1. Crazy Monkey" Jun Kasai vs. "Mr. Insanity" Toby Klein - No Ropes Barbed-Wire Lobster Pit Match - 1
2. Mad Man Pondo vs. "The Deranged One" Coke Hane - Fantastic Four Match - 6
Wait, they just dumped live lobsters into a kiddie pool? WTF!? Where is PETA at when you need them? Not much happened here, the typical rake your opponent's face with a strand of wire spot, etc. Kasai dumps the lobsters out onto the mat and gives Klein a German suplex onto them for the finish. What a waste of a plane ticket. Post-match Jun tossed a lobster across the gym to its death. This is really tasteless. I don't even want to comment on the backstage footage and what 2 Tuff Tony did to a lobster.
What's a Fantastic Four match? No superheroes just different types of fans in each corner of the ring, including your favorites like oscillating, box fan, etc. Hane is a big dude wearing the old outfit of Nailz. Pretty fun crowd brawl with some nice shots (they pulled off one of the handrails from the bleachers and bludgeoned each other) and Pondo wheeling a handicapped man in a wheelchair over and backing it up over Hane's throat. Some of the fan bumps were nice visuals, too; Coke getting his head pushed into a moving blade and it slicing him open, Coke swinging a damned home run swing (any MLB scouts see this?) with a tall fan and nearly decapitating Pondo, and Pondo DDT'ing Hane off the buckles onto four box fans with no fronts lying on four steel chairs, etc. I've seen so many of these low-rent death match tournaments and it's so rare the gimmickry, violence, innovation, and actual competitiveness can actually come across and meld together, you're usually lucky to get one, maybe two of those attributes on display, but I felt these guys exceeded my expectations and helped wipe away the memory of that first repulsive match. Definitely check out the Fantastic Four match just make sure Franklin Richards is already in bed before you turn it on.
3. Corporal Robinson vs. "Psycho Shooter" Drake Younger - Garden of Eden Match - 4
4. JC Bailey vs. 2 Tuff Tony - Fans Bring The Weapons Match - 5
Next up a good bloodletting with all sorts of gardening equipment, garden shears, a weed eater (no, not JC Bailey's homemade pot brownies) that took Robinson 5 min. to get started, a rose bush, and a gigantic cactus. Younger ate a chair shot that surely made him forget his little league baseball team's name. Pretty fun and didn't wear out its welcome although disappointed Younger didn't advance. I liked the post-match promos by both men too.
I'll give the West Virginia fans credit -- they made some outrageous homemade weapons. Tony turns Bailey's forehead into beef jerky than douses it with salt and lemon juice. I heard JC did really good on his test later that week, you know, the hepatitis test? He got two A's, a B, and a C. Announcer sounds like he's on meth and calls 2 Tuff "Toby Klein". All sorts of vile and painful bumps that I won't bother listing but suffice to say if you're into that sort of brutality there's lots on display here. Props to JC, kid deserved better, RIP man, but back then this guy was game for whatever and Tony obliged. Bailey got to kickout of the 2 Tuff Driver onto some light tubes. Pretty creative finish, enough for me to toss it an extra point: they had this huge structure of 20+ chairs outside the ring and were teasing a superplex off of the top onto it, but they fooled us all (and Tony's chiropractor) when Bailey reversed it and superlexed Tony off of the top to the other side onto the concrete! Holy shit, indeed! What a fucking bump. Stay for the post-match replays, too, as the closest camera shot of that bump captures audio that sounds like a whale being tossed off the Eiffel Tower.
5. Semiinal: Mad Man Pondo vs. Jun Kasai - Electrified Lighttubes Match - 5
6. Semifinal: Corporal Robinson vs. JC Bailey - Ghetto Shoes Barefoot Thumbtack Match - 2
Pondo and Kasai started off with some trite lightbulb stuff but Kasai would go on to do one of the damnedest things I've seen in recent years. Kasai did a balcony dive from about 30ft. in the air onto Pondo who was on a table and covered with a whole bundle of electrified lightbulb tubes that were lit up. I must have replayed that damn spot 20+ times. So awesome. Lots of times in these gnarly matches it's hard to correlate and tell exactly what damage came from what bump as everyone ends up so bloody but as soon as Kasai arose from that unreal spot you could see glass shrapnel all over his chest like a supreme pizza overflowing with toppings. Pondo, being the booker of this company, booked himself very strong, he survived that, and later, kicked out of an elaborate spot that should have ended the match, a superplex through an electrified glass log cabin. This had some outrageous moments and I won't soon forget that epic balcony dive.
Next match was sort of middling, it's hard to do much when you're barefoot in a bunch of thumbtacks. The gimmick was you had to climb a ladder to retrieve some tennis shoes that were hung-up "inner-city ghetto" style. The finish was atrocious as Robinson finally gets the shoes then immediately gets beat by a... Russian leg sweep into the 'tacks? Well, post-match he put over JC stealing "my move" and after looking it up the Boot Camp is a Cobra clutch legsweep he does but that still doesn't mean I'll buy it as a believable finish.
7. Da Fucking finals: Jun Kasai vs. JC Bailey - Barbed-Wire Cage/Bed of Nails Match - 4
The Bed of Nails sure didn't look like fun to bump in. At this point both guys were dead and as a result this wasn't much of a match. Some real sloppy stuff, Kasai half-assed it on a few things including a backdrop into the nails and a basic German supelx later. The feel good story would have been Bailey winning it all but Kasai won and never returned to defend his crown although several other BJW guys have competed in later MoP tournaments. Post-match Pondo screams "this is our WrestleMania!". Just let that soak in for a minute...
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