WRESTLEMASSACRE Review–You Can’t Tap Out When You’re Dead
Directed by Brad Twigg
Written by Julio Bana Fernandez and Matthew Furman
Starring Richie Acevedo, Tony Atlas, Julio Bana Fernandez
For fans of backyard wrestling looking to seek out the latest B-movie find in regional horror, Brad Twigg’s latest may be right up your alley. Filmed entirely in Martinsburg, West Virginia, Wrestlemassacre is the seventh indie film from Fuzzy Monkey Films and their Troma-inspired collective. If you’re tuning in to learn some of the basics of ring fighting or to see some questionable nudity you will not be disappointed. But as you may have surmised from the comic intestine ripping poster above, the real reason to watch is to witness the brutal kills that special makeup effects lead Marcos Koch (We Are Still Here) and his team have conjured up. Amazingly, the massive amount of practical FX wind up being less memorable than the eccentric, down-and-out characters found in the film.
Suffering from massive delusions of grandeur, a middling landscaper (Richie Acevedo aka The Cuban Assassin) has fantasies about becoming a professional wrestler. With the perfect physique of a late seventies heel that probably drinks his own weight in beer, Acevedo can’t even get the local wrestling community to stop beating him up and endlessly laughing in his face. Couple that with an overbearing mother and clients reporting him for being a peeping Tom, and he finally snaps. Donning a unitard that could have been stolen out of Andre the Giant’s closet, a town wide murder spree begins. In a creative twist, a self-made Championship belt is made entirely out of human flesh!
Every body part is ripped out and off in this movie at some point: fingers, tongues, faces, spines…it’s a lot. The initial charge of seeing all of these seemingly endless practical effects done really well on a micro-budget sadly dissipates fairly quickly. Repeated shots of victims running around in front lawns being ripped apart at the seams is fine for awhile but it just doesn’t stop!
Scenes that feel like they should be part of a finale wind up on a never-ending loop where it feels like footage of previous gags are just shown all over again. You just want the revenge to end because the killer just isn’t relatable anymore. For something called Wrestlemassacre to actually succeed in making you root for the main character, it’s a disappointment that the whole bloody affair turns into a bit of a slog.
Sure, there are a lot of other options now and Wrestlemassacre is far from perfect but it really is worth watching. Well, at least for the first 10 kills or so…
Wrestlemassacre is now available on DVD and On Demand from Wild Eye Releasing and October Coast.
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Wrestlemassacre
Summary
With a cast of eccentric actors and a surprisingly funny script, strangely, the movie’s weakest moments are the seemingly endless sequences of practical effects that transform a low budget gem into an uninspired gorefest.
