One Punch Man level power in this instance, or at least not yet. I’m sure by the end of the season, the gauntlet will have transferred all of its power to him whether he's wearing it or not. Massaro actually makes a minor comeback including a headbutt to Cage’s pec and an STO, but he stops to pick up Cage’s gauntlet in an attempt to hit him with it. Cage ducks the swing and then clobbers Massaro for daring to touch his power glove before landing a Steiner Screwdriver for the victory.

 

• After the match, the folks in post-production completely screw up the whole “keep up the illusion that this is a shoot” deal that allows me to suspend my disbelief by getting a fairly close-up shot of an enraged Cage popping the gauntlet back on and then repeatedly hitting Massaro in the head with it. I say this because the close angle allows me to see Massaro blatantly gigging himself while Cage does it. This poor bastard stabs himself in the temple while I wonder why the fuck anyone would stick this shot in the final production. Cage chokeslams Massaro from the apron to the floor to end the segment; the Cage-loving crowd is subdued about what they suspect might be a coming heel turn because of the glove that Cage has started sporting on his hand.

 

• Hype video: Rey Misterio Jr. has had a long and awesome career. Watch him work out in Boyle Heights while the Australian dude does a voice over! Rey also cuts a promo about himself and his mask in which he claims that he is more than merely his mask. To sum up, he relates that his name is Finlay Misterio and he loves to fight! Meanwhile, Johnny Mundo trains in his dojo while Taya films him for the Worldwide Underground's in-house documentary. We get the same voice over-and-wrestler promo dealie as we got for Rey. I’m sorry, but I have no hype for this matchup because I saw enough mid-aughts WWE to have seen it multiple times already. The bout will be good, probably. I simply can’t get excited about it.

 

• Leave Melissa Santos alone, Marty, you fuck. Stop licking her hair. Go away. Recognize her (and everyone else's) boundaries. There’s an actual MAR-TY chant coming from a notable section of this crowd full of degenerates. Saltador versus the Moth will probably be filled with uncomfortable moments! Saltador out-weirds Marty by turning around, wiggling his ass, and offering his arm up for a free hammerlock. Meanwhile, Matt Striker recounts some great pro wrestling tournaments of the past. Of course, he mentions the WWF Intercontinental Championship tournament that established the title, and of course, he notes that there is no surviving footage of Pat Patterson taking Rio by storm to win it. Cute. So, was the point of the phantom tournament that by winning it, Patterson unified a North American Championship with a South American Championship, thus the Intercontinental Championship?  I’m woefully bad on my 1970s WWF knowledge, actually. ‘70s WWF is a huge historical catch-up goal for me later on. I’ve seen most of the big matches and title changes from that era, but beyond that, I’m shaky.

 

• Vampiro remembers a few World of Sport guys as the Moth and Saltador do a few hold escapes that are pretty fun. Johnny Saint and Rollerball Rocco are specifically mentioned. This match takes from the Mack/Suerte match last week with the mix of escaping holds and lucha-ish pacey leaping and diving, but adds considerable strangeness to it. It’s an unusual little melange of an approach that is compelling because it’s so different that what we’re used to from this company's matches…and it means that when Marty gets sick of Saltador’s nonsense and catches a Saltador rana before powerbombing him into the raised railing right next to Melissa Santos’s position, the move actually has weight. It escalated the proceedings. Wow, it’s almost like being a bit choosy about when to use those big spots is a good idea! Of course, after completing that move, Marty leers at Melissa, sticking his tongue out lasciviously. She quickly turns away from him, and this is all legitimately uncomfortable in a good way!

 

• In fact, this whole match is uncomfortable to quite the positive effect. What a strange little bird this bout is. Marty drags Saltador around by his mask and shimmies while Saltador tries to fire up by thrusting his crotch. Marty chokes Saltador in the corner, and when the ref five counts him, he turns around and hocks a loogie right in the ref’s face. See? This is a testy little match. Saltador makes a comeback, looks ascendant after a springboard rana, and tunes up the band for a superkick. He doesn’t launch because he sells that his knee is a bit out of joint; Marty walks over and laughs at him, but it’s a ruse by the rabbit man! He explodes with a kick to the Moth’s jaw. Alas, he takes too much time to follow up; Marty goes behind him, hits a huge release German, follows with an even huger Exploder into the corner, and then loses his fucking mind. Marty slams his head against the mat and then simulates that he would like to give Melissa oral at ringside before pointing directly at her.

 

• Vampiro is apoplectic at the utter grossness of that last bit and hopes for the Moth to catch a beatdown; Striker notes that as Marty ramps up the violence, he gets hornier and hornier, which I think is a good way to frame this character. Saltador tries to fire up again, but he’s a total fucking goof who is too busy hopping in place to actually try some offense; Marty grabs him and hits a Codebreaker out of the Northern Lights position for three. Melissa is bummed about having to announce the Moth as the winner. I don’t blame her.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Mascarita Sagrada is just trying to get his pump on before his big match tonight, but Paul London and Mala Suerte walk up and bow to him. London: “Saltador has fallen in battle, so tonight, you can lead the Rabbit Tribe as we ascend toward Valhalla.” Sagrada understandably is like, Yo, fuck off, absolutely not, and then he steps between them and Vinnie Mac-walks out of the gym. London, looking reverently at the departing Sagrada: “That, my friend, is divinity personified.” Boy, Paul London is gettin’ real weird with it, ain’t he? I mean, even for him!

 

• Seedy secret masturbation room interstitial: So, Marty Martinez has set up a Helga Pataki-like shrine to Melissa Santos. Actually, if the production team had made a bust of Melissa’s head out of bubble gum akin to the one Helga had of Arnold, they would have totally redeemed themselves for the earlier blatant gigging camera shot that made it into this episode. Alas, we only get Marty talking to the pictures he’s posted of Melissa on the wall. Oh, and before I forget, the picture of Melissa that he pulls out of the dick-area of his trunks and sensuously licks. Also, he’s got some of her hair, which he sniffs, and that second one is definitely some Helga Pataki shit.

 

• Before the interstitial ends, Mariposa pops into her brother’s wank closet and lectures Marty on forgetting what their father taught them: “Family first.” I bet that Jim Trueblood-ass motherfucker you called "Dad" taught you that shit. Gross. Disgusting. Wipe this family and their whole tribe from the earth for they are a desecration unto the land. Mariposa promises to beat Fenix tonight and then to beat the lust out of Marty in the second round of the tournament because she’s sick of him looking at other women and not her. They put their foreheads together like lovers as Marty recalls when “[they] used to play,” which causes Mariposa to caress his chin, but she’s essentially like Lil’ Zane in that Marty informs her that she’s getting none tonight. She slaps him twice because she’s sexually frustrated, I guess? I mean, I assume that she wants to fight him and then fuck him, but also, I’ve thought about this frankly disgusting pair of incestuous siblings and their regrettable relationship for long enough.

 

• The end of this interstitial is that Marty promises his dick-scented Melissa picture that she’ll be joining the family soon, presumably because he only fucks close family members, and I think he manages tiny orgasm as he pops the picture back in his trunks. Yeah, we got his O-face (and not the fun diving cutter type), his vinegar strokes, you get the deal. That was the most disturbing interstitial I’ve seen in the whole run of this show, and I’ve seen characters get killed on camera.

 

• Mascarita Sagrada is my dude, but I don’t know if he’s going to beat Pindar (w/Kobra Moon) in what is essentially a two-on-one match. Or, uh, even a one-on-one match considering how Pindar flings this dude around after barely feeling Sagrada’s opening strikes. Sagrada does manage to land a basement dropkick to Pindar’s knee, then score a rana and a springboard arm drag. Pindar tries a running knee in the corner, but misses badly and bumps to the floor, where Sagrada follows with a diving rana.

 

• Sagrada continues a run of offense with a diving crossbody back in the ring and a big kick to the face, but he runs himself into a pop-up cutter. Kobra cackles with glee from her spot at ringside. An angered Pindar wastes time boot choking Sagrada and throwing punches instead of putting Sagrada away. This might be a mistake, but Kobra gets her shots in as Pindar glories in his control of the match, so maybe not? No, wait, Sagrada manages to spin around Pindar’s body like twenty ties before landing a headscissors. The dizzied Pindar wobbles around on the floor as Kobra gets in the ring and fails to attack Sagrada, who uses her as a way to boost himself for another rana to Pindar on the floor. He then walks past Kobra and returns a slap that she gave him a couple of minutes ago.

 

• Holy shit, the work from Marty Martinez and Mascarita Sagrada has elevated this episode into something kind of amazing. I don’t know if it’ll be an episode for everyone who likes pro wrestling, but as far as I’m concerned, this is the one of the episodes of Lucha Underground that gets across why it had so much potential as a wrestling show. It’s like the whole damned episode is one huge Charming Uniquity. Anyway, Sagrada gets two on a crossbody, but he doesn’t have the weight to hold Pindar down, who figures out that it’s time to stop playing around and lands a boot and a huge sit-out facebuster after he flips Sagrada out of powerbomb position to win the match. This match one hundred percent ruled. I can’t remember the last time this show had back-to-back notably good matches.

 

• OK, the main event pits Mariposa Martinez against Rey Fenix in our fourth and final Cueto Cup match of the night. Melissa blows a kiss to good-guy Fenix as he circles the ring and slaps hands with everyone. He even offers to slap hands with Mariposa, who responds by dismissively slapping his hand away. They lock up and break; Fenix offers his hand again, but Mariposa ow dismissively kicks it away. They go back at it; Fenix prepares to launch a superkick, and Mariposa shrinks away and shrieks because she thinks she can invoke “don’t hit a girl” privilege in the middle of a wrestling match. Nope! Fenix buries a dropkick right in her mush a couple of seconds later.

 

• I feel like part of the problem with Lucha Underground’s roster construction is that by far the best female worker on the regular roster is Mariposa, but the female babyfaces are Sexy Star and Ivelisse Velez. There’s not that one female worker who is a beloved babyface and a great worker that this show really could have used. Mari manages to kick Fenix away from her; she tries a crossbody that Fenix catches, but he puts her down to follow up instead of hitting a slam and ends up eating a nasty spike DDT that Mari covers on for two. Mari takes things to the floor, landing kicks and a springboard rana with the apron as her springboard.

 

• Fenix is a bit addled as Mari deposits him back in the ring. She clubs him down and then manages to work out of wheelbarrow position and into a springboard bulldog. She’s doing well for herself until Fenix leaps over her on a corner charge and scores a release German. Fenix once again goes for a kick and stops, but this time, he just completes the move and kicks her when she relaxes. His cover, however, is so casual that it is very easy for Mari to get a shoulder up; the commentators pillory him for being disrespectful to his competition, and it is FANTASTIC because I TRULY BELIEVE in commentators running down wrestlers for lazy covers. These male wrestlers continue to disrespect their female opposition to their detriment.

 

• To be sure, Mari tries to capitalize and gets a boot in, but she gets hung up on the ropes after Fenix slaps his bicep – oh, and also I think there was a weak strike in there that the bicep slap was supposed to represent. She blocks a C-4 attempt, but dives, is caught, and gets flipped into Fire Driver position and drilled for three. Good match (despite the dumb bicep slap/weak strike combo that Fenix fired off)!

 

• Of course, Marty Martinez immediately jumps in and attacks Fenix; Melissa is upset at ringside, and she’s even more upset when Fenix kicks the Moth and he falls from the ring and stumbles to a position right beside her. Fenix deposits a revived Mari out there as well and then dives onto both of the sibs while Melissa hits a tiny version of her O-face, her vinegar strokes, but just a small version, and you know what? This was the un-sexiest show full of sex that I have seen in a long time. Just a total penis-shrinker of a program tonight.

 

• And I mean that as a compliment. This show got very strange very quickly and wholly to its benefit. 3.75 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

[tbarrie]

4 hours ago, SirSmUgly said:

Of course, he mentions the WWF Intercontinental Championship tournament that established the title, and of course, he notes that there is no surviving footage of Pat Patterson taking Rio by storm to win it. Cute. So, was the point of the phantom tournament that by winning it, Patterson unified a North American Championship with a South American Championship, thus the Intercontinental Championship?

That's always been my assumption. But I'm also curious if anybody reading knows for sure. That was before my time.

[zendragon]

That is correct, Pat won the NA title off a pre-Million Dollar Man Ted Diabase, the had the phantom unification after winning the South American title in the phantom tournament.

Funny thing that the first WWWF Title match was Buddy Rogers over Antonio Rocca and that footage has been lost to time as well!

back to the show,

This Marty angle is really good, one of the highlights of the whole series. Marty gets serious main event level heat in a roomful of ClapClapBullshit Smarks. I know at some point he had a serious back injury but he's still semi-active on the indys so I'd love to see him get a run somewhere. 

[SirSmUgly]

I was just coming to post this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWF_North_American_Heavyweight_Championship

The NA title existed for like a blip in time. I think I've seen that DiBiase/Patterson match a long time ago and then totally stuffed it in the recesses of my mind. 

EDIT: Also, I just looked up the WWF Intercontinental Championship, and 1.) the current design is sinfully ugly, one of the worst-looking title belts that I've ever seen, and 2.) Dominik fucking Mysterio is the champ? I...uh...is he actually a good wrestler, or is this basically a nepotism deal?

Edited October 15 by SirSmUgly

[tbarrie]

6 minutes ago, SirSmUgly said:

I was just coming to post this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWF_North_American_Heavyweight_Championship

The NA title existed for like a blip in time. I think I've seen that DiBiase/Patterson match a long time ago and then totally stuffed it in the recesses of my mind. 

Yeah, I was surprised to learn how little time there was between the creation of the NA title and the switch to the IC title. I had assumed the North American title had been around for at least a few years.

For those who don't trust Wikipedia, here's the article they cite for the statement about the Rio tournament being for the South American title: https://www.cbssports.com/wwe/news/wwe-legend-pat-patterson-first-intercontinental-champion-and-creative-force-dead-at-79/

[zendragon]

I think the reason they said Ted was the NA champion was that he had held the Mid-South version of the belt (and dropped it) so maybe they could get a little second hand lineage. 

 

As for Dominick I haven't seen his matches but he does do excellent character work and seems to be very over and a heat magnet.

[tbarrie]

32 minutes ago, zendragon said:

I think the reason they said Ted was the NA champion was that he had held the Mid-South version of the belt (and dropped it) so maybe they could get a little second hand lineage.

That makes sense. So did they explicitly say they were creating a new title and awarding it to DiBiase, the way Wikipedia makes it sound? Or did they just bring him in as North American champion with no explanation?

Tangent: we're so used to secondary titles being a thing, it's kind of wild to think that the WWWF went over a decade and a half with only the one men's singles title. Or were there other secondary titles in WWWF between 1963 and 1979 that have largely been forgotten?

[zendragon]

The WWWF Junior Heavyweight Championship (which ended up being mainly defended in Japan) and The WWWF Martial Arts Championship which was awarded to Antonio Inoki , also the WWWF International Heavyweight Championship which originally was when they where a part of the NWA but also ended up in Japan.  

[SirSmUgly]

Season 3, Show 24: “Macho Madness” or Since we're alluding to Macho Man Randy Savage in the title of this show, here's a syllogism for you! Good wrestling : This episode of Lucha Underground :: Macho Man's entrance music at WrestleMania 8 : Macho Man's entrance music in an early '90s LJN WWF video game on SNES or Genesis

• Wow, I’m allowed to sit down and write about some wrestling? I didn’t know that was still a possibility at this time of the year!

 

• (I am genuinely bummed because I had aimed for finishing this watch-through by the end of the year, but now I’m relegated to hoping that I can finish it by the end of January. January 2026, I want to be clear. January 2026. If I’m still somewhere in the middle of season four by January 2027, I’m going to need an admin to figuratively nuke this thread from virtual orbit.)

 

• Recap: Oh no, Killshot and Dante Fox are still feuding. I had blissfully forgotten about that. Jeremiah Crane is still striking out with Catrina, as you may recall, and as you may recall even more recently than that, the Cueto Cup started and continues tonight right alongside all the other drama in the Temple.

 

• Seedy meditation room interstitial: Catrina interrupts Mil Muertes’s said meditation to issue him a new order of commands. Cat sends him out there to win not only his first round match in the Cueto Cup, but the whole shebang. Mil says that he’ll win it for her because she is his “love.” She is not his love, but in a move that Vince Russo would claim is JUST LIKE WOMEN, BRO, she responds to Mil's claim with a kiss to keep Mil doing the stuff that she wants him to do. Mil, she’s not into you, dude! You are the stereotypical unloved husband whose wife just keeps him around to pay a chunk of the mortgage! Oh yeah, also, Jeremiah Crane sneaked into the meditation room and saw that whole exchange from a dark corner, so not only is he irrationally enraged, he’s just as confused as Mil is about who Catrina actually loves. That is, if Catrina was even telling the truth about actually being in love with Fenix. She doesn’t seem all that bothered by Fenix macking on Melissa Santos, after all. Probably what we should take away from anything Cat’s done is that the only person she is truly in love with is herself.

 

• Matt Striker and Vampiro hype the Cueto Cup. We don’t see tonight’s quadrant, though.

 

• Veneno, AKA Officer Cortez Castro Reyes or whatever the hell order I've been naming him in, I haven’t watched this show in a while so forgive me, is out here to get destroyed by Mil Muertes (w/Catrina). I find it hilarious that Veneno/Reyes is still getting tossed into matches where he’s going to get slaughtered even though conceivably, Dario doesn’t recognize that it’s even him. I might guess that Dario has figured it out and is doing this on purpose, but sometimes he gets lucky and does an accidental sadism instead of his usual purposeful sadistic behavior. Mil just murders this dude with a spear to start, throws a ton of soupbones, lands a chokeslam, and drops Officer Cortez Castro “Veneno” Reyes with a Flatliner for the **Shang Tsung voice** flawless victory.

 

• Melissa Santos had better stop with her nonsense. She announces Paul London as being “from down the rabbit hole,” which is not my issue. My issue is that she uses her left hand to point toward the mat while circling it around as though it is swirling down a drain. Is Melissa Santos the worst ring announcer ever? I think she might be! Vibora (w/Kobra Moon) is hailed as “from when reptiles ruled the earth,” and you know what, I’m not taking any of this shit seriously. Look at Vibora! That mask makes him look like a goomba from the shitty live-action Super Mario Bros. movie!

 

• London’s initial offensive flurry, unlike Mil’s in the previous match, is woefully ineffective, so he grabs a carrot and holds it threateningly to Kobra’s neck while Kobra yells VI-BO-RA in the same cadence as the Swiss guy from the Matterhorn yelled RI-CO-LA in those old cough drop ads from the ‘90s. That’s now two random (unintentional?) callbacks to media from the ‘90s just in this match. Why doesn’t this show next call back to WWF and WCW in 1997 next and have a good wrestling match or three?

 

• London does a forward flip off a lariat to the back of the head, but had he just snapped himself to the mat face forward, it would have made the move look more vicious. The comedy in this bout didn’t land for me, and this is a worse squash-y type match than then one that came before it. For some reason, the other two Rabbit Tribe members run into the ring, and though they don’t actually do anything, I guess it serves as a distraction that allows London to use his legs to yank Vibora to the floor, where Vibora then completely fails to catch London on a trust fall. The ref leapt right the hell out to the floor to check on him because it looked like London injured his neck. As it turns out, this isn’t a squash at all; the Rabbit Tribe members grab Vibora’s ankles and keep him from beating the count, which is a problem that London doesn’t have. London wins by countout. This match was an abomination unto the wrestling gods.

 

• We see a bracket update: Jeremiah Crane versus Killshot and Joey Ryan versus Taya Valkyrie are the other two matches in the quadrant. KEEP JOEY THE HELL AWAY FROM TAYA.

 

• Taya is pretty rad, IMO. I would assume that she’s actually going to win this match. She’d better not be jobbing to Joey Ryan’s punk ass. Speaking of, here’s the dude with the absolute worst shtick in a Temple full of questionable third-season gimmicks. The camera zooms in on his dick as he enters the ring. Yuck. Ryan does his fucking nonsense that grosses Taya out, like ew, and she throws some forearms, then follows with a clothesline and double knees that send Ryan to the floor. Taya goes out there and brings Ryan back into the ring by his short hairs (on his chest, mind you), but my least favorite transition happens and Ryan scores a superkick.

 

• Ryan tries for a countout victory, then decides to go out and land some strikes before putting Taya back in the ring and taking about fifty years to consider a possible top rope move. Naturally, he gets caught up there and tossed to the mat, Ric Flair-style. A follow-up double-stomp earns her two, but she misses a corner charge. Ryan smacks her and tries an electric chair move, but she wriggles away and to the mat, then manages to duck a wild Ryan swing. Taya stays hooked around Ryan’s waist, hits a Northern Lights Suplex, releases her grasp, and lands another double-stomp that this time does keep Ryan down for three.

 

• There is only one more match on this show, but there are twenty-three minutes left in this show. Let’s all hope for a bunch of interstitials and not a twenty-minute Jeremiah Crane/Killshot match. For the love of all that is holy, please, no.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Mil Muertes checks his tie in the mirror of the dingy locker room bathroom, then saunters out into the hall…and right into a chair attack from an enraged Jeremiah Crane. Crane knocks him out and declares that Catrina is his lady even though she doesn’t seem interested in him at all, and I doubt that she’s just going to agree to date him or whatever because he says so, not even if Crane does a combination Pillmanizer/Con-chair-to sort of deal to snap Mil’s neck. Whoops, he does that combo move anyway, thus illustrating the futility of love or some shit. Is the meta-joke here that Paul London will keep getting matched up against monsters in the Cueto Cup, but somehow he'll manage to stumble all the way into the semis?

 

• Hype video: Sorry, but I can’t get up for Rey Misterio Jr. vs. Johnny Mundo, though Chavo Guerrero Jr. tries his best by giving his analysis. So does Brian Cage, who I note does not have the gauntlet on his hand. Puma is also called upon to comment and notes that this is the first time these men have wrestled…in the Temple. Exactly my point, man! We've seen this matchup before! Many times! Striker also hypes this thing, and he does some real sports comparison in which he likens this Mundo/Misterio close-cut rivalry to others in both real and real-ish sports: Ali/Frazier (thinking big with the comparison there, but okay), Tate/Rousey (uh, not that close-cut), and Flair/Steamboat (is Steamboat Flair’s best opponent…or is it Terry Funk? No, it’s Steamboat because he didn’t have a nightmare match against Flair in early 2000 WCW like Funk did). This is objectively a quite good hype package for a match that I simply feel zero hype for. Also, kayfabe predictions: Chavo chooses Rey, Cage chooses Mundo, and Striker is a broadcast journalist and therefore invokes the Heenan rule to pick the heel. Whoops, sorry, actually he doesn’t pick because he wants to appear impartial, just as Heenan was an impartial broadcast journalist who would never pick the heel. Puma angrily picks Rey and makes it obvious as he does so that he is reliving his own loss to the guy (Season Two, Show Twenty-Six), thus keeping that iron in the fire for a future rematch that probably won’t happen. At least not in this company.

 

• (Also, Cage suggested that Mundo would win because “he cheats, he’s cagey,” and the way he sorta paused as he said that last word made me think that he realized what a viewer might say back to the screen, which is that who could possibly be more cagey than Cage himself?)

 

• I bet you can guess how this Killshot/Jeremiah Crane match begins. Go ahead, guess. No, silly, not with a mat wrestling exchange. No, you goof, not with a series of well-worked punches as both men brawl with one another. Yes, that’s it, with both men exchanging dives at top speed while also no-selling the effects of the dive they were hit with to then subsequently hit their own dive. If you wanted to book a match that I wouldn’t give a single shit about, you’d toss these two guys into it. There’s nothing like one dude hitting another dude with an Exploder Suplex on the floor two minutes into the match, thus rendering such a huge spot meaningless.

 

• This match fucking stinks. I’ll tell you how it ends or if anything that means anything happens in it (other than the finish). I just want reasonable escalation in my matches. Is that so much to ask? There’s nowhere to go when you start a match doing wild shit and two minutes in, you’ve had someone hit an Exploder on the floor. It just turns into a big spot fest with a ton of such spots that feel small because they don’t mean anything. There are also lots of contrived flips and, in the case of this match, some annoying facial expressions from Crane.

 

• The crowd chants FIGHT FOREVER, which of course is a marker on Smugly’s personal map of crowd chants that indicate that a match is actually godawful. This is the sort of chant you’d hear from a crowd full of demons in hell while you are strapped to a front row seat with your eyelids yanked upward, A Clockwork Orange-style, and being forced to watch modern (circa-2020s) wrestling. Also, I guess there’d be hot pokers stabbed into your private parts at the same time or something since it’s hell. But the point is, you’d have hot pokers stabbed into your private parts while being painfully subjected to Killshot/Crane, which is a level of torture heretofore unimaginable. This thing finally ends when Dante Fox gets on a house mic and is like I STILL HATE YOU, KILLSHOT, which allows Crane to grab a distracted Killshot and land a Cranial Contusion for the victory. You can do anything to Killshot and he’ll kick out…except for distracting him on a house mic. That one move is worth a million Exploder Suplexes on the floor. This match was aggressively bad, as was most of this show.

 

• Ater this match, the lights go out and when they come back on, Catrina has blit-blurted to the top of the stairs. She has her mystical Aztec stone and looks, um, annoyed? Constipated? Kind of interested in Crane? Who knows? Crane blows her a kiss, and then…

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: …Dario Cueto reorganizes his Cueto Cup board after tonight’s matches while excitedly talking to someone off-screen about how rad this tournament has been so far. Well, sure, that’s an opinion that one might have. Dario is especially excited about next week’s bouts, which we can see on the board. Here is the fourth quadrant’s worth of matches: Prince Puma vs. Ricky Mandel; Sexy Star vs. P.J. Black; El Dragon Azteca Jr. vs. Dante Fox…and the fourth bracket is not yet filled. Hold on. A guy in a Son of Havoc-like mask sits across from Dario; Dario has just hired him. He’s Son of Madness, and he’ll be facing Son of Havoc as the final match in the fourth quadrant, in what promises to be a battle of masked guys who ride motorbikes. I definitely stopped watching by this point the first time around because I don’t remember Son of Madness at all.

 

• Well, this was bad! 0.75 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

[SirSmUgly]

Season 3, Show 25: “Left for Dead” or Yeah, watching this was kind of like enduring a zombie attack, but not in the fun “Valve co-developed a neat game” sort of way

• It’s a rainy Sunday morning, so let’s watch two!

 

• Recap: The Killshot/Dante Fox feud refuses to fucking end. It’s probably running all the way to the end of this season. Prince Puma is still mad at Rey Misterio Jr. for beating him back at Ultima Lucha Dos (and presumably is also still under the strange leadership of unholy bishop Vampiro). Finally, Son of Madness makes his Temple debut against Son of Havoc in the Cueto Cup tonight.

 

• Not-all-that-seedy Boyle Heights interstitial: Dante Fox goes for a jog through Boyle Heights’s industrial area. As he does so, he has a war flashback to…

 

• Seedy P.O.W. camp somewhere in Afghanistan: …a seedy P.O.W. camp somewhere in Afghanistan. Killshot is in the process of blasting his way out and leaving Fox behind to get his ass beaten by a bunch of dudes in the Taliban. In fact, Fox almost got beheaded on camera when, just before he took a sword to the neck, he was saved by the troops of the good ol’ U.S.-of-A.! Hooray for the troops! Hooray for forever wars that get people killed! U-S-A! Raise your 2x4 in the air! Old Glory kneedrops for all!

 

• Not-all-that-seedy Boyle Heights interstitial: Anyway, Dante has that flashback to his stay in Afghanistan and then either legitimately sees or merely hallucinates Killshot standing on a warehouse roof, peering down at him and blasting his finger guns at Fox’s person. God, this was stupid. I don’t rate Swerve or Fox, but their presentation in this company isn’t only doing them no favors; it’s doing them negative favors.

 

• Alright, let’s finish up the first round of the Cueto Cup. P.J. Black opens the show against Sexy Star in a matchup that I really don’t think we needed to see again. Then again, this match has a floor in quality because Star can’t just run out here and launch herself off shit while doing five backflips in a row. In fact, this match is based around Black being bigger and stronger and Star needing to get on the move and use her agility to attack.

 

• Basically, this is the story of LU: In week-to-week television matches, the promise of a decent match floor means more to me than the possibility of a high match ceiling. Star being a mediocre athlete (at least as far as pro wrestling goes) means that her matches have to escalate at least somewhat reasonably and that the match has to be worked around a clear narrative because she can’t just bust out a bunch of high spots and call it a bout. This is maybe the only company I’ve ever watched where the limited athletes are the ones who feel the safest to watch.

 

• In a decent match during which Star gets momentum by going to the air, Taya Valkyrie joins her buddy Black at ringside and trips Star on a rope run. Taya then distracts the ref and throws brass knucks at Black. Black slips them on, but he whiffs on the Power of the Punch. The knucks fall to the mat; Star grabs them, and Taya wisely drops off the apron and frees the ref up to turn his attention back to the match, just in time to see Star land a Power of the Punch. Star gets DQ’d, and while I don’t have beef with this particular finish, boy, do I have beef with how Striker tries to frame it by saying the following: “Dario Cueto has ordered our officials in the Cueto Cup to really enforce the rules.” I didn’t mention this in the previous review, but Striker literally explained a long segment fought outside the ring in the Killshot/Crane match by noting that Dario wanted the refs to relax the count because he wants a winner, not a cheapie finish. I blame Striker for the bad announcing, though, because everything else about that episode was consistent with Dario wanting strictly-enforced rules for the Cup matches: London won by countout, and in the Crane/Killshot match, not two seconds after Striker said that Dario wanted the refs to be a bit more lax, Crane deliberately rolled back into and out of the ring to break the count. Get your fucking story straight, Striker! Anyway, Star frustratedly slugs the ref while Taya grins with pleasure that she was able to adjust to Black’s incompetence in order to pull off her plan.

 

• Hype video: More Rey Misterio Jr./Johnny Mundo stuff. They’re really trying with these, but I’m never going to buy into this matchup's supposed magnitude. It’s a shame because, once again, these packages are objectively very well-made. One note: Rey calls Prince Puma “my friend.” Does he know if Puma agrees with him about the nature of their relationship?

 

• Son of Havoc meets Son of Madness in our next matchup. Who is Son of Madness? Let’s find out. While I’m doing that, I’d like to note that Havoc meets Madness halfway up the steps and then beals him off the steps and to the mats at ringside, which is a cool spot…twenty seconds into the bout. Can you imagine if they saved that spot for a major escalation in an eventual grudge match instead? Striker asks Vampiro for his insight into this feud, noting that “[Vampiro’s] been to Sturgis.” Striker has alluded to the pomp and circumstance of the illustrious Road Wild PPV before, and I hope that he continues to do so as often as he possibly can.

 

• OK, I looked the guy under the Son of Madness hood up and do not have the indie wrestling chops to know him from anything else before laying eyes on him here. The match starts as a ringside brawl before it re-enters the ring where they do a stupid corner spot in which they duck each others corner lariats and then switch places. It’s like that Family Guy gag in which Peter Griffin hurts his knee and then painfully clutches at it in that it goes on like three beats too long, though that’s the point of the Family Guy gag. I’m not sure that it was the point of the corner lariat spot.

 

• Striker mentions Jake “the Milkman” Milliman, in what is a Family Guy-like move because he asks Vampiro about if he should maybe make a Milkman reference instead of just going ahead and making a relevant Milkman reference. The joke isn’t in the mentioning of a funny name from the death throes of the AWA, Striker. Dammit. You’ve got to make the joke itself, and if it’s bad, we’ll just crap on it. It's okay. Madness hits a double-stomp and brainbuster-ish suplex combo, only gets 2.5, and shakes his head in disbelief like he unloaded on the Undertaker, but the guy still kicked out. Or like the Undertaker if the Undertaker unloaded on Brock Lesnar, but Lesnar still kicked out. Someone please win this match already. I don’t care who wins it. Just someone. Anyone. Eventually, one of these myriad double-stomps will connect and keep the opponent down. Or not! Actually, what happens is that Madness rolls out of the way of a Havoc SSP attempt, but Havoc lands on his feet. Madness tries a quick rollup with a yank of the tights; Havoc kicks out at two. Havoc does the same to Madness without a yank of the tights and manages to get three anyway. Madness attacks Havoc after the match and steals his biker jacket. Shades of PCO yapping Bret Hart’s jacket in 1995! Stop borrowing dumb WWE angles from 1995, Lucha Underground showrunners!

 

• Prince Puma shouldn’t have much issue putting away Ricky Mandel in this penultimate first-round Cueto Cup match. Mandel comes out dressed like Mundo; he attempts to mimic Mundo’s entrance taunt, but the fans cut out and his hair doesn’t flow seemingly effortlessly in mid-air as it does for his hero. Honestly, Mandel looks way more like X-Pac in this get-up than he does Mundo. Mandel gets on the house mic, declares that he’ll be taking Puma to Slamtown, and then immediately gets kicked in the face. Mandel actually kicks out of a suplex combo and lands a superkick of his own, but Puma eats it for breakfast and returns yet another kick, then lands a spinning cradle Tombstone for three, and that’s a pretty cool move, actually. Vampiro seems pretty stoked about Puma’s performance from his spot at the desk.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Rey Misterio Jr. meets El Dragon Azteca Jr. in the back; Rey is here to support his young charge, who hopes to battle with Rey for the big gold at Ultima Lucha Tres. Dark Prince Puma cuts in and tells Rey that he wants a rematch at Tres, and since he’s planning to win the Cueto Cup, he hopes that Rey does his part by beating Mundo rather than losing his shot at the gold and thus the rematch. Rey and Azteca are displeased with Puma’s mercurial attitude, but Rey shrugs the intrusion off and re-focuses Azteca (“One match at a time”) like the awesome mentor and claimant to the title of Greatest of All-Time that he is.

 

• Striker and Vampiro preview the Sweet Sixteen round of the Cueto Cup with a focus on next week’s matches: Paul London versus Mil Muertes – if Muertes still has working vertebrae after Crane snapped his neck with a couple of chairs last week, that is – Jeremiah Crane versus Taya Valkyrie, and Marty “the Moth” Martinez versus Rey Fenix in a battle of dudes who like Melissa Santos (but she only likes one of them back).

 

• Dante Fox meets El Dragon Azteca Jr. (w/Rey Misterio Jr.) in the final first-round Cueto Cup match. This bout will be improved if more people get involved. Give me gaga. Get Killshot and Prince Puma out here to interfere. As both men embark upon a pacey opening that is alright, man, because they keep it in the ring and there aren’t just wild dives every-fucking-where, I am just waiting for the jibber-jabber in the finish. Vampiro is over at the desk selling that he is threatened by Rey Misterio Jr., complaining about Rey being at ringside even though he’s not in the match and audibly preferring the “darkness” and violence that Fox displays. I don’t think Rey is going to stop you from corrupting Puma, Vamp. You can calm down over there.

 

• This match is what it is. Fox does stuff like a guillotine legdrop to Azteca on the apron that I really think should be saved for a big spot in a big match, but you know what, my philosophy of wrestling is completely different from what’s in, what’s hip, and what’s popular! I am just old! And that’s fine! I am owning the fact that I am old! I used to know what was jiggy, but now I have no idea! I am the Val to the modern wrestling fan's Daria Morgendorffer! I don’t like that a lot of my commentary on LU’s weekly matches is so same-y, though. It’s hard to say much more about the house style. You know what I like, dear reader, and I know what I like, so what else is there to discuss, really? I’m actually glad that there are only four seasons of this show because I feel like even that much LU is more than is necessary for me to analyze how I feel about it or how I (don't) fit into the modern big-time TV wrestling fandom.

 

• I do think that because the show has essentially signaled me that Killshot is going to get involved somehow in the show-opening recap, it’s also impossible to get into the nearfalls at the end of the match. I get why LU does this; the show is heavily serialized. The reminders are often useful. Alas, they also indicate that the feuds showcased in the recap are getting progression that night.

 

• Ah, here’s the gaga! Azteca sells an injury while the Worldwide Underground swarms Rey and eventually beats him down at ringside. Azteca ducks a Fox lariat and dives onto the Undrerground to break it up, then tries to springboard back into the ring, takes a boot to the face on one of what feels like a billion superkicks on the night, and then falls to a Dante Fox Foxcatcher for three. Well, look at this: Killshot didn’t get involved in the finish. Still, it was clear enough that there would be some fuck shit going on in the finish of the main, so ultimately, my inability to bite on any near falls was pretty much pre-ordained.

 

• Technically, this was better than last week’s show, but the bar is in the Ninth Circle of Hell and being used as a toothpick to get all the leftover bits of Cassius out of Satan’s teeth. 1.25 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

[SirSmUgly]

Season 3, Show 26: “A Fenix to a Flame” or What do the Sega Saturn, Virtual Boy, and this episode have in common with one another? They're all interesting even when they miss their mark! 

• The Cueto Cup rolls on…and on…and on, and man, let’s move it along to Ultima Lucha Tres already.

 

• Recap: We’re now into the Sweet Sixteen in the Cueto Cup. Let’s get it down to eight! Marty Martinez and Fenix are in a match and feuding over the heart of Melissa Santos. I mean, Fenix and Melissa don’t know that they’re in a feud over her heart, but that’s not stopping Marty! Speaking of matters of courtship, Texano was being courted by Famous B. when last we laid eyes on him; I suppose B. has driven his previous client Dr. Wagner Jr. into the desert and dumped him there like Brian Knobbs dumped Al "the Dog" Green(e). Is that what happened, do you think? Wagner, are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay, Wagner?

 

• Jeremiah Crane tries to move on in the Cueto Cup by defeating Taya Valkyrie in tonight’s opener. This is a weird matchup. Crane charges Taya, who bids him to stop. He does. She slaps the shit out of him and then shimmies. He boots her in the jaw. Uh, that’s quite the opening sequence. Crane hits a suicide dive through the middle and bottom rope, clearly pulling his momentum because he doesn’t want to crush her. Then why do the move? He also practically bumps himself on a running cannonball to a seated Taya. It reminds me of Bubba Ray Dudley – er, Buh Buh Ray Dudley – powerbombing women through tables, but actually mostly powerbombing his well-padded ass through the tables. What if they simply didn’t do moves that Taya wasn’t big enough to catch properly? On the one hand, I respect that they’re trying to have Crane’s preferred style of LU wandering brawl anyway – I type this just as Taya dives off the raised railing and lands a crossbody – but I can see the strings being pulled in this particular marionette show. The illusion is lost.

 

• Back in the ring, Crane’s had enough of Taya hitting diving crossbodies and fists. He knocks her down and then charges her, but she sticks her boot up and he jams his junk. Taya gets up and unloads with a series of running knee strikes that keeps Crane down for two. This crowd is very into Taya, and I definitely get it. A crazed-looking Crane invites Taya to slap him, so she obliges with a series of slaps and chops;  he responds with two slaps that make her wobbly-legged and knock her down. That was the best spot of this match; it was pretty violent. Alas, they then screw up the vibes with a contrived-looking Taya reversal of an Alabama Slam into a Canadian Destroyer. Taya goes up top to try a moonsault, but Sexy Star saunters to ringside and right into Taya’s cone of vision, which freezes her for a second. Crane takes that opportunity to pop up, forearms Taya in the lady parts, kicks her in the ass, and then powerbombs her into the corner. She manages to squirm into a flash pinfall that gets two, but Crane immediately shuts down her comeback attempt after he kicks out with a back leg front kick ([tm] Eric Bischoff) and a Cranial Contusion for three.

 

• After the match, Star enters the ring and nudges Taya with her boot, mockingly asking if she’s okay. Taya is definitely not okay, and that goes double after Star loads her fist and pops her with the Power of the Punch. This match tried to fit into Crane’s wild and violent arena brawling style even though his opponent couldn’t really eat the impact of Crane’s biggest moves. I don’t think they succeeded at this, but I do think it was an interesting failure. I respect that they tried their best to have that type of match even if it maybe wasn’t the best option considering the workers in the bout.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Fenix has insane core strength. I say this because of his workout, in which he holds himself in the air on a heavy bag by his legs while throwing punches at it. I mean, that is impressive as hell. Aerostar walks in and daps up Fenix, then tells Fenix that since he’s lost in the first round of the Cueto Cup (to Drago, remember), he’s putting his money on Fenix to win it. Fenix asks if it’s fair to let a time traveler gamble, then tries to make Aerostar feel better about Drago returning to the Reptile Tribe. Aerostar doesn’t share Fenix’s optimism that Drago will break free from the tribe again: “I’m not so sure…Optimism is not always easy for a man who has seen the future.” Fenix is shook by Aerostar’s proclamation. No, wait, actually, he’s shook by the fact that Aerostar can see the future and therefore knows if he's going to win in tonight's main event. He calls his buddy back to ask if he’s going to leave that match victorious. Aerostar makes me chuckle by hemming and hawing a bit, shrugging and indicating that his prognosis is iffy before throwing him a thumbs up. Fenix sure seems to have wanted a stronger indication either way.

 

• Hey, it’s Mil Muertes (w/Catrina), and I guess that brutal chair attack that Jeremiah Crane perpetrated upon his person a couple of weeks ago meant all of nothing. I don’t know, man. Even the Undertaker sold extreme beatdowns like that one. I also find it interesting that Mil and Catrina wouldn’t bother to intervene in Crane’s opening match tonight. Maybe there’s a narrative reason that I’ll find out about, but I don’t know that I believe that Mil would just let Crane’s attack pass without having a good reason for doing so. He certainly didn’t let Puma get away with any such attacks earlier this season.

 

• I digress. Mil’s opponent is Paul London, who thrusts his junk at Mil as Striker tries to put over that London's not just some weirdo druggie junk-thruster by talking about his ROH match against Samoa Joe at Death Before Dishonor ’03. The juxtaposition of these two things amuses me. London looks completely unserious as he wiggles his hips like a psychedelic Elvis Presley and ducks away from Mil’s lunges while Striker opines upon his toughness. I do appreciate Striker essentially saying that though London was able to endure a ton of damage from a monster like Joe, Mil is another matter entirely.

 

• London continues to frustrate Mil, tripping him, then running away and circling the ring like four times while Mil stands there, seething. The comedy isn’t working for me at all, and I appreciate it when Mil finally mows him down with a shoulderblock and London does his best Shawn Michaels impression on the bump. Mil spends the next portion of the match ragdolling London, but London does score a surprise wheel kick as Mil charges him. Alas, when he tries to follow up, Mil drives him back into the corner and lands a series of corner lariats followed by a boot to the mush.

 

• All London has is his ability to stick and run, but it doesn’t do much to save him from eating a beating. He hangs Mil’s arm up on the top rope, but Mil barrels into him and knocks him off the apron, then slings him into the side of the announcers’ table. London rolls away after Mil tosses him back into the ring and, uh, does his best Shawn Michaels impression with a series of superkicks once Mil follows him outside. The other two Rabbit Tribe members run out here while Mil turns things around on the floor and lifts London back into the ring. Mil continues to play with his food by sending London in, and London fires back with a series of kicks, then a double-stomp off the top rope to a stooped-over Muertes. That puts Mil on the mat…for a second. Mil gets up and catches a London leap with a goozle, then drills a chokeslam that gets 2.5.

 

• The crowd is chanting THIS IS AWESOME, and no, it absolutely is not awesome, but it is different and a little weird and therefore somewhat novel, even if I’m not particularly into it. Saltador and Mala Suerte hop in the ring as Mil clubs at London, and though they aren’t very effective at landing offense, they do enough to distract Mil, who turns around and eats a boot. London goes up and quickly hits an SSP for two, then goes right the hell back up again and lands another one for about 2.8. Well, you tried your best, buddy. London remonstrates with the referee about the cadence of his count before turning around into a spear and taking a Flatliner straight on his mug for three. Catrina gives Paul London the lick, and I wonder if it’s like licking a toad. Do you think she’s seeing in the magic of technicolor, maaaaaaaaaaan?!

 

• The results of tonight’s first two matches set up an Elite Eight matchup between Muertes and Crane, by the way.

 

• Seedy dive bar interstitial: I don’t know how anyone with Brenda’s voice would convince anyone else to buy her a drink, but she shoots her shot at Texano, and it works. Back in the day, there was scuttlebutt that one of the film companies was planning to shoot a comedy in which Jason Alexander played a blind dude who could only hear a love interest played by Fran Drescher (obviously doing her The Nanny voice) but not see her. I think the idea is horrible, and I'm not even sure how close it came to being made, but if you wanted to get at least a sense of what that movie might have played out as, here are Texano and Brenda! She wants “something strong, like [Texano],” so he orders two whiskey shots. She downs her shot and immediately starts acting somewhat tipsy. She then tells Texano that he is good at fighting but bad at sports entertainment, PAL! Texano takes it well, at least for someone with his temper. He limits himself to breaking a beer bottle with his bare hands in anger. Brenda’s response, paraphrased: Don’t be so aggy, dude, I’m going to fuck you until you’re fun to be around! Texano immediately stops being aggy. Famous B. creepily watches this play out from a table in the corner and uses his hands to motion that he is reeling Texano into his agency, where Texano will pay him a 35% cut of all monies made both in and outside of the ring in perpetuity, I’m sure.

 

• Striker and Vampiro run down next week’s Sweet Sixteen matches in the Cueto Cup: Brian Cage (w/Aztec god gauntlet powers) vs. Pindar (w/Kobra Moon, hopefully); P.J. Black vs. Prince Puma (w/new outlook on life, thanks to Vamp); and Son of Havoc vs. Dante Fox (w/never-ending Killshot feud).

 

• Marty “the Moth” Martinez (w/Mariposa Martinez) has a thoughtful little gift for Melissa Santos! He packed it in his very own lunchbox! Not his favored MLP: Friendship is Magic one! In the one that’s yellow with AZTEC PRIDE written on it in bold black lettering! The Moth stands uncomfortably close to Melissa as she announces his presence, and she makes it through that introduction safely. Marty didn’t do a single thing to her. She’s gone unscathed, and it’s all smooth sailing from h—no, sorry, Marty just opened the lunchbox and stuffed a sandwich into her mouth as she began introducing Rey Fenix. Melissa swings her head around and spits the morsel of sandwich that she bit down upon right onto Marty’s chest. Psst, I think she prefers her turkey sandwiches without cheese, dude.

 

• Anyway, Fenix enters the ring while Melissa gets the tingles in her heart. And I don’t know, probably in other places, too. She seems pretty into this guy. I mean, he does have impressive core strength. Marty is so gross, man. He’s the sleaziest guy in this Temple. No need for Joey Ryan’s discount sleaze act. The Moth has things covered. Marty doesn’t seem to be able to keep up with Fenix early, but luckily for him, his entirely-too-loving sis at ringside distracts Fenix by grabbing his ankle on a rope run. This allows Marty to get control at ringside for a bit, but Fenix quickly recovers and ends up landing a somersault dive.

 

• Mariposa senses that her dopey weirdo brother is in trouble again, so she trips Fenix as Fenix springboards onto the ropes; Marty takes over as Missy Santos implores him to get up. Marty tears at the eyeholes of Fenix’s mask; Mariposa soon does the same as Marty breaks the count and distracts the ref. Marty rolls Fenix into the ring and covers, but he only earns two.

 

• The Moth embarks on a heel control segment full of mask ripping and face gouging, with forearms and the occasional impact move thrown in. Marty manages another two count on a nice German suplex in there, but eventually he tries too many corner charges and ends up taking a couple of boots and then a round kick to the jaw. Fenix hangs Marty up and leaps off the top with a double-stomp – man, the wrestlers in this company love the hell out of their double-stomps – but that only gets two.

 

• The crowd is chanting THIS IS AWESOME, and wow, they have a low bar for declaring awesomeness. This is perfectly fine, but I’m not sure it’s much more than “solid.” The Moth avoids an overelaborate Fenix moonsault and lands a boot for two, then butterflies Fenix’s arms and hoists him into Northern Lights position before dropping him in what starts out as a Dominator, but ends up as a Codebreaker. His follow-up cover comes close, but only manages two more.

 

• Marty works himself into trouble when he tries to attack Fenix in the corner, but when Fenix tries to leverage into position for a headscissors, Marty manages to keep Fenix across his shoulders; he lands a neckbreaker out of DVD (no VR) position for two more. Marty backs into the corner and waits for Fenix to rise; Fenix stumbles as he gets up, and Marty goes over, grabs him, and can’t do anything with him. Fenix wriggles away and ends up landing a superkick. Mariposa grabs the lunchbox and tries to hand it to Marty so that he can tee off with it, but Missy Santos cuts her off. Mariposa can’t believe this lady is all up in her face, but she does nothing. Well, nothing except for watching Marty turn back to Fenix and end up flash-bridge-pinned for three.

 

• Marty then chooses that point at which to crack Fenix with the lunchbox. He goes through his packed lunch to dig out the fork that he was going to use to eat his potato salad, but that he is now using to gouge chunks out of Fenix’s head. Mari grabs Missy and makes her watch as the Moth goes all Abdullah the Butcher while declaring to Missy about his attack that THIS IS FOR YOU! I LOVE YOU! It’s pretty disturbing, folks! Of course, Marty then licks the blood of the fork after he’s done because, I mean, what the fuck, this guy is a goddam mess. The match was fine, but the post-match was very good.

 

• As Melissa finally breaks free from Mari and runs over to comfort the bloodied Fenix, I now understand why Aerostar was like, Um, yeah, you’re gonna win the match, but uh, you know, it might get rocky! Hey, does he happen to know Saturday’s Powerball numbers?

 

• The matches themselves weren’t that great, but I feel like they all tried to do something interesting, and I think they deserve credit. Interesting failures should get a bit of extra credit for at least being interesting, right? Also, the post-match gaga in the main event was so fucked up that most of the Temple stopped chanting and just looked disgusted as hell at Marty’s antics, and getting the majority of these cornballs to stop chanting for two seconds is genuinely an impressive feat, so bump this score up another .5 LU-CHA chants! 3 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

[zendragon]

Catrina after licking Paul London

[SirSmUgly]

Season 3, Show 27: “Fade to Black” or The Cueto Cup is basically a series of radiant quests

• Like Bikertaker’s annoying theme song suggests, we should keep ROLLIN’ ROLLIN’ ROLLIN’ ROLLIN’.

 

• Recap: Cueto Cup! Killer Cage! Biker dudes! Legendary luchadores! Dark Puma!

 

• Seedy rooftop interstitial: Speaking of Dark Puma, he stands on the Temple roof and overacts while having flashbacks of battling with Mil Muertes and losing his mentor Konnan over the past couple of seasons. Vampiro blit-blurts up here and tells him that he can ease his mental unquiet by becoming the Lucha Underground Champion…and if he doesn’t, the madness that he’s experiencing will consume him, OOH YEAH! But not OOH YEAH because that would be fun, like Macho Madness. More like OOH NO because Puma eternally reliving the experiences of Mil putting both he and Konnan in a coffin and leaving them for dead is the opposite of fun, basically, um, not-Macho Madness? Yeah, like not-Macho Madness. As it just so happens, the Worldwide Underground are noisily entering the building, and Puma catches sight of the Lucha Underground strap hanging over Johnny Mundo’s shoulder. I was hoping he was going to dive onto the guy like Batman, but no, he just gets flipped off by his opponent for tonight P.J. Black when Black notices him standing up there. Puma re-dedicates himself to his Dark Master Vampiro and to ultimate victory in the Cueto Cup.

 

• Are we headed toward Vampiro’s former charge Pentagón Dark meeting his current charge Prince Puma in the finals of the Cueto Cup? It sure feels like it, but I’m not quite sure about how the brackets are lined up.

 

• Speaking of, here are Striker and Vampiro at the desk. Vamp says that tonight, the “cream [will rise] to the top.” CUP ‘O COFFEE. Sorry, now I wish Macho Man had been able to participate in the Temple.

 

• Pindar (w/Kobra Moon) opens the show hoping not to get his lizard-looking ass beat by Brian Cage (w/Aztec god-powered Gauntlet of Doom). Melissa Santos is supposed to be in love with Fenix in kayfabe, but she gets so charged up announcing that Cage is FROM THE FIVE-FIVE-NINE that even Striker notices. Tone it down, Melissa! You gotta keep kayfabe!

 

• So, right at the bell, the ref is like, Cage, you gotta take off that gauntlet and Cage is like Haha, no and the ref is like, Well, look, buddy, I’mma have to forcibly take it from you and Cage is like, Haha, no, and also, eat this lariat and Pindar is like, AW, FUCK and Cage is like, I’m just gonna hit you with a Steiner Screwdriver now, no tears, only dreams, and the ref is like, Ow, that lariat hurt, I’m DQ’ing you, Cage and Cage is like, OK, then I’m just gonna hit YOU with a Steiner Screwdriver and he does and Pindar wins and Kobra Moon grins like Pindar actually did some shit even though he decidedly did NOT do some shit, not in the least.

 

• The crowd was not happy about that result, by the way.

 

• Pull out the pommel horse! Set up the rings! Choose some energetic music for the floor exercise! It’s Dante Fox! Vampiro tries to put Fox over by noting that he (Vamp, that is) grew up idolizing the Great Muta and the Road Warriors, and he attempts to favorably compare Fox to those guys. I mean, you tried, Vamp, and I appreciate that, but if Fox was showing even a sliver of 1989 Muta’s charisma and ringwork, I wouldn’t be dreading his matches so much. It’s too bad that Fox doesn’t have Gary Hart around to talk for him. Shit, now I wish Gary Hart had been able to participate in the Temple.

 

• It doesn’t help that his opponent Son of Havoc’s favorite thing to do is flip a whole lot, and I don’t want to see this match, but Son of Madness immediately tries to help a brother out by choking Havoc with a chain on the stairs as Havoc makes his way toward the ring. Havoc uses his forward momentum to flip Madness over his shoulder, and they end up brawling in the stands, where Havoc is like, I love springboarding off shit, it rules, and nothing about it can ever go wrong and then Madness is like **punches the springboarding Havoc in the jaw with a chain-wrapped fist** and then Dario Cueto steps out of his office and is like, Get your bitch ass up and get in the ring, Havoc, or get the fuck outta my tournament. Havoc promptly gets his bitch ass up and gets in the ring, so good for him! And bad for me since I think another quickie cheap finish that avoids having the actual wrestling match would have been a better watch!

 

• Fox jumps Havoc and immediately lands a kick to the mush. Do I even have to do this? Nah, fuck it, I’mma do this even though I shouldn't have to. On a thigh-slap scale where “least obvious” is Prince Puma, “most obvious” is Fenix, and dead in the middle is Alberto El Patrón, these thigh slaps score a…Fenix, obviously. Fox hits a huge plancha over the corner strut, which is a great athletic feat. So there’s that. He also lands quite a bit of offense, but can’t get the pugnacious ([tm] Jim Ross) Havoc to stay down. Fox knows the remedy for that: more somersaults! He triple-flips himself right into a predicament that gets him bashed into the raised guardrail, actually. I take back that Fox knew the remedy. The remedy ended up with him getting smashed into a guardrail. Springboard, flip, flip, springboard, ostentatious thigh slap, two count. Just imagine who did which of those. It doesn’t matter. This house style makes me sad. It makes me so sad that at some point early next year, I’m going to be randomly reviewing individual matches from across the European promotions from before 2000 so that I can wash my brain out after viewing all this LU. See, Havoc just did that rebound cutter of his that looks dumb and contrived. I'm gonna need to cleanse myself by watching Jimmy Breaks maneuver his hapless opponents into Breaks Specials about a thousand times.

 

• Havoc sure seems unaffected by getting clocked in the jaw with a chain earlier. It might as well not have happened at all. This is just your basic “overelaborated move trading with 2.9s” match that LU has as its standard “epic” match that happens practically every week and that looks pretty much the same as the standard LU epics from previous weeks. Do you think I like getting old and being a fuddy-duddy and using ancient-ass colloquialisms like “fuddy-duddy?” I sure wish I could enjoy a bunch of big moves with no interesting connective tissue or match flow, but how hot can I get for an apron DVD to the floor mats when it’s just another high-risk move that I will forget happened by the time I write the review of the next show?

 

• Anyway, Havoc misses an SSP; Fox grabs him and hits a Foxcatcher for three. It’s mercifully over. Shitty fuckin’ match, as you might guess I’d judge it.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Johnny Mundo discusses his new movie opportunity (Ghost Dad 2 – no ghosts, no dads, which is his hot new take on the concept) with the agent he’s hired to represent the group, Benjamin Cooke. I believe that David Arquette was supposed to play this part, if I’m remembering what I read correctly, and let me tell you, that would have been pretty funny, and I’m bummed that it didn’t happen. P.J. Black joins the group, having rushed into the room on Mundo’s request, and listens to Cooke’s “inspirational” speech in which he mispronounces Mundo’s last name and tells Ricky Mandel that he sucks. Actually, I wish Paul Heyman was playing this part. Cooke tells Black to get out there and win his match tonight so that he can use this victory to put pressure on Dario Cueto w/r/t more opportunities for the group. Oh,and Cooke thinks he’s going to get along with Dario. Oh, brother.

 

• Striker briefly promotes next week’s Cueto Cup matches: Drago vs. Pentagón Dark and Willie Mack vs. Texano.

 

• I am kinda wishing that emo Prince Puma was in the midst of some other storyline in this company. Mostly, it’s because of his bad acting as he attempts to show that he’s conflicted and troubled, but also, he just seems like an aimless character even though he’s part of a major storyline with Vampiro. He’s almost certainly the best of the flippy guys in this company, though (not counting the legend Rey Misterio Jr., obviously, who is just marking time in the Temple). Puma and his opponent P.J. Black do some mat wrestling that exists so that Puma can get sick of trading arm wringers and show some aggression by punching Black in the face instead. This opening is pretty solid, as it picks up from trading holds and into quick counter-counter-counter stuff after that Puma right hand. Puma sends Black scuttling to the floor, where he cowers as Puma fakes a dive and poses.

 

• Back in the ring, Black finds that his shoulderblocks have little effect, and Puma does a cool move where he stops short as Black leapfrogs and smoothly snatches Black out of mid-air, transitioning him right into a tilt-a-whirl backbreaker. Why is Puma so much better than the vast majority of the other wrestlers in this company who work his style? Part of it is that he actually tries to escalate his offense properly, unlike all the other bomb-throwers in this company who have seemingly no desire to structure their matches in such a way. Also, while Puma's mic work kinda stinks at this point, he’s got more physical charisma than most people in this company, and certainly more than any of the consistent high-flyers that work this company. Someone like Penta coasts on physical charisma and strong promo delivery, but Puma actually has good matches while also being physically charismatic.

 

• I’d be remiss if I didn’t give Black his due in this match. His major heel control segment is pretty fun, with Black applying holds and trying to slip Puma into flash pinning combinations, methodically using a combination of power and guile to defeat his foe. Puma does manage to slip a Black corner charge and land double boots to the face and a springboard lariat to halt Black’s control of the match. When both men get back to their feet, they counter and counter again until Puma can hit a huge DDT and a running SSP for two. Puma tries another DDT off a tilt-a-whirl after another exchange, but Black halts his momentum and hits a brainbuster for two.

 

• The crowd has chanted THIS IS AWESOME or THIS IS LUCHA or maybe even THIS IS AWESOME LUCHA for what feels like the whole show. What if you folks just, like, cheered and booed instead? Puma hits a lot of big moves that should end the match. He scores a high-angled back suplex that I sort of wish got the three. One big issue that I have with this house style is that after you’ve eaten like four death moves, I feel the fifth one should probably end your night, especially if you’re a midcarder like Black. And this match has been comparatively restrained, too!

 

• I type that, and then they do a bunch of kicks and knees and strikes back and forth in the middle of the ring while slapping the shit out of their thighs and biceps. That feels like a bit much at this point in the match. This bout was better than I probably would have guessed, but it, like many matches in this company, was five minutes too long. These main events are particularly prone to going longer than they need to. What has happened to all the story progression on these shows? Instead of eighteen minutes for this match, what about thirteen and you give me some fucking progression on whatever Captain Vasquez is doing? While I felt that the twenty-six episodes of the second season weren’t enough to really let the criss-crossing Temple narratives breathe and grow, the forty episodes of this season is way too much, as were the thirty-nine episodes of the first season. A flat thirty shows per season was probably the perfect amount for this show. As I said many, many reviews ago, LU is better when it talks, and this many shows in a season is going to inevitably rely on wrestling for long stretches of episodes.

 

• Both guys hit about a billion mega-moves that I know will never put either of them away because even though they hit so many high-risk, high-impact moves of which any one should have knock out power at any time, this is the United States, and straight-up matches here only end with finishers or flash pinfalls. Puma lands a front dropkick and a Senton 630, and since the latter is his finisher, it ends the match. I should note that Striker and Vamp did do a good job of selling Puma’s newer and more aggressive style throughout the bout. There were objectively well-done things about this match, but LU is at the point where the in-ring style has hit a ceiling and there’s nowhere left to go but turning up the deathmatch-style violence, which, ugh, not interested.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Dario Cueto handles a phone call from Benjamin Cooke, but he hustles off the line when P.J. Black enters his office. Cooke has apparently called Dario seventeen times since Black lost that match to Puma “five minutes ago.” Dario says that while he can’t re-enter Black into the Cueto Cup, he’ll give Black a shot to redeem himself by defeating Rey Misterio Jr. next week. Meanwhile, Cooke has realized that Dario’s not answering his office phone anymore, but he has somehow gotten Dario’s personal cell number. Do I sort of feel sorry for Dario for once? Yeah, I kinda do.

 

• LU is better when it talks (unless it’s the crowd that is talking), LU is better when it talks (unless it’s the crowd that is talking), LU is better when it talks (unless it’s the crowd that is talking)… 2 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

[SirSmUgly]

Season 3, Show 28: “Booyaka! Booyaka!” or If this episode is any indication, a theoretical Lucha Underground video game would have a smaller CAW moveset than WWE WrestleMania 21 for OG Xbox

• We are almost three-fourths of the way through season three as we start November. With a little luck, we’ll be about three or four episodes deep into the fourth season by (U.S.) turkey time. But man, does it seem that there’s a long way to go…

 

• Recap: There are only two Cueto Cup matches tonight to cement the rest of the Elite Eight entrants; Rey Misterio Jr. opposes P.J. Black in the third bout, a PROVE YOURSELF match for Black (and a chance for the Worldwide Underground to soften up Misterio before his big title match with Mundo down the road). Also, Drago is now a heel and there’s an ongoing Son of Havoc/Son of Madness biker feud that is pretty meh.

 

• This El Conjunto Nueva Ola song that incorporates the THIS IS AWESOME chant into the lyrics is absolute devilry. Mother plays this song on repeat in The Null. I don’t like it, is what I’m saying.

 

• Vampiro reminds us that Drago vs. Pentagón Dark and Willie Mack vs. Texano are the final two Sweet Sixteen matchups in the Cueto Cup.

 

• In fact, Willie Mack and Texano open the show against one another. Texano proffers his hand before the match; Mack accepts it. I assume that Texano won’t be so friendly by the time this match is over. He really only ever turned babyface because Blue Demon Jr. wasn’t creatively working in that role opposite Chavo Guerrero Jr. anyway. It was quite the abrupt babyface turn considering that he was just heeling it up against Alberto El Patrón immediately before he turned. He should probably be a heel, and that turn should probably come soon, if not tonight.

 

• They have a whole sequence that starts with a beefy shoulderblock standoff and goes downhill from there because they have to do lucha armdrags and a bunch of roll-throughs and trips and leg sweeps and a dual flip into a standoff. They could have just thrown meaty forearms instead of doing the same sequence the smaller guys do…and the women do…and everyone in this company does. They shake hands again. Then Willie Mack starts violently slapping his thigh. OK, I see where this match is going. It’s nice that Mack can do a slingshot senton and all, but this could have been more of a beefy guy match to contrast with practically every other match that happens on this show. Mack wants to do a ton of flips instead.

 

• There’s a decent chop exchange in there, but mostly this match is just above acceptable at its best. It’s got your typical ringside brawl in it, which is dull, but Mack hits a huge tilt-a-whirl backbreaker on the floor and sells that he hurt his knee, which is novel. Also, Texano yanks Mack’s tights before quickly sliding into the ring to try and win a cheapie count-out victory. Too bad for him that these refs have been ordered to be lenient as fuck by Dario Cueto.

 

• Mack hits an Exploder and a Norman Smiley-style swinging slam (!!); the cover gets two, and I must admit that I popped for the swinging slam. Famous B. slides into the ring and shoots Mack with H20 from a dollar-store plastic water gun. Mack responds by hitting B. with a Mack Stunner, but turns around into Texano’s boot to his gut and eats a quick sit-out powerbomb for three after pretty much dominating the match. Speaking of pretty meh: This match, everybody!

 

• Seedy dive bar interstitial: Son of Havoc is waiting for the bartender to slide his drink to him, but Madness steps in, takes it, sips it, and then fights to a standoff with Havoc. Havoc says that he’s “not going back; not after what happened,” but Madness says that he’s going to harass Havoc into the ground until Havoc comes back home to “the Invisible Cult,” I think is what he said. Madness says that Havoc is coming home to the cult willingly or Madness will bring his head back to the leader of the cult as tribute. Who exactly leads his biker cult, King Herod? Like damn!

 

• Seedy psychedelic cult interstitial: Paul London and Mala Suerte are using Saltador – and Saltador’s checkered bodysuit – as a draughts board. London jumps Suerte’s final two pieces to end the game; just then, Mascarita Sagrada walks in holding a huge gift, wrapped all pretty with a bunch of nice little bows stuck to it. The Rabbit Tribe apologizes to Sagrada for not making their way successfully through the tournament, but Sagrada simply drops the gift and swaggers out. The excited Rabbit Tribe members read the card – “Hope this brings you better luck” – and then they tear through the packaging peanuts to try and find the gift itself. It’s a single rabbit’s food. The Tribe screams in horror that someone lopped the back right foot off a poor defenseless rabbit, which honestly I agree with them about. All in all, though, I think this signifies that Sagrada doesn’t want to be their leader, and also I hope it’s a fake rabbit’s foot!

 

• The second and final Cueto Cup match of the night commences as Drago (w/Kobra Moon) wrestles the extremely dangerous, extremely over Pentagón Dark. Seriously, he consistently gets the biggest pops on this show. Was anyone’s career helped more by being on this show than Penta’s? Fenix’s was helped probably about as much, but otherwise? 

 

• I get a wry kick out of the opening, which is almost the same as the one from the first match with a ton of leg sweeps and trips into a standoff. I know that I’ve gabbed on far too much about this sort of thing, but do you see what I mean in this latest slew of season three reviews? Why is everyone who makes this show so insistent on having all the in-ring stuff feel vaguely the same? I think this is also how WWE pretty much was by the time I stopped regularly watching it. This seems like a huge issue with modern pro wrestling, but then again, I don’t really watch modern pro wrestling (this show excepted, obviously), so what I’ve typed is a hunch rather than an observation out of experience.

 

• The rest of this match is fine. I just wrote about Bray Wyatt’s work as the Fiend, and I noted that he’s all aura and mic work and a ouple of big moves. That’s pretty much Penta in a nutshell. His matches depend on him hitting his signature spots (low dropkick into the abdomen, Sling Blade, huge SHHHH slap, package piledriver, arm breaker) and having a ton of presence (in this match, he attempts a cocky pin that is done so disrespectfully that he deserved to eat a follow-up running Blockbuster DDT from Drago, even if the timing on his bump was off).

 

• Drago kicked out of one package piledriver, by the way. He does manage to hit a DDT on Penta for two and then an overelaborated top-rope Frankensteiner and top-rope splash after surviving that particuar Penta big move, but Penta kicks out in kind and then scores a weak-looking diving Canadian Destroyer for two before landing a double-underhook package piledriver for three. This was watchable enough, I suppose, but only because the crowd loves Penta so much that they act like a hyped wrestling crowd instead of focusing on all the meta-chanting they usually do.

 

• After the match, Penta superkicks Kobra as she tries to stop him from snapping Drago's arm, but Aerostar tries to bring his friend back to the light side by attacking Penta and making the save. You can guess what happens next; Drago refuses Aerostar’s help by repeatedly kicking him, and then slides out of the ring as Penta snaps Aerostar’s arm in irritation for his having interrupted Penta's attempt to snap Drago’s arm. The crowd booed the babyface Aerostar when he broke up Drago’s arm snapping and then cheered Penta for snapping Aerostar’s arm, so yeah, Penta is a babyface in the Temple no matter what he does.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Catrina blit-blurts up to Pentagón Dark in the dimly lit Temple halls after that last match and reminds Penta that, oh yeah, she and Mil Muertes still have it out for Penta attacking Mil as Muertes entered Aztec Warfare II and directly causing his near-immediate elimination (Season Two, Show Nine). Catrina touches the side of Penta’s head to induce a flashback to that event. Catrina threatens that Mil will be coming to get revenge on Penta, who responds with a hand signal that indicates that – you guessed it – he has zero fear. Catrina notes that Mil and Penta are on the same side of the bracket and suggests that if they both win their Elite Eight matches in the Cueto Cup, Mil’s going to put Penta on the Permadeath Count in their prospective Final Four match. Then, she blit-blurts away. However, Penta, like Bonecrusher, AIN’T NEVER SCARED.

 

• Y'know, this interstitial essentially promoted a match that won't happen until two rounds from now, thus basically spoiling the results of two matches in the Elite Eight. 

 

• I wonder if Rey Misterio Jr. ever wrestled P.J. Black when Black was in WWE and wrestling as the former Justin Gabriel. I’m going to look it up while the opening happens. You’ll never guess what moves were performed in the opening, by the way. Yeah, trips and a standoff. It was worked more smoothly than either of the other two match openings, sure, but man have the match layouts become crazy stagnant.

 

• Anyway, they wrestled one another in tags, but not in singles, so this is kind of a novel matchup. They also wrestled one another in the indies. I found a Rey vs. Ricochet vs. Black Triple Threat Match in an indie called Destiny World Wrestling in 2015. Interesting. As for this LU match that I'm currently reviewing, is what it is. Black does some arm work before engaging in a kick exchange with Rey in the center of the ring, losing that exchange, and ending up hit with a springboard moonsault on the floor.

 

• I think that the joy that I extract from this match is really in watching Rey be incredibly aesthetically pleasing. Rey is what, 43 or so at the point he wrestled this match? Leaving aside the little things that he’s so good at, his athletic ability in general is amazeballs at this point in his career. His bumping, his movement, and how clean he is are all insane for a wrestler with as much mileage as he’s got on him by this point.

 

• To that point, they’re able to work a knee injury for Rey when he gets violently hung up in the Tree of Woe because he’s been blowing out that knee with semi-regularity since about 1996. And yet, he still moves like this! Insane. He’s got to be one of the greatest athletes that I’ve ever seen in a wrestling ring. And he’s in a business with guys who participated in high-level professional sports! I’m putting Rey, Lesnar, and Liger in the top tier of my list of most insane athletes ever to work in pro wrestling.

 

• Black works a decent heel control segment after that worked injury, even landing a Styles Clash in there for two, but Rey fights back with a tornado DDT that, unfortunately for him, takes out the ref as he completes it. It doesn’t take much time at all for Johnny Mundo to run down here and attack. Mundo lands some kicks and knees, then helps Black up. Jack Evans joins them, and hey, it’s Jack Evans in the ring again. I presume that he was injured. Come to think of it, Evans disappeared for a while, Ivelisse seemingly legit hurt her knee (again!) and hasn’t been around to do any build to her big Ultima Lucha Tres match with Catrina, and Angelico immediately got hurt as soon as he came back. It’s been a tough year for injuries here in LU.

 

• El Dragon Azteca Jr. rushes the ring to make the save, but he’s cut off by the heels and Taya destroys him at ringside before tossing him into a barrier. Mundo puts Black on top of Rey and retreats as the ref comes to, but Rey kicks out at two. Azteca recovers, grabs a chair, and chases the interfering Worldwide Underground members away. In the ring, Black tries a crucifix bomb, gets countered into 6-1-9 position, and quickly gets rocked with a 6-1-9 and a springboard Frog Splash for three. This was alright. I mostly enjoyed watching Rey put in yet another strong shift.

 

• After the match, Rey grabs a mic and says that Mundo’s stick-and-run tactics won’t be worth a damn when they face off in a month for the Lucha Underground Championship. Rey can get away with this pure babyface promo in the Temple because he’s a legend. Poor Aerostar gets booed and the crowd loves it when Penta’s snapping his arm, but Rey can do the typical WWE-style quickie babyface comeback after a long beatdown and then cut a fightin’ babyface promo, and these animals eat it up. That’s almost as impressive as his continued high level of athleticism.

 

• This show passed without much incident, but maybe don’t have three trip/trip/sweep/sweep/standoff openings in three matches next week? Or ever again, for that matter? 2.5 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

Edited November 2 by SirSmUgly

[SirSmUgly]

Season 3, Show 29: “The Hunger Inside” or Bad Day L.A.

• Recap: More Cueto Cup! Mundo and Misterio Jr. continue to feud! And oh yeah, Matanza Cueto is still mad at Misterio for defeating him back at Aztec Warfare III (Season Three, Show Eleven).

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Matanza Cueto’s back in his cell, where Dario Cueto taunts him with a platter full of uncooked animal flesh while talking about a metaphorical hunger that Matanza has to get revenge on Rey Misterio Jr. Dario argues that this hunger has unfocused Matanza and also driven him to do nutty things like knock Dario out (Season Three, Show Fourteen), which isn’t nice, dude, Dario’s your older brother, man. At least, that’s Dario’s argument. Dario suggests that unless Matanza get his worldly mortal desires for things like revenge under control, the Aztec gods might have to intervene and strip away any humanity that still exists inside the hulking vessel that is his body. Or maybe add him to the Permadeath Count. Either/or.

 

• Dario places the platter of bloody, raw meat that he brought in front of Matanza’s cell and tells Matanza to control his hungers, both physical and emotional. Matanza huffs and grasps the bars of his cell, but he does his best to maintain a semblance of self-regulatory control. I note here that both Dario and Kobra Moon (Season Three, Show Sixteen) believe in the strategy of starving people as a way to mold their behavior. And I mean, in both cases, it appears to have worked. Good to know! I mean, not that I’d ever do something like that. No, sir. Forget that I wrote that this was good information to know.

 

• *cough*

 

• …and in other news, the Cueto Cup rolls on! Here are the Elite Eight quarterfinal matchups that show on screen while Striker hypes the Cup: Pentagón Dark vs. Texano; Mil Muertes vs. Jeremiah Crane; Prince Puma vs. Dante Fox; and Pindar vs. Rey Fenix. The latter two matches will be wrestled on this show. 

 

• We’ll also be getting a Johnny Mundo vs. El Dragon Azteca Jr. match that will probably break down into more interference just as last week’s P.J. Black/Rey Misterio Jr. match did [Editor's note: Dario Cueto made sure that I was wrong about this...at least during the match itself].

 

• While Drago crashed out of the tournament last week and Vibora didn’t escape the first round, Kobra Moon’s got one more Reptile Tribe hope left in the tourney; she escorts Pindar to the ring to wrestle Rey Fenix for a spot in the Final Four. We see a shot of Rey’s wife in the crowd sitting right next to Eddie Guerrero’s child Dominik. No, just kidding, Rey won paternity in a ladder match, so Dom is Rey’s kid by all legal rights. Seriously though, Rey’s kid is here, or at least one of them is.

 

• Meanwhile, Melissa Santos is openly blowing kisses at Fenix at this point. The Moth is probably seething in his little perversion room with all the Missy Santos pics as he watches this. Fenix naturally scores a Fenix on my little thigh slap scale before Pindar takes control and tries to hit a few power moves. Fenix quickly escapes and lands kicks, so Kobra Moon leaps onto the apron and chokes Fenix for long enough to hep Pindar land a corner charge wheel kick. It doesn’t help him that much; Fenix lands a bunch of strikes anyway, though Pindar sneaks in a forearm and then manages a monkey flip.

 

• Fenix tries to fight out of a heel control segment from Pindar that has all sorts of power moves, some weirdly complex. Pindar spins Fenix around a bunch…for a sit-out slam. I mean, the sit-out slam was fine, but why not just drill him directly? Fenix makes a comeback with, you guessed it, kicks, and actually there’s a neat spot where he tries to land a German suplex on Pindar, but each time he fails to get him over, he lands a flurry of strikes and tries again, coming closer to scoring the move until on the third try and after the third flurry of strikes, he gets Pindar over and bridges for two. I liked that sequence. Fenix really earned that suplex.

 

• Though Fenix shows that he’s able to work the power game alongside Pindar, Pindar is not able to do the same when he goes up top, where he’s in no-man’s-land against a skilled aerialist like Fenix. Fenix catches him up top, yanks him down to the mat, and lands a pretty tough-looking double knee strike from the top that puts Pindar down for three. Sorry Kobra, but the Reptile Tribe won’t be controlling the LU Championship. At least not yet.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Dario has called the various flunkies within the Worldwide Underground (and also Taya) to his office. Whatever injury Jack Evans shoot suffered, he got his jaw wired shut for real, and he frustratedly tries to explain how much it sucks to an amused Dario. Dario is less amused when P.J. Black “translates” for Evans, who gets mad at Black’s nonsensical translation and starts to bicker with him (as much as Evans can do so in his current state, that is). Dario shuts them up and then chews them out for being a woefully ineffective heel group at taking down any of the babyfaces. Dario wants them to keep their asses in the back for tonight’s Johnny Mundo match and then attempts to keep them in line by telling them that if they obey him, they’ll be in matches for three Aztec Medallions – hey, glad to see those being redistributed – next week. On the other hand, if they disobey him, they’re fired! He should have said exactly those two words in Vince McMahon’s cadence, IMO, but he used corpo-speak about losing all future opportunities in the Temple or something like that instead. BOO.

 

• I think Prince Puma vs. Dante Fox will tell us a lot about Puma’s development at this point. Can he corral Fox and get something watchable out of him or will he indulge all of Fox’s worst fucking instincts?

 

• The answer is that second one. They no sell one another’s dives to hit dives. FUCK OFF. Fuck this match. This sucks so bad. They start out by literally no-selling two suicide dives apiece to hop back in the ring, kick the guy who just hit a suicide dive, and hit one of their own, and they do this FOUR FUCKING TIMES IN A ROW. I’d rather watch the Equalizer throw weak forearms at Charlie Norris as Norris makes an uninspired comeback attempt than this. I’d rather watch a comp full of Tugboat matches than Fox matches. I refuse to talk about this match anymore. I protest. I’ll just tell you the finish, which I acknowledge solely because it tells us how the Cueto Cup tournament will develop.

 

• Puma wins with a 630 Senton. This was the worst match this show has ever put on…so far.

 

• Prince Puma and Rey Fenix will meet in the semifinals of this Cueto Cup tournament. Killshot runs out to attack Fox after the match, by the way, and he gets booed because the fans were like WHOA FOX DID SO MANY FLIPS AT HIGH SPEED, WOW, WE'VE NEVER SEEN THE LIKE OF IT EVEN THOUGH MOST OF US SPEND TIME WATCHING THIS SAME STYLE OF WRESTLING IN RESEDA and therefore, Fox is a babyface to these fans even though Fox sneakfuckily attacked Killshot and knocked him out of the tournament weeks ago. Someone in the crowd yells GO BACK TO TACOMA at Killshot. Nah, we don’t want him back. AEW can keep him on the road and maybe urge him to get him a nice house in Jacksonville. Killshot grabs a mic and promises to continue this fucking feud as this crowd shits on him. Fox is a heel for doing heel shit no matter how many WHOA, FLIPS AND SHIT that he does, and Killshot is a heel for promising to continue the feud with Fox. That’s what I’m going with.

 

• Seedy LAPD precinct interstitial: Someone finally figured out that Brian Cage killed a fucking ACTIVE CITY COUNCILPERSON weeks after it happened (Season Three, Show Twenty-Two). Wow, the LAPD moves quickly! Captain Vasquez watches video of Officer Cortez Castro Reyes getting murked by Cage while under the Veneno mask from a few weeks back (Season Three, Show Nineteen). Reyes is also in the room, watching the video and wincing at his failure. Even after seeing that footage, Vasquez demands that Reyes get the gauntlet away from Cage. Reyes is like LOL NOT GONNA HAPPEN, NO MAN IS ACCOMPLISHING THAT TASK, so Vasquez waves him off disgustedly. She waits until he leaves, then takes her half of the amulet out of her desktop and mutters about the "no man" part of Reyes's diatribe, “You may be right.” I presume that the amulet half keeps her alive, but if Cage punches her head off her shoulders, she’ll just be alive and in extreme agony without a head, right? This would be a gorier Death Becomes Her situation, wouldn’t it? Whatever, Vasquez is a dolt as far as I can tell. Her ancient Aztec father unfortunately had to pin the hopes of the Aztec peoples on a moron. And also a very ineffective Aerostar. Geez, the good guys are absolutely fucked, aren’t they?

 

• Can we stop here and talk about how this show ignored a bunch of (what I consider to be) necessary storyline to instead pack these episodes with mediocre-to-bad Cueto Cup matches? Delgado’s brazen murder at the hands of Cage should have triggered a ton of movement on the LAPD storyline, but instead, Cage is walking around a free man and wearing that gauntlet, the LAPD is seemingly like We’ve got video of the guy who did this since he killed Delgado in his office, but we’re not going to do anything about it, and Dario Cueto hasn’t even mentioned Delgado, nor have we seen Delgado’s mysterious Dr. Claw-like master showing up and asking questions about Cage killing his minion with a single punch. But we’ve sure had time for guys like Dante Fox and Jeremiah Crane to stink up the joint each week!

 

• ARGH, I WANT THIS SHOW TO BE GOOD AGAIN

 

• What I want and what I get are two different things, though. Because what do I get next but a Johnny Mundo vs. El Dragon Azteca Jr. match? Striker hypes this match as a first-time one-on-one bout, but Azteca has looked pretty much like an ineffective, over-his-head rookie who can’t do anything right. So pretty much like Prince Puma back in the first season. Striker mentions a somber-looking Ron Funches. I’ve never seen Funches that un-smiley before. The extremely low quality of this show is killing Ron Funches’s joy, dammit! Striker also talks about Dominik Misterio being a huge fan and potential future practitioner of the fine art of pro wrestling. I still can’t believe this dude Dom is apparently a massively heat-getting heel. I’ve only ever seen that wrestling clip of him talking about surviving in prison even though he clearly only spent a day at the city jail; Dom trying to act hard with his Henry David Thoreau overexaggerating ass is a funny concept. Otherwise, I have no idea about any of his work whatsoever.

 

• There’s a huge spinebuster that Mundo drills on the mats less than a minute in. I don’t know. I think the last time I felt this way about writing about actual matches, the matches themselves were happening in late 1999 and the middle of 2000 in WCW, so they were at least usually pretty short. These matches are ten or fifteen minutes of constant movement that signifies nothing. Mundo is – and I can’t believe I’m typing this – one of the best workers in this company because he understands things like pacing (even with that spinebuster on the mats spot less than a minute in) and putting together basic heel control segments and stuff like that. If Mundo is one of your best singles workers, your company is in a spot of trouble with its talent level. LU has so many young guys who can dive and flip and run, but not enough ring generals to turn that enthusiasm and athleticism into good matches. Azteca just did a running plancha over the corner strut, and I didn’t actually care. That is a bummer.

 

• This match is fine for what it is. I’m burned out on this company, though. Too much wrestling, not enough storyline progression. And I think that as I get deeper into the show, the more I become certain that I shouldn’t bother trying to watch any current wrestling shows because they are likely going to have a lot of similarities and won’t be for me. It’s fine: There is so much wrestling that I want to watch and that I’ll never have time to get through, probably. But man, I keep writing the same thing again and again, over and over as LU crystallizes its house style. Mundo wins this match with an End of the World after tripping Azteca as the latter goes up top.

 

• Rey Misterio Jr. runs out and saves Azteca from Mundo’s attempted Pillmanization of his neck. Rey then walks over to his family and shows them some love before going to slap fives with some fans. Mundo walks back down the stairs and jabbers at Dom, who seems like he has no charisma whatsoever when he attempts to respond. They face off while Dario’s guards try to split them apart. Mundo piefaces him; Rey finally tries to make his way back over to intervene when the Worldwide Underground, now able to come to ringside since the match is over, runs out and grabs Rey so that Mundo can waffle him with the LU Championship belt. I. Don’t. Care. I can’t wait until we get through that match. Only a couple more shows.

 

• Seedy parking lot interstitial: Rey Fenix walks Missy Santos to her car. They have like zero romantic chemistry as they attempt to have a flirty conversation, by the way. Anyway, guess who’s watching this whole walk to Melissa's car? Yep, it’s the Moth, who monologues a plan to take Fenix’s mask in the hopes that Melissa will see his full face and react like we all did with people we met during the COVID era who wore masks, and then one day we saw their full face, but we had filled in facial features more pleasing to our brains than what they look like even for the people who we acknowledge are clearly conventionally attractive, but of course, Marty’s forgetting one thing: MELISSA. THINKS. YOU. ARE. A. FREAK. AND. IN. FAIRNESS. MARTY. YOU. ARE.

 

• Best-laid plans and all that, Moth.

 

• For all the reasons laid out both in terms of the in-ring and the storyline progression, this was my least favorite LU of all the LUs. -3 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

Edited November 2 by SirSmUgly

[zendragon]

For what its worth both Prince Puma and King Cuerno ended up in WWE before Penta and Fenix

Also the Smiley Swingin' Slam is a pretty sweet move, If I may say so myself

[SirSmUgly]

9 hours ago, zendragon said:

For what its worth both Prince Puma and King Cuerno ended up in WWE before Penta and Fenix

This is a fair point. I feel like Ricochet was always going to end up there, but Cuerno probably needed the exposure from LU to get a call from the dub.

Penta and Fenix, though, came in here and got featured as potential main eventers, then did the jump to AEW and then the dub anyway. That seems pretty impressive. And looking at Penta's Wikipedia page (I know, I know), he seems to have just been a midcard talent kicking around AAA until the point at which he showed up on LU and got way over. 

[tbarrie]

On 11/2/2025 at 3:31 AM, SirSmUgly said:

• Someone in the crowd yells GO BACK TO TACOMA at Killshot. Nah, we don’t want him back. AEW can keep him on the road and maybe urge him to get him a nice house in Jacksonville.

I don't think Swerve is buying any houses any time soon. He's had bad luck with that.

[SirSmUgly]

Season 3, Show 30: “Bloodlines” or Lucha Underground would be way better as a classic Telltale game than it is as a pro wrestling show

• We’ll be 75% of the way through this season after this show. That fact is more exciting than any of the recent wrestling matches on this show.

 

• Recap: It’s the Cueto Cup! Famous B. is trying to sign Texano! Texano is trying to bang Brenda! Mil Muertes and Jeremiah Crane love the same woman, but I’m not sure she loves either of them! Also, Johnny Mundo’s male mooks are still incompetent! Taya is pretty good at running interference, though! Tons of excitement! Expressed through punctuation marks!

 

• Matt Striker and Vampiro lay out the rest of the Elite Eight matchups - Pentagón Dark vs. Texano and Mil Muertes vs. Jeremiah Crane – and mention that the Aztec medallions will begin being re-circulated tonight…

 

• …and the first three will be up for grabs in a match between the Rabbit Tribe (Paul London, Mala Suerte, and Saltador) and the Worldwide Underground (Taya Valkyrie, Ricky Mandel, and P.J. Black, accompanied by a still-recuperating Jack Evans). Mala Suerte is wearing around his neck the lucky rabbit’s foot that Mascarita Sagrada gifted them last week, so I guess Sagrada’s gift didn’t scare them off as intended. They do their weirdo dance, circling around Melissa Santos, and she actually gets a kick out of it. Maybe she can enjoy herself because when she waves them off, they respect her boundaries and stop bothering her (hint fucking HINT, Marty Martinez). Wow, wrestlers having a positive interaction with Missy Santos in the Temple is so rare that I sort of enjoy it when it happens.

 

• Meanwhile, Evans is holding a white board with a rebus puzzle on it. It has a poorly-drawn bowling pin on it, so it’s a puzzle about someone or something getting pinned. Rebus puzzles rule. Striker mentions Classic Concentration, which funny enough I’ve recently been thinking about watching while I’m on my exercise bike that my wife got me for like fifteen bucks on Buy Nothing. That is the best fifteen bucks she has ever spent on me, possibly. It’s definitely the healthiest fifteen bucks. Anyway, I’ve been watching old Scrabble episodes with that slowpoke dolt Chuck Woolery trying to comprehend the clues to the word puzzles that he's presenting, and it’s been a great way to pass the time while cycling.

 

• The other thing that I’ve been watching while on the bike is these old Coliseum Video uploads that the WWE Vault has been slowly adding to YouTube. I realize, having watched these, that growing up watching WWF as a kid has made me sort of like these objectively mediocre matches between two beefy dudes that were so prevalent in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I had fun watching Davey Boy Smith wrestle Warlord at WM VII, and while Warlord is not a good singles wrestler, the big moves that Warlord did hit came off nicely, specifically a counter-Hot Shot early in the match that established his heel control segment, and Bulldog breaking Warlord's previously unbreakable full nelson grasp and then winning the match was a nice finish. I also got to see the British Bulldog/Repo Man abrupt feud-ending match once Bulldog was shunted over to wrestling Bret Hart for the Intercontinental Championship at SummerSlam ’92, and having watched that feud progress a year or two ago, I was glad to finally cap it off. The match itself was maybe just north of mediocre, but I had fun with it.

 

• Anyway, this match on LU is an exactly mediocre trios match with some unfunny comedy on the part of the Rabbit Tribe. They win this unremarkable and dull bout when Paul London lands an SSP on Ricky Mandel for three. It was a snoozer.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Benjamin Cooke and Johnny Mundo are displeased at the failure of these dopey mooks in the Worldwide Underground. Cooke threatens to fire them, but he says that Mundo is such a kind soul that he’s allowing them all to stay. I have no idea why Mundo is lecturing Taya. He should call her up to stand next to him and then tell the rest of these geeks that they suck. Cooke leads Mundo off to do photo ops – Mundo: “No more sick kids, please. I can’t afford to get sick right now” – and I feel like Mundo should watch himself, man, because Taya is obviously the brains behind this whole unit, and I think he's losing her patience.

 

• Mil Muertes (w/Catrina) jumps Jeremiah Crane when Crane steps to the top of the stairs and beats his ass right into a commercial break. We come back to Muertes tossing Crane through a closed door. This, of course, is revenge for Crane destroying Mil’s neck with a couple of chairs a few weeks back. They do your typical crowd brawl, tease a toss off the roof of the storage closet, and then go back to crowd brawling after that. Eventually, they make it onto the floor and then, finally, onto the apron, and then just before Crane can make it into the ring, he tries to leap from the apron and land a rana, but he is caught and powerbombed into the apron. Then, and only then, does the match reach the ring after Mil dumps Crane’s body in there and follows.

 

• Whoops, wait, Mil misses a corner spear and goes back outside. Crane loads up a suicide dive, but he does it through the middle and lower rope and, I mean, is he trying to do a dive that looks like a botch? He looks like he trips and barely hits Mil in the waist, but it seems like it’s meant to be a transition rather than Crane hitting a big move, but Mil no-selling it anyway. I have no idea what the fuck that move is supposed to be. He did it against Taya, and it looked just as bad. If I can’t tell whether or not you tripped or you meant to do the move the way that you did, maybe take it out of your arsenal.

 

• They trade moves back and forth and toss each other into chairs and across tables. Crane stinks IMO, so no, I am not enjoying this. Mil can be a fun crowd brawler, but this is just a very noisy brawl that does a bunch of spots that were done better or more emotionally impactfully in other matches of the weapon-based type that Mil wrestled on earlier episodes of this show. Basically, Crane just takes stupid-wild bumps to hype this thing up, which probably explains why he had to recently retire from the ring. All this legit pain and bodily damage that he’s eating, and for what? A forgettable garbage match that blends in with countless others on this show?

 

• Crane hits Mil with his Pillmanizer/Con-chair-to sort of dealie. I mean, it’s not really a Con-chair-to because there’s no chair on the other side of Mil’s face. The point is that Mil doesn’t really give a fuck about that move and soon ends up spearing Crane from inside the ring, knocking Crane off the apron and across a table, then powerbombs him through the table, then grabs a crate that he ordered from ACME and pulls out a huge mallet, then swings the mallet, then Crane’s eyes bug out of his head when he's hit, then tries a spear, then gets caught in a front choke by Crane while attempting the spear. OK, only some of that list of moves was true. The front choke struggle is easily the best thing about this match, though, especially Mil struggling to break it, getting to his feet, then slinging Crane away and landing a massive chokeslam to punctuate his escape. Alas, his follow-up pinfall only gets two.

 

• After that, we’re back to breaking furniture and then a finish that feels anti-climactic. After all these chair and table and high-impact death spots, Crane simply leaps off the second rope and right into Mil’s arms; Mil quickly hits a counter-flatliner for three. Catrina enters the ring and, rather than giving Crane the Lick, gives him a full-on open mouthed kiss. There’s a long string of slobber and everything. Gross. Mil is mad about that, obvs, and hits Crane with another Flatliner because he’s jealous. This was what it was, and if you like garbage matches that focus mostly on delivering high-impact weapon spots, then you’ll like this. I personally do not, however.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: The Fibbies are onto Dario Cueto! Wait, no they’re not; actually, Dario’s office visitor is just one Fibbie and he’s been named Councilman Delgado’s replacement by “The Order.” Dario is confused, so this Fibbie named Agent Winter (whose actor I knew I recognized - it's Godfrey), informs him that Councilman Delgado was killed by Brian Cage and Brian Cage’s Magic Aztec Gauntlet Powers. I mean, it is completely unbelievable that the news of an acting councilperson who got his fucking head exploded in his office would not have gotten back to Dario in some way, even if he doesn’t watch the local news. Come the fuck on. And I say this about a show that runs on mysticism and immortality and super-duper Aztec god powers. Dario gets over Delgado’s death very quickly on account of Delgado was a prick and even pricks like Dario don't like other pricks a lot of the time. Winter enthuses that he’s a huge Pentagón Dark fan and then goes into a kind of reverie and monotones that despite his fandom,“[Penta’s] flesh will fry like everyone else’s when the war comes.” Well, that was creepy. Even Dario is creeped out, and this dude has seen some shit. Agent Winter says that The Order’s got eyes and ears everywhere, and boy are they excited to unleash the Aztec gods to rule the earth and start killing people indiscriminately! This news stresses Dario out so much that he presses the horns of his trusty ceramic bull to his head and tries to keep himself from forming a massive migraine. This was a high-quality interstitial that was extremely well-acted and nailed the unsettling tone that it was trying to set.

 

• The main event determines who will reach the Cueto Cup’s Final Four: Pentagón Dark or Texano. Mostly, the good thing about this match is Vampiro trying to subtly deal with Penta’s post-Vampiro-as-his-master progress by intimating that he needs to bide his time under the guidance of a wise sage and that becoming a truly dangerous wrestler can’t be rushed. As for the match, well, obviously you can guess that I don’t think much of it, but it is what it is. There’s a shot of DVDVR dude Tromataker in the crowd looking desperate for a Penta victory, which I get a kick out of. This match is worth it just for that shot.

 

• Famous B. and Brenda wander out here to support Texano in his efforts. Texano’s heel control segment is broken up by blips of Penta’s signature offense, such as lungblowers and the like. It’s otherwise pretty nondescript except for an Indian Deathlock into a leg snap that I thought was creative and cool. B. and Brenda try to run a distraction, but B. tosses a golden horseshoe right to Penta. I mean, his aim was the opposite of true. It was extremely false. Penta grabs it, tees off on Texano’s jaw, and earns an easy pinfall victory. Underwhelming match, but then again, considering the low ceiling based on who was in it, it was honestly just about whelming.

 

• Obviously, Penta tries to snap Texano’s arm after the match, and obviously, B. jumps in to interrupt it, and obviously, B. ends up with a snapped arm instead. Equally as obviously, Penta grabs Brenda when she jumps in to check on B., and Penta snaps her arm to a pop. Texano couldn’t even come back and help her out? Forget scoring with her anymore, buddy.

 

• The final four matchups in the Cueto Cup: Prince Puma vs. Rey Fenix and Pentagón Dark vs. Mil Muertes.

 

• Seedy LAPD office interstitial: What the fuck, Catrina blit-blurts into Captain Vasquez’s office?! And what the actual fuck, Vasquez apparently called upon her even though they agreed to stay out of one another’s way? And HOLY SHIT, Vasquez says this: “I gave you life, Catrina. Twice.” WTF Vasquez is Catrina’s mom?!?!?! And also saved her from an early death by giving her half of the amulet willingly?!?!?!?!?!?!?! AGEWGTAMAGAHBOWHN>!?!?!!,1?

 

• Well, this explains a ton in the batshittiest way possible! Catrina is aggrieved; she says that needing to possess the half of the amulet she has just to continue existing isn't all that great an experience for her. She’s stuck between life and death, “like a ghost,” on account of that she should be dead, but her mom broke the pendant in half to bring her back from the brink. Vasquez is desperate because she knows, as Catrina does, that Brian Cage + Aztec god gauntlet = Everyone’s flesh frying when the war comes, so she asks Catrina to use her hold over Mil Muertes to get Mil to take the gauntlet away from Cage. I am all in on Mil and Cage having a Superman/Doomsday match in which they punch each other repeatedly in between trying to powerbomb one another through the mat.

 

• Vasquez is so desperate for Catrina's help that she offers to trade the other half of the immortality amulet to Catrina for the gauntlet; apparently, when the pieces are rejoined, Catrina can fully cross back over into the world of the living. Catrina notes that this means that Vasquez will lose all her immortality protections and thus die, but Vasquez is clear about the trade: “I don’t fear death; I fear the gods.” Catrina accepts this deal from her ma and blit-blurts away. Do I even have to tell you how much this interstitial ruled?

 

• All the blah wrestling just gets in the way of the storyline stuff and the fun acting that I actually care about. If I were grading only the wrestling on this particular episode, the episode would earn zeroout of five lucha chants. If I were grading only the interstitials on this particular episode, the episode would earn five out of five lucha chants. On that note, here’s the final score! 2.5 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

 

[SirSmUgly]

Season 3, Show 31: “The Cup Runneth Over” or Lucha Underground Remastered

• Recap: This fucking Cueto Cup is finally coming to an end soon. Hurry it up, LU! Marty Martinez is plotting on Rey Fenix, which’ll probably be an insurmountable extra difficulty for Fenix in attempting to win his Final Four match against Prince Puma; Pentagón Dark and Mil Muertes are going to carve up some long-stewing beef that was put into the metaphorical Crock Pot way back in season two in the other Final Four match. Oh, and we’re one week away from a Johnny Mundo/Rey Misterio Jr. LU Championship bout that probably won’t be as good as a random Johnny Nitro/Misterio match from a random Smackdown. And no, I won’t blame Misterio for that if my prediction turns out to be correct. Most importantly, however: Captain Vasquez is Catrina’s mom! Holy shit! That reveal is my second favorite reveal of the whole series behind Vampiro unveiling himself as Penta’s Dark Master, and there's no shame in being ranked behind that reveal. As I believe zendragon earlier noted in this thread, that reveal was basically Vince McMahon’s Higher Power reveal except done incredibly well as opposed to how the Higher Power was revealed (i.e. like complete shit).

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Brian Cage has the power of a bunch of bloodthirsty Aztec gods running through his veins, but that isn’t stopping him from getting his reps in anyway, just in case. Catrina blit-blurts into the gym and questions Cage about whether or not he even understands the origin and purpose of the Aztec gauntlet that he now wields. Cage only knows that the gauntlet is his and that wearing it makes him feel pretty fuckin’ great! Catrina scoffs at Cage’s lack of knowledge about the extremely unstable magicks that he is wielding and prefers that he turn the gauntlet over to her without further incident, lest she put him through hell to take it from him. Cage prefers hell. Catrina grabs his arm and lets him know that she's going to make the situation untenable for him. He tries to punch through her skull in response, but she is way more crafty than Councilman Delgado’s stupid ass and blit-blurts away well before he can land the death blow.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial, the second: Great, we’re getting a ton of plot today! This show is automatically superior to most of the LU shows this season if this plot-heavy formatting holds. Dario Cueto takes a meeting with Joey Ryan in his office, but not before shitting on Ryan for losing in the first round of the Cueto Cup like a lil’ bitch. Then, Dario has the audacity to demand that Ryan get to his point when Ryan’s point is that he’s snitching to help Dario. This time, it’s another snitchfest in which he exposes Veneno as Officer Reyes (Dario, not able to keep any of Cortez Castro’s various aliases straight: "Who?!"). Once Ryan patiently explains that Veneno, Officer Reyes, and Cortez Castro are one and the same, Dario locks into planning for how to address the persistent mole and remembers a storyline that I completely fucking forgot about, which is that Sexy Star is currently constantly freaking out about spiders and in fact freaked out on Veneno when she thought that he was the one leaving tarantulas in her belongings (Season Three, Show Nineteen). Dario devises a plan to have Star wrestle Veneno in a mask-versus-mask match next week, as he is confident that Star will find the drive and anger to dispatch of the spidery luchador and thus expose him to the world as the snitch cop that he is. Joey gushes over the plan, claiming that he loves it but – let me quote Dario’s exact words in his response here – “I love solitude, so get the hell outta my office.” No one respects a snitch, Joey, not even when the snitch is on your team.

 

• I know that I’ve been so busy that my reviewing of this show has been inconsistent, but that paranoid Sexy Star attack on Veneno was twelve episodes ago, so three months in real time when these shows first aired. The showrunners have done a poor job of moving the timelines ahead on the various narrative threads that they have spun up (pun not intended) this season.

 

• Matt Striker and Vampiro run down the card, which includes the two Cueto Cup semifinal matches and a Rey Misterio Jr./Johnny Mundo in-ring gab-off.

 

• The opening match pits Rey Fenix against Prince Puma, and I feel confident that I guessed correctly a few reviews back that Vampiro is going to end up sitting ringside at the announcer's table to watch his old follower Penta face his new follower Puma in the finals of the Cueto Cup. I will say this: When Penta wins this tournament and then walks through all of the Worldwide Underground’s interference to finish off Johnny Mundo – which I feel is bolted on happening, this booking is so obvious, and if I am wrong, I will own up to being wrong – the Temple audience is going to go fucking bananas.

 

• This match starts with chain wrestling that won’t mean anything in the long run, but that at least builds anticipation within the crowd for when they will finally start running around the ring and diving onto one another. They move from holds to trading strikes and slapping thighs and biceps before bonking heads. Vampiro uses the unfortunate phrase “gypsy boxing” to describe illegal forearm shivers. But I mean, other than that, his work in getting over the dangerousness of both competitors is very good. If this LU rewatch has done one thing for me, it’s turned me around on Vampiro, who I found to be generally anywhere from "okay, I guess" to  "mildly shitty" until this watch-through. I enjoy the guy as a talker and as a crafter of stories and logical explanations for what's going on in the ring.

 

• There is some solid stuff in here, including a neat nearfall when Fenix manages a rana counter on what looks like a pop-up powerbomb attempt from Puma. Of course, Puma gets up first, which I don’t think should happen since he was the one who ate the rana, but this is pretty much what LU matches do – they have big move after big move and forget all the little logical stuff in between )something that makes Vamp's work to try and piece things together on color all the more important). Fenix gets two on a roll-through Canadian Destroyer after Puma crashes and burns on a wild 450 attempt from up top, and they reset for the next big spot after a counter-counter-counter sequence. That big spot ends up coming after a standing ten count caused by Puma landing a springboard strike and then, once they both get to their feet around the count of seven, a rebound cutter that Fenix manages to land, but that only earns two on the cover.

 

• This crowd annoys the shit out of me. That last spot got a HOLY SHIT chant, but Fenix does that spot practically every match! They somehow got more annoying than chanting FIGHT FOREVER five minutes into the match. The Temple crowd is so irritatingly indie-chanty (I’m making that a word now) that they actively harm the presentation of this show in my humble little opinion.

 

• Melissa Santos and Vampiro increasingly freak out as the match comes closer to a finish, which is a nice touch. They both react to another close two count for Fenix. Vampiro, stressing out, explodes at Striker, complaining that he wants to be allowed to watch the match silently except for when he gets emotionally unhinged at a near fall. Santos, on the other hand, exhorts Fenix to get up and finish off Puma while Puma’s woozy. Of course, here comes Marty “the Moth” Martinez at this crucial flashpoint within the match. He stalks Melissa at ringside and causes Fenix, who is up top and ready to leap onto a prone Puma, to dive onto him at ringside instead. This allows Puma time to recover and regain his feet, land a leaping knee strike, and hit a fishhook buster, but that move only gets 2.9. Puma’s follow-up 630 Senton, on the other hand, does earn him a three count and passage into the Cueto Cup Finals. Melissa Santos shrieks as the Moth once again advances on her, hastily announcing Puma as the winner while backing away from her pursuer. She gets on the apron and hugs Fenix as the Moth backs away, licking his fingers lasciviously. That was a perfectly solid match for what it was, the Moth’s interference included.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Sexy Star towels off after a workout; she prepares to take a drink from her water bottle, but she stops because the water is sloshing around in it like the famous scene from Jurassic Park where the T-Rex is stomping closer to the depowered electric cars that the protagonists are hiding in. To quote Ric Flair, what’s causin’ all this? Answer: Mil Muertes, who destroys a heavy bag with one punch, hitting it so hard that the shockwave rattles the walls of Dario Cueto’s office and stops Dario in mid-sip of the drink that he's just poured for himself. Back in the gym, Catrina enters and tells Mil to save some of that rage for Penta…which is when Brian Cage shows up and destroys Mil by beating him with a dumbbell plate. Cage drops the plate on Mil's midsection after he finishes his attack and, paraphrasing, reiterates to Catrina that he’s not too worried about any hell that she can bring to him. He walks out; Catrina pulls out her mystical stone and powers up Mil again, then tells him to forget about Cage – only for the moment, of course – and re-focus himself on Penta. Mil immediately looks suitably re-focused.

 

• The other semi-final matchup in the Cueto Cup is next: Pentagón Dark rolls into the ring to rapturous applause and squares up once more with Mil Muertes (w/Catrina). Mil and Penta immediately fuck up a wheelbarrow spot, so yeah, I’mma just tell you when important spots happen. The move-to-move won’t be any good – and I’m not putting that on Mil – but I'll notify you about important or big spots like this running plancha to the floor by Penta. Now, in a cool little sequence, Mil is selling his ribs, but he’s holding his arm close to them. Penta immediately susses this out and targets that area with strikes, but the best part is the conversation between Striker and Vampiro, in which Striker thinks that Mil is protecting the arm because Penta previously snapped it (Season Two, Show One), but Vampiro notices that actually, Mil is using the arm to protect his ribcage. That exchange accomplished so much: There was interesting analytical conversation between the announcers to convey the action and story of the match while also successfully calling back to a key point of their long-term feud.

 

• Vampiro has mostly had a good night over on commentary aside from his comment about dirty boxing. Here, again, he enhances the match along with Mil because as Mil destroys Penta at ringside, they wander over to the commentary table. Mil takes a second to stare down Vampiro, unsure if Vamp is still backing Penta and warning him with a glare to keep his ass seated at commentary while he destroys Vamp's (former) protégé. Vampiro stands up and backs off, hands up, averting his gaze, trying to let Mil know that he doesn't still have that type of relationship with Penta. This was a compelling non-verbal confrontation that sorta made me want to see Vampiro and Mil get more screen time together.

 

• Man, this show glows when it focuses on story and characters over in-ring action. What a fun boutthis is, and solely because of all the character and commentary work. Catrina, still angered that Penta dared to try and snap her arm (Season Two, Show Five), now chooses to interfere by grabbing Penta’s ankle on a rope run when the match makes it back into the ring. Everyone at ringside is so tense, you can just feel the thickness of said tension coming through the screen, and I cannot wait to see the finish, which is probably not going to be clean.

 

• Striker quotes Robert Frost (“miles to go before we sleep”), but I'm prettty sure that we are probably in the finishing run right now. Penta slumps Mil with a series of superkicks, then tries to climb the ropes; Catrina grabs his leg again, so he boots her square in the face using his free leg to knock her away, and then in a shocker to me, completes his climb and wins it with a double stomp to Mil’s ribs that keeps Mil down for three. OK, that was generally a clean finish; I thought that Cage would make his point increasingly more clear about not worrying himself with Mil or Catrina by interfering in the match. As for Mil, I’m not sure that I trust him to have the power and strength to take out the gauntleted Cage right now. Uh, and especially not if Penta snaps Mil’s arm again, which he’s fixing to do right now. Thankfully for the sake of mankind (not Mick Foley, though man do I wish '96 Mankind could work LU), Mil musters up enough strength to fling Penta away and escape the ring. Catrina needs to get out the spellbook and power up this dude Mil some more.

 

• But what I did get right  is the Puma/Penta Cueto Cup Final matchup! Next week's show is set, what with that final, Sexy Star/Veneno, and the LU Championship Match between Misterio and Mundo on deck.

 

• I’m also going to predict Mil Muertes versus Brian Cage in a Grave Consequences Match at Ultima Lucha Tres. I know we’ve had one already this season, but that seems like an appropriate match for this particular budding feud.

 

• Dario Cueto excitedly brings Rey Misterio Jr. and Johnny Mundo to the ring to “talk shit to each other.” I don’t know; Mundo’s gotten much better as a talker even over the course of this very show, but Mundo doing his typical heel boasting while hiding behind a personal security detail isn’t doing much for me at first, though things pick up a bit once Mundo notes  that Dirty Dom (I know his current nickname, at least) is a tall dude and must have gotten his size from his mom is pretty funny, though. Then, he brings up that whole “Eddie Guerrero might be his dad” deal again by suggesting that no kid of Rey’s is topping six feet unless his pops is a different dude entirely. This comment inspires Rey to fight through the security detail and attacks Mundo. I get a massive kick every time the whole Eddie/Rey parentage angle from WWE is referred to in Lucha Underground.

 

• The Worldwide Underground hustles to the ring and helps Mundo out by inflicting a team beatdown on Misterio. El Dragon Azteca Jr., Willie Mack, and Sexy Star can’t stand seeing the heels do any of this to a fucking legend, so they rush down the stairs and attempt to make the save. Mundo actually manages to mount Rey and throw more punches before Puma rushes the ring and squares off with Mundo; Penta soon joins, and all four men attack one another indiscriminately, but that four-person brawl gets busted up when Mil Muertes jumps in, which lures Brian Cage out to attack Mil and then powerbomb Mundo. Mil and Cage face off and throw strikes. The Moth wanders out while that happens, followed by Fenix, and you know what? I love a good ol’ roster blowup in which everyone beats the shit out of everyone else in and around the ring. So does Dario, based on the look on his face.

 

• Dante Fox assesses the battle from the top of the Temple until Killshot jumps him; the Rabbit Tribe sits on top of the storage closet and does pretend commentary for the massive brawl (Paul London uses a carrot as a makeshift microphone, which is the first funny thing that anyone in the Rabbit Tribe has done so far). As it ends up, Puma dives onto a bunch of people and Rey hits Mundo with a 6-1-9 before hoisting the LU Championship belt in the air. This segment started out as a boilerplate confrontation and got better and better as it went along.

 

• Two matches + more character segments + lots of storyline movement = Oh wow, Lucha Underground is good again, almost like there is a proven formula for this show being fun! 4 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

[SirSmUgly]

Season 3, Show 32: “The Cueto Cup” or Botched Quests

• Let’s finish the fucking Cueto Cup.

 

• Recap: We’re about to finish the fucking Cueto Cup. The winner of the final match faces the winner of tonight’s LU Championship Match. Meanwhile, Officer Cortez “Veneno” Castro Reyes is probably going to catch a major ass beating tonight. Again.

 

• It’d be great if they put the belt on Rey Misterio Jr. tonight and let him hold it for a few weeks before dropping the fall to Penta at Ultima Lucha Tres. I just want a competent babyface to hold the gold for longer than a week.

 

• Here’s Veneno, wearing a mask, but not wearing a long enough elbowpad to cover up the tattoo on his arm that should have tipped everyone in the Temple off weeks ago. Cortez Castro Reyes getting his ass kicked by everyone in the Temple cracks me up. Sexy Star walks down here on a mission to squish this spider. I’m baffled by Star’s booking this season and feel that plans around her must have changed because that’s the only reason that I can guess she went from looking like she’d be a babyface champ fighting from underneath to a transitional champ and somewhat out of focus for much of the season. Anyway, the time it took to write about this was more than the time it took for Officer Joey Ryan to run out here thirty seconds in and unmask a downed Reyes before Star can do much to press her early advantage, causing the match to get thrown out. O…kay? I hope this abrupt finish and zero of a match has a follow-up that makes it worthwhile.

 

• Seedy backstage interstitial: Johnny Mundo and his chirpy agent – what was his name again? – ah, Benjamin Cooke, it was, both enter Dario Cueto’s office. I’m skeptical of generative AI, or more accurately, of humans who are largely determined to offload their critical thinking to it, and it uses too much energy like all my other devices, but I do appreciate that it is a much quicker and more thorough CTRL+F when I need to remind myself of the exact show upon which something happened or the name of one of LU’s myriad cast of characters. It’s a great assisting tool. Now, if only it were a great, energy-efficient assisting tool. And also if only human beings weren’t so often too lazy to think.

 

• Anyway, Cooke and Mundo try to weasel their way into a better situation for Mundo’s title defense tonight by threatening to hold the title up for concessions. Mundo prepares to storm out of the Temple like he was Shawn Michaels after Bret Hart legit took a chunk out of his scalp in the locker room, so Dario calms things down by saying that everyone is banned from ringside during the title match, thus avoiding a massive melee such as the one that sprung forth during Mundo and Misterio’s confrontation last week. Mundo likes that idea, at least until he demands that the rest of the Worldwide Underground be exempt from that ruling. Dario doesn’t budge on his stance that "everyone" means everyone, so Mundo threatens to leave LU with the gold and take it to another promotion like he was Ric Flair stylin’ and profilin’ all over Jim Herd’s pizza-slinging ass. Dario pumps up Mundo by raving about all his credentials and manages to talk him off of that ledge, but Mundo promises that if anything screwy happens to him out there, he’ll take the title and leave with it even if he loses. The look on Dario’s face says that he might be about to make sure that doesn’t happen like Vince McMahon when Bret Hart…well, you know.

 

• But first! Prince Puma and Pentagón Dark wrestle for possession of the Cueto Cup and a trip to the main event of Ultima Lucha Tres as the challenger to the LU Championship.

 

• These guys kick each other in the face and then just bounce off the ropes to do it again at the start of this bout. I think that Puma has gotten worse since he started working LU and probably needed to go on ahead to the WWE so that he would be forced tofit into a more restrained structure that at least attempts to use in-ring action to build steadily toward a climax. From one perspective, working LU has encouraged within Ricochet a ton of bad habits. From another, he’s just working the modern style that fans love.

 

• Penta actually manages to slow it down with heel control that centers around slaps and boot chokes. It’s dull, sure, but it creates a clear contrast between Penta working slowly and sadistically when he can and Puma trying to hit the full court press and land as many moves as possible to pile on damage. The match from here is back and forth; both men score close two counts. Penta continues to try and lock on holds or chokes to stop Puma from doing all his video game offense, but he struggles to manage it and eats a Northern Lights/deadlift vertical suplex combo for two. Puma goes up, then does a dive that he rolls through when Penta moves, though he runs right into Penta’s grasp after that and eats a fishhook brainbuster for two.

 

• This match is fine. It’s got a pretty hard and fairly low ceiling on its quality; dudes are doing diving Canadian destroyers and springboard Canadian destroyers and trading these moves quickly and without much time selling the damage of a flipping fucking piledriver because wrestling moves mean absolutely nothing in this company if they’re not the finisher. Look, why don’t I just tell you who manages to score their finisher? Penta tries his, but Puma escapes. Puma tries his and lands it to win. Uh, okay. That is a booking choice. Vampiro is pretty pleased about this outcome; he gets in the ring and raises Puma’s arm.

 

• Well, Puma winning might actually mean that we’re getting Puma/Misterio at Ultima Lucha again. No fucking thank you. Dario Cueto hands the cup to Puma after the bout and then declares it time for Puma to find out who he’s facing at Ultima Lucha. Penta against Misterio was the far more interesting prospect, especially as it happened at the start of the third season (Season Three, Show One) and seemed intriguing enough to be worth exploring in a longer rematch, and Penta against Mundo with the Worldwide Underground backing the latter would have been a fun “Penta snaps everyone’s arms as they interfere while trying to save the title for Mundo” match, but Puma/Rey II is the almost the least exciting booking that LU’s showrunners could possibly come up with, with Puma/Mundo of course being the least exciting match in the universe [Editor’s note: AW FUCK YOU, LUCHA UNDERGROUND], so I’m somehow not surprised that we’re going to end this cursed third season with a suboptimal and boring matchup coming out of this long fucking Cueto Cup tournament that had almost no good matches and that took weeks of television time to complete.

 

• Man, I like Rey Misterio Jr. The only good thing about this booking would be Rey getting to be champ for a few weeks before Puma gets his win back. Of course, LU could surprise me and not have Puma get his win back or maybe not even put the belt on Rey at all. I was wrong about Penta being signaled as the winner of this tournament, after all. Meanwhile, Rey starts the match by kicking the shit out of Mundo at ringside and then gets a two count back in the ring on a springboard crossbody.

 

• Mundo takes control and has a decent enough heel control segment, using a bodyscissors, a Cobra Clutch, and a few kicks to control. Rey manages a flash nearfall on a bridging pin in there, but Mundo earns a near fall of his own before sliding Rey out to the floor and following with a whiffed slingshot crossbody that is the opening Rey needs to spark a comeback with a big headscissors. One slingshot rana to the floor later, Rey hops on Mundo and soupbones the shit out of him because he understands common sense wrestling things like throwing heated blows at his opps after they disrespected him and his family even if that’s not part of his usual oeuvre.

 

• The defending champ regains control when the match re-enters the ring with what else but a kick. Mundo’s offense is usually pretty bad, but the stuff he does as a heel that isn’t part of his typical lineup of moves is good. I just wish that Mundo had traded out more of his moveset when he turned heel. He’s much better in this role than he was as a babyface, and he’s got nice little sequences like ripping up Rey’s mask and then immediately crotching himself on the post to get his comeuppance when Rey swings out of the way of a follow-up baseball slide. There are good things about what Mundo is doing, definitely. I just think I’m fatigued by how often he’s been floating around the main event. He’s early 2000 Jeff Jarrett in terms of how he’s (way too) featured.

 

• In short, this match is perfectly solid. We careen toward the finish; Mundo stuffs a Rey 6-1-9 attempt and hits a backbreaker, part of a sustained attack of Rey’s lower lumbar that Mundo has fairly consistently kept up. Mundo tries for an End of the World and I think legitimately blows it, or maybe he and Rey timed Rey’s cut-off slightly incorrectly. It doesn’t matter that much. Rey ends up landing a seated senton from the top to Mundo on the floor while Matt Striker does some godawful WWE-style overemoting over at commentary, invoking the names of all the members in Rey’s family and repeatedly screaming FIGHT like some kind of jackass, or even more accurately, like some kind of Michael Cole.

 

• Speaking of things fresh out of 2000 WCW, here’s a contrived ref bump! It happens just as Misterio looks ascendant; Mundo uses the resulting confusion to kick Rey in the junk, then drives the air from Rey's chest with a lungblower out of a vertical suplex, kind of like a Crash Landing into a lungblower, really. Mundo leaves the ring, grabs his gold, gets back in the ring, prepares to swing…and is cut off by Dirty Dominic Misterio, who then spears him. Mundo’s security chases Dom away, but not before Rey recovers and lands a 6-1-9 followed by a springboard Frog Splash just in time for the ref to count one, two, and, um, no three count here because Dario Cueto rushes from his office and pulls the ref out of the ring.

 

• Dario loudly proclaims himself the KING OF THIS TEMPLE and then palm strikes Rey, who responds with a leg trip and a 6-1-9. What in the overbooked fuck? Mundo finally lands that belt shot on a distracted Rey and hits an End of the World for three. These LU bookers were certainly on one tonight.

 

• This whole-ass show should have ended with the Aztec gods being successfully unleashed by the Order and killing everyone on-screen before the end credits of the final episode rolled. Just let the heels completely run the table at this point. Tonight's two semi-watchable matches came up against a disappointing opener and straight up shitty booking and, much like LU’s babyface heroes, badly lost out to the very worst that this show had to offer. -5 LU-CHA chants out of 5.

Edited Friday at 07:20 AM by SirSmUgly