‘Lucha Underground’ Review (July 11th 2018)
Welcome to this week’s Lucha Underground review on Nerdly. This week, we have some excellent action with Joey Ryan and Mil Muertes, to name but a few. I’m Nathan Favel and we should get right to the action!
Match #1: Matanza Cueto beat Cortez Castro
My Take: This was a quick squash that Matanza won. You could piss farther than this match went.
Match #2: Ivelisse beat Joey Ryan for a Gift of the Gods Medallion
My Take: This was a good match and an infinitely better inter-gender match than either of the Asuka/James Ellsworth matches from WWE Smackdown. It’s remarkable what happens when you take a match seriously. Ryan is no stranger to working with women, as he had a great run in PWG with Candice LaRae as a tag team. I would wager that Lucha Underground is set to be the most innovative wrestling league of the year, precisely because their inter-gender matches are actually competitive and interesting, like this one. You can expect a nice meshing of lucha and technical, all while Ryan tried to use his penis to gain a victory, which was denied him by the winner, Ivelisse.
Match #3: The Mack beat Son of Havoc and Killshot in a Triple Threat Match where the winner and the un-pinned each won a Gift of the Gods Medallion
My Take: This was a good match that was almost ruined by the stipulation that only the one who was pinned didn’t get a medallion. There should have just been the one medallion available to win, but they chose to push a lame dissention story in the midst of the match with Killshot. The idea here was that the Lucha Underground Trios Tag Team Champions have been trying to deal with Killshot’s new ego, which didn’t figure into the action as much as you’d think, but enough to mention, I guess. The action was mostly just one good stunt after another, which makes for exciting television but shallow wrestling. The Mack, or Willie Mack to those who don’t know, was the star here and remains one of wrestling’s most interesting athletes. The finish was that The Mack was not sure of who to pin and chose Killshot, which leads to the dissention angle/story after the match was over.
Match #4: Main Event – Mil Muertes (w/ Catrina) beat Cage for a Gift of the Gods Medallion
My Take: This was the best match of the show and an excellent one, overall. These two worked very well together, making this a hard-hitting match between two people who are looking to break on through the glass ceiling of professional wrestling. In a departure from the earlier triple threat match, Mil and Cage built their match more methodically, with little moves transforming into big moves as time passed. Mil felt like the more complete character out in the ring, but Cage feels like he has more momentum in professional wrestling, which probably means that he should have won. The finish came about as each man destroyed the three referees signed to Lucha Underground, leaving each man to hit more big moves on each other. As Cage was ready to decimate Mil, Pentagon Dark, who was hiding in the crowd, attacked Cage and gave Mil Muertes his opening to get the win and the medallion.
News of the Night:
- Pentagon Dark came across as a huge star tonight. My measurement of star power is not the WWE method watching some guy walk through an air-port, but is one of stripping a wrestlers down to the bone and seeing if he/she is still interesting (like Wolverine in “Logan”). Pentagon came out in only his civilian attire, which was a muscle shirt and track pants, as well as his mask and make-up, and felt like an even bigger star than usual. It’s no wonder why Pentagon has become one of the biggest wrestling stars in the world today.
- Catrina wouldn’t lick Mil Muertes’s hand, which is apparently a bad thing. Catrina came back from the dead, so maybe she is aligned with some new, incredible force… or maybe it’s just a bad angle.
- Paul London and his goofy friends killed Mascarita Sagrada because Killer Kross, who lives in a dark, evil forest, told them to. If Lucha Underground runs an episode where the last minute of the show is just Bob Newhart waking up during the night to tell his wife every-thing that just happened on that episode, is that plagiarism or just lazy writing?
- The commentary with Matt Striker and Vampiro subtly mentioned violence against women during the Ivelisse/Joey Ryan match. It was some-thing about the “Hit her harder…it’s good for business, right?” conversation between the two that clued me in that these two might not be as big of fans of inter-gender wrestling as I am.
Final Verdict: As far as the wrestling was concerned, this was an excellent card, but the bad story-lines make this feel like a WWE-lite kind of thing.
