Assorted ICW:NHB Matches

Gonna open this post by giving full credit to the reverseviperhold blog, aka @secretwrestlin1 on Twitter because I basically took the formatting (of watching assorted matches and reviewing them) & naming convention of this article entirely from them. I’m sure they’re not THE ONLY PERSON to have done this before but I felt like it should be necessary to credit them. And also you should just check out their blog anyways.

Meng vs. SHLAK - ICW No Holds Barred: Volume 8 (11/14/2020) - ***.90

God, I really did forget that this ever existed. An incredibly fun pandemic era ICW:NHB match between SHLAK and Meng, in spite of the mediocre no-contest finish. It’s entirely just both men beating the living dogshit out of each other with no real “spots” occurring at all, but to be quite honest, did this really NEED anything special? It’s hilarious how Meng for the majority of the match chooses to just continuously either laugh or make some kind of noise. I might be talking right out of my ass here, but the match earnestly feels like some of the old Memphis style brawls, especially with that nose biting bit. Holy fuck the nose biting was soooooooo cool. The no contest was definitely a disappointing result and what brings it down slightly for me, but regardless it’s a real hidden gem of a brawl.

Low-Ki vs. Masashi Takeda - ICW No Holds Barred: Volume 1 (01/04/2020) - *****

Wrestling fucking rocks, dude. This is maybe one of the most uniquely wrestled and overall BEST ICW matches I have ever seen. Takeda and Ki don’t really wrestle a traditional deathmatch style and choose to go for what I can basically describe as what Takeda’s match with Gresham from Bloodsport a few years prior to this would look like on steroids. AbsoLUTELY intense shoot-style heavy bout with a smidge of brawling in the crowd where Ki basically fucking murders Takeda a shitton. When Takeda does manage to get an advantage on Ki by basically kicking him in the nuts, it’s really fucking fun. Ki tying Takeda’s arms behind his back with his gi in order to nearly break his neck by giving him a Warrior’s Way off the top was especially brutal, and made him look like a million bucks going into a potential Nick Gage match that… unfortunately never happened and that fact makes me depressed. Nonetheless, it’s matches like this that help me realize no matter how weird or funny Low Ki is as a person, he’s still an amazing wrestler.

Reed Bentley vs. Lil Sicko - ICW No Holds Barred: Volume 75 (05/03/2025) - *****

Absolutely brutal match that blew me away on the first watch, and does it again on the rewatch only five months later. The whole story of the match was basically centered around Reed “By Gawd” Bentley’s lack of respect for the IWA Deep South mainstay Lil Sicko, not believing he should even be in the ICW chains, and Sicko himself trying to not only earn the respect of Reed but also the crowd themselves. It is an absolute trial by fire for the clown and weeellllll lemme tell you brother, it works damn well. Bentley’s offense is both disrespectful and hard hitting, with some great moments like him doing a sitout tombstone through a chair on the concrete, dropping Sicko right on his fucking HEAD into some light tubes or even sitting on Sicko’s head with one of the chairs from the crowd. I should also mention one of the commentators mentioning a video about a woman defecating on somebody’s car in regards to the latter moment if only because it was so not something I was expecting to be used as an analogy in a wrestling match ever, cheers to the man whose name I unfortunately forgot. The crowd also help this match as well because they go from being mostly into Reed (save for a woman in the crowd who I believe might’ve been his girlfriend) to coming around for both men by the end of it. Just an amazing match, purely vicious and diabolical, it’s what turned me onto Lil Sicko in the first place and is another great notch to a great guy like Reed Bentley.

SLADE vs. York - ICW No Holds Barred: Volume 32 (09/10/2022) - ***

This was good. A really solid SLADE sprint where he basically gets busted open the hard way very easily in the match and starts bleeding from just about every part of his body. If it were possible, his feet could probably bleed too. He’s that damn good. York is not somebody i’m familiar with at all prior to watching this match by virtue of me having never watched any Australian Deathmatch Wrestling, but he gives a fun showing in this match with some good looking sentons and the big sidewalk slam off the platform through some barbed wire light tubes. The visual of SLADE getting up and pulling the gusset plate that York smacked onto his back like a horror movie villain looked very very cool. I also am a fan of the finish where SLADE just chairshots the living shit out of York in the head till the referee stops the match. Good clean(?) fun.

Justin Kyle vs. Krule - ICW No Holds Barred: Volume 21 (01/22/2022) - *** 1/2

Justin Kyle was one of those early-ish ICW:NHB guys who I saw a lot of but has just completely fallen off the map as far as I know. Same with like, Bruce Santee. Does anyone know what happened to him? He was really fucking cool! He doesn’t have a Cagematch page and so I have no idea if he still even wrestles. If you’re a reader of this and know, please inform me because I would love to know! Anyways, a fun hoss vs hoss bout. It’s very brutal in a “dudes rock” kinda way because there’s not any kind of real intricate spots going on, no sort of real grappling, just two big as fuck freaks throwing nuclear bombs at eachother and trying to get the other one to stay down. Again, Justin Kyle in particular was really fucking cool during this match with multiple great looking spears to Krule. There’s a moment in particular where Kyle powerbombs Krule through two chairs and like, damn man. It’s so fucking cool… Outside of Krule’s finisher being kinda goofy in my opinion, this was pure freak vibes and I liked it.

A Review Of A Kinda Halloween Lucha Underground Episode.

* This review was made at the recommendation of my friend @maybejom, who runs the Dragon Screw blog, check him out! He’s good people.

Lucha Underground is a promotion that I definitely have interesting feelings about. While I think I should maybe do a full rewatch of the company’s history (not any time soon mind you, with the IWA:MS project on the horizon) it’s definitely got some really fun stuff like being the promotion to give Marty “The Moth” Martinez, somebody who has brought some of my favorite TV heel work ever purely by being a disgusting freak ass pervert, a top guy position, alongside some incredible violent performances with matches like Penta vs. Vampiro and Dante Fox vs. Killshot. I’ll fully admit here that the fourth season was when I was pretty much tapped out of the company at the time of it airing, the only thing I really know about it was the reveal of Wade Barrett at the end of the season which never went anywhere due to the company straight up dying not that long after the end of the season, but since it’s Halloween I figured why not try and cram some themed reviews in at the end of the month? I’m mostly focusing on the two marquee matches on this episode because I’m gonna be honest, I skipped through a lot of the in-between stuff due to a lack of interest. Except for the Worldwide Underground segment, if only because I completely forgot that Johnny Mundo/Hennigan/TV/Elite/Blackcraft had a faction involving Taya Valkyrie, Jack Evans, and PJ Black/Justin Gabriel. Real neat stuff.

Mil Muertes (w/Catrina) vs. The Mack - Haunted House Steel Cage Match - ****

I’m not ashamed to admit that this was the whole entire reason why I wanted to watch this show to begin with, and goddamn this match didn’t disappoint me at all. The concept of a promotion such as Lucha Underground, which typically runs more “serious” match concepts like Grave Consequences or Hell of War, putting on a “Haunted House” match amuses me quite a lot to be quite honest. The whole presentation with the objects strewn across the ring and cage… shout outs to the tables with things like “SPOOKY!” written on them, very funny, and the pre-match graphic feels like something you’d see on either a late 80s/early 90s WCW Halloween Havoc, or a low-level American promotion like Smokey Mountain Wrestling. It’s out of place for sure, but it’s out of place in the best way because this is actually FUN. These two just beat the shit out of each other, man. Mack does a really good “babyface in peril” when he gets his shit kicked in by Mil, his selling throughout this match in general is genuinely really really good and it helps Muertes look like a genuine monster. Big fan of Muertes spearing Mack through the wall of the cage twice. I love cage spots like that where there’s a bit of struggle  instead of the wrestler going clean through a cage wall. Mack getting stabbed in the head was the right amount of goofy mixed with looking incredibly cool with, again, how he sells it and also how he looked after getting busted open. The best spot was quite obviously the finish with Muertes giving Mack a Flatliner off the top of the cage through the “Haunted” table, Muertes doing the Flatliner has always been great. Overall just an incredibly campy and fun steel cage match, Mack and Muertes show a ton of really good chemistry here to the point that I wish they actually had more matches. Go out of your way to watch this, honestly.

Pentagon Dark © vs. Cage - Last Man Or Machine Standing Match, Lucha Underground Championship - ***

This match was…. okay, I guess.

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m coming off of watching the prior awesome campy Muertes/Mack match, or if it’s because a Brian Cage World Title Match™ really doesn’t move me all that much to begin with but there was nothing particularly all that great or horrible in this. Cage is just one of those guys who I honestly feel like is always stuck in the wrong era of wrestling, with the type of moveset and look he has he just SCREAMS late-stage WCW Power Plant graduate turned Natural Born Thrillers member but realistically there’s nothing he’s done to make himself stand out compared to other big men with good athletics. I LIKED what Cage does in the story for the match, being the unbreakable monster that Penta hasn’t broken, and, in turn, getting broken by the champ. Cage does also manage to pull off an actually decent looking suplex off the ropes through some tables on the outside… but that’s really about all I can say. It’s mostly a fine Penta carryjob, with the finishing stretch of Penta basically dominating with a Packaged Piledriver through some chairs, snapping both of Cage’s arms and then giving the stomp through a cinder block being pretty fun. The match went a little longer than I think it should have but that’s probably because of me not liking Cage all that much, if you shaved some time off this and gave it to Mack & Muertes (and also maybe made that the main event) I probably would’ve liked it a little more, but i’m not sure by how much.

That One Time Vader Wrestled Necro Butcher

(credit to Indy Wrestling Flashback for the cover image, they also uploaded the match!)

This is something that, honestly, I never thought I would see in my life. A match that I had no clue it even happened until it randomly popped into my YouTube recommendations the day i’m writing this, and even then I had to double take because I absolutely thought it was some random person’s 2K simulation. But it’s real! I just knew I HAD to watch this.

The match itself comes from “Pro Wrestling Superstars,” a North Carolina based promotion that, according to the very base-level research I did, has not been active since maybe about 2012. I say base level because the only evidence of this company’s existence is its Cagematch page and a Facebook account that has barely posted anything since 2009. Hey, they did have Hulk Hogan be a special guest referee for… something! It’s on the level of House of Hardcore, Northeastern Wrestling, really any low tier fed that mostly books legends/ex-WWE talent looking for a weekend payday alongside whatever mildly popular indie talents are making the rounds at that moment in time. Both men at this point are definitely not in their physical primes at their current moment, which is unfortunate really. Necro’s still getting decent bookings in mostly JCW, with some odd popups in CZW and IWA after leaving ROH during the start of the HDNet era two years prior. Meanwhile I'll admit that I haven’t seen a whole lot of Vader’s post-WWF run outside of some odd NOAH & AJPW bits and the incredibly funny Will Ospreay match. However, in this instance, what they do against each other is… not terrible, to be honest? If both men were in their prime then I'm sure this would be a lot better than it actually was, but here it’s mostly just a fun, decent little Vader squash match that you probably would’ve seen on some WCW B-Show taping. Necro doesn’t really get any kind of big moves in on Vader, pretty much of the offense he does get in amounts to punches, kicks, and elbow strikes. But he does a good job in trying to make a 56 year old Vader look rather impressive for what it’s worth. The commentary also helps reinforce the idea of it being a squash match with Shane Douglas and some man I'm not really able to identify mostly focusing on Vader, his comeback, how devastating he is, etc etc. I’m giving it a solid *** on my personal rankings, if mostly for the wonder of seeing two people who are basically some of my favorite wrestlers of all time facing each other. If you have like… five minutes to spare then I think you should give this match a look, definitely a fascinating one. As a small extra note: I would like to find more interesting matches like this, so if anyone knows of any that I can find then please reach out to me through my usual social media channels and I may try and feature more for the blog.

An Introduction To The (Ian) Rotten Archives, I Suppose.

It’s about time that I dust this off once again. I have to apologize really, my 2025 has been all over the place and while I meant to do more with this I earnestly kinda forgot about the blog for a while. That’s on me, that’s my fault. I plan on doing more with this blog whenever I can, especially as I actually do the thing I've been meaning to do for ages and put more focus on wrestling for my now-main YouTube channel. I wanna try and actually get at least one or two videos out on my YouTube before the year ends (because to be honest with my mental health, this year's probably a wash in terms of content), and then hopefully in 2026 I'll be able to really lock in I guess.

Anyways, it’s time for me to introduce a new project.

I’ll be completely honest in saying that I don’t really know a terribly massive amount about IWA Mid-South, a lot of my experience comes from the latter half of the promotion’s existence (2020-2022) which includes the moment where Jake Crist burned their World and Light Heavyweight Championships due to multiple instances of not getting paid by Ian Rotten, that also led to IWA hopefully ceasing operations for good, and in general learning about a lot of the various other incidents that have happened over the years that i’m not really go over here, (Really, with how infamous Ian is, it would probably take a simple Google search to find at least most of them) PLUS some various matches sprinkled in such as Eddie Kingston vs. Chris Hero from 2007 which is quite honestly one of my favorite matches of all time. So, because I have severe problems and I love turning anything at all possible into content, I've decided to start a project I'm currently calling The Rotten Archives. The name is a work in progress, obviously, but is inspired partially by snowboiiii’s 2005 watchproject where he watched every single wrestling show that occurred in the year 2005, and also by @MarilynOfDeath who is watching every CZW show ever. I also want to give a quick shoutout to Tom Green for his video on the 2004 Ted Petty Invitational (which you should check out, he’s really cool) as that was part of the inspiration for why I went with IWA. I will choose a completely random year of IWA:MS to watch and review every single show that has made tape that I can even FIND, talking about what I do and don’t enjoy from it in hopes of… well, to be honest, I don’t really have much of a goal with this. I guess you could say to fully understand the “lore” and “mythos” around IWA Mid South, but honestly I thought it would be funny to do this one night and it’s stuck around in my brain like a mildly catchy song. I’m still really trying to figure out how I'm gonna format this, there’s a high possibility that once I finish a year I might make a big YouTube video compiling everything within the year and talking about it but it really depends on how I'm personally feeling. There’s also a high chance that I could expand this into other indy companies if I get bored of just doing IWA:MS, hence why the title isn’t an “official” one. Hell, everything’s kinda just a complete crapshoot work in progress and I won’t fully know what I'm doing till I really get into the whole meat and bones of it, soooo…. I mean, I dunno, I hope you guys can understand?

To decide WHAT year I’ll exactly be watching I put a bunch of years that were available on the “Sugiura Holdman” VK channel (IWTV does not have a complete archive, I also do not have IWTV currently) on a wheel and spun to find out that i’ll first be watching 2005. A year featuring both a mildly interesting TPI lineup (some of the members pictured above) AND an interesting KOTDM lineup, AND Samoa Joe vs. Necro Butcher, AND a War Games match from the vague look I had on Cagematch! It’s honestly probably not the WORST choice I could’ve gotten? I will begin this project very soon, in the next couple of days and posting updates alongside hopefully gifs/clips of my watchthrough progress on Twitter and Bluesky (@emmosWRLD/@emmosfunnywrld respectively).

There's a total of four shows in January 05, most of them being over two hours so i'm gonna have a crapload on my plate. I hope you guys will be as entertained as I will be with this. Hopefully I'll have the fuller details of what ENTIRELY I wanna achieve with this soon.