Stuff from Schneider Comp #26

So I picked up the latest Schneider Comp along with the ECW and SMW sets last week. They reached my doorstep the other day, much to my merriment. No idea when I'll dive into the SMW and ECW sets, but the new Schneider Comp looks like it might be the best yet. I'm gonna try and talk about all of it. I'll probably fail or it'll take me seven years, but I'll at least TRY, and that's what's important.


Team Beyond v Aeroform (Beyond Wrestling, 11/5/10)

Pretty much a perfect popcorn match. I'd never seen any of these guys before. Never even heard of Beyond Wrestling. Basically, I had no idea what to expect out of this. For 18 minutes I wound up sitting with a giant smile on my face watching 4 guys run through a fucking truckload of crazy spots and bumps. Some of the shit they were doing was more goofy in a stupid way than in a cool way, but even the stupid stuff was new to me so it at least worked on a "well THAT was different" level. The lucha armdrag sequence at the start between Flip Kendrick and Chase Burnett was really nifty, and Kendrick is a guy that seems freakishly agile. He does a moonsault where he starts off sitting on the mat that looked cool as Hell. Wasn't really a "sitting moonsault," because he didn't exactly moonsault from his ass, but he started there at least. If there's one thing you take away from this it's that Chase Burnett is a fucking bump machine lunatic. He eats a knee RIGHT to the cheekbone from Louis Lyndon, and later on he takes a psychotic flat back flip bump off the apron to the concrete. Zane Silver has a bunch of forearm and backhand slap variations. Some of them look kind of whiffed and crummy, but I'm tickled he'd try them in the first place. Really, considering the sheer amount of stuff - and the difficulty of some of it - they were pulling out of their asses here, it's remarkable they managed to pull off pretty much every spot cleanly. This was a total blast.


LA Park v El Mesias (Mask v Hair) (AAA, 6/18/11)

Well fuck the world, this was absolutely incredible. I'll probably watch it again soon, but on first watch it really felt like the best match of the decade so far. Hell, I'd even put it up there with any of the MOTDC stuff from the last decade as well. Park looked like the best wrestler on earth here, taking insane bumps, bleeding like this was a fucking apuestas match, hurling sick chair shots, brawling like crazy, etc. He starts jawing with some lady in the front row, and they play off that even into the post-match. When she threw a cup in his face it looked like he would've murdered her if Mesias wasn't there to save her. The thing that really impressed me about this (other than the crazy bumps and blood and such) was the way they paced it. Within the first five minutes Mesias has taken two table bumps - one of which looked completely fucking nuts, btw - and by the time they hit the ten minute mark you're wondering what else they can do without it coming off as them just "doin' stuff." Match goes about 30 minutes total, and not once did it seem like they were running out of ideas or just moving from spot to spot. I mean, this was more about them doing crazy shit to each other (not in a spotfesty way) than straight lucha brawling (punch, kick, forehead biting, posting, etc.), but they totally made it work, and at the risk of getting carried away with hyperbole, it honestly felt like one of the most smartly paced matches I've ever seen. Never thought any of the table stuff felt out of place, either. I don't usually like it when guys bring tables and ladders and whatever else into blowoff matches, because a lot of the time it comes across as them just wanting to do cool looking shit. It feels pretty out of place in a hate feud. I watched a bunch of Jimmy Jacobs brawls from that early 2007 ROH run last week. The Cabana match from Chicago and the Whitmer brawls were all crazy, but I started to lose interest once they brought out the tables and ladders. I'd much rather they just kept stabbing each other in the head with rail-road spikes. The reason the falls count anywhere match from Liverpool was my favourite of all those crazy brawls is because they stuck to just beating the ever loving dogshit out of each other (and Whitmer blades his forehead about 15 times) and never bothered with the props. This has several nutso table bumps, but all of them felt like a case of one guy trying to kill the other. The fact they looked totally badass was just a bonus for the people watching this massacre. Park setting up a table in the middle of the ring only to be speared through it was kind of contrived, sure, but he gets up on the table and starts dancing like a shithead. In amongst all this carnage, he still takes the time to do his dance. It might've been contrived, but it was the best set up to a contrived table bump you'll see. Oh and the actual spot looked motherfucking spectacular. And Hell, I even liked the bullshit finish. Just a phenomenal match; maybe the best in the history of the company.