Revisiting WCW Spring Stampede 1994!

Taking a look back at one of the greatest pro wrestling pay-per-views of all-time - from Cactus Jack getting concussed with a snow shovel to Flair and Steamboat putting on an unsung classic to AARON GODDAMN NEVILLE, this show has it all!

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Well, it's WrestleMania week, which means Internet Law requires me to publish at least one rasslin' related article. Sure, it would be extremely easy (and lazy as a motherfucker) to just pick a random WM from years gone by and give it the old play-by-play treatment, but that's way too predictable. In fact, we being the supreme outside-the-box-thinkers we are, we here at The Internet Is In America has decided to celebrate the biggest WWE spectacle of the year by turning our attention to their old arch-rival ... and what may very well be the single greatest pay-per-view event they ever produced.

Mid-1993 to mid-1994 WCW has always been "peak WCW" in my eyes. Indeed, the run from Beach Blast '93 to Bash at the Beach '94 might just be the best one year run any North American rasslin' promotion had in the 1990s, if we're talking about sheer in-ring product. From the time Ric Flair returned to the company to the moment Hulk Hogan entered the fray, just about every WCW PPV was AAA material, and for my money, no WCW PPV represents the greatness of the epoch more than Spring Stampede '94.

Simply put, this shindig from the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago-Town has it goddamn all. We've got Brian Pillman and Steve Regal putting on an awesome-as-usual TV title technical showcase. We've got Dustin Rhodes and some dude who looks like a child molester making each other bleed buckets in a Bunkhouse Brawl. We've got Cactus Jack, Man Mountain Rock and the fuckin' Nasty Boys putting on one of the single greatest garbage matches in the history of any promotion ever. We've got Big Van Vader and the Big Boss Man just fucking whaling on each other in an outstanding flab-fest. And for the main course? Oh, nothing major ... just Ric Flair taking on mother-fuckin' god-damn RICKY STEAMBOAT in a 30-minute-plus war of attrition for the World Heavyweight Championship.

Yeah ... you don't need me to tell you this thing's going to be great, do you? Well, how about we cut out the jibber-jabber, fire up our old Turner Home Video copy of the show and take a trip down memory lane, why don't we?

We begin the program with Mean Gene Okerlund saying the Chicago crowd is "hanging from the rafters," which is probably untrue because that's almost assuredly a safety code violation. Here to sing the national anthem (of the U.S., duh) is AARON GODDAMN NEVILLE, who is rocking a leopard print vest, a ton of gold, a giant assed birthmark over his right eye and some fucking HUGE beefy biceps, thus looking more like an actual wrestler than 95 percent of the current WWE roster.

Pulling commentary duties tonight is Tony Schiavone and Bobby Heenan. Proving Chicago, once and for all, is a collection of classless assholes, these motherfuckers have the audacity to boo The Brain. Well, fuck them.

Our first match of the evening is Johnny B. Badd (dressed like Cowboy Curtis from Pee Wee's Playhouse, for some reason) taking on Diamond Dallas Page, back when he was more fat than muscle and still couldn't read. You know, Johnny B. Badd has to be the single blackest-looking white dude in the history of melanin. DDP gets clotheslined out of the ring early. DDP hits his foe with a great looking back body suplex and locks in a crossface. Badd counters it into a wristlock. DDP escapes but Badd hits him with a series of arm drags and you can audibily hear Page say "god damn it" on camera. DDP locks in a guillotine, but Badd bridges out of it and hits a fucking BOSS looking modified Ace Crusher, but it's only good for a two count. DDP with elbows in the corner, followed by a belly-to-back suplex. DDP with a gutwrench suplex into a gutbuster. Man, Page had some pretty good looking suplexes back in the day. Page tries to crush Badd's head with a neck wrench.  Man, Kimberly Page sure was flatter than I remember. Badd rolls out of the way and drops DDP with an inverted drop and a clotheslines. There's a back body drop and a pair of flying headscissors. A discus punch sends Page reeling to the outside - where Badd splashes him with, of all things, a fucking' plancha. Badd goes up top and lands a sunset flip on the follow-through for the fairly anticlimactic three-count.  

Well, all in all, that wasn't too bad. Both guys showed off some pretty inventive moves, and the fact that WCW actually had Badd coming out to a ripoff of  The Dukes of Hazzard theme song for a while makes me all kinds of happy. Not great by any stretch, but still a decent enough  [** 1/2] opener. (Oh, and a reminder - unlike that closeted homosexual Dave Meltzer, we here at The Internet Is In America actually has a scientific rubric to explain our star ratings, which you can evaluate anytime you want right here.)

Mean Gene Okerlun is with Jesse "The Body" Ventura, and goddamn, does he look ridiculous with that chrome dome and ponytail. Holy shit, I totally forgot that even back in 1994 WCW had Michael Buffer doing announcement gigs. Anyhoo, up next, we've got Lord Steven Regal (with Sir William) taking on Brian Pillman in a TV Championship match. Fuck, how long DID Regal have the TV title? It seems like everytime I watch a WCW PPV from 1993 to 1995, he's the perma-television-title holder. Anyway, we've got a 15-minute time limit to work with here, so be ready to pace yourself. Pillman goes after Regal early, and Pillman slaps the taste out of the Limey's mouth and we all cheer. Regal reels to the outside following an arm drag. When Pillman pursues him on the outside, Regal Pearl Harbors  ... uh, Boston Massacres him, I guess would be the better historical analogy? Back in the ring and Pillman takes Regal down with an armdrag. Then he starts slamming his arm against the metal ring post a couple of times. Pillman with some NASTY chops in the corner, to which Regal responds with an equally nasty looking European uppercut. Regal wrenches the arm and Pillman keeps slapping him. Pillman goes for a Lou Thesz press and Regal counters it with a NASTY bridging suplex.  Man, Regal is getting all kinds of heat from this Chicago audience. Regal looks like he's going for a powerbomb, of all things, but Pillman uses the ring ropes to counter it into a school boy. Regal kicks out and does a leg whip into a SICK STF variation. Regal with more European uppercuts. Pillman goes for a backslide, but Regal counters it into a muffler/crossbow stretch. Shit, that looks painful. Pillman escapes and breaks out the slaps again. Regal goes for a gutwrench powerbomb, but Pullman counters it with a hurrancanranna (but not before he conks HIMSELF on the top of the head in the process.) Regal does his patented "Regal roll" into an abdominal stretch on the ground. Now Regal's working a modified crossbow submission. Goddamn this stuff is great. Pillman gets out by absolutely CLOBBERING Regal with stiff punches, then Regal says "fuck you" and locks Brian in a single leg crab. And there's the Indian death lock. Shit, Steven Regal fucking rules. Five minutes to go until the bell sounds. Pillman back to his feet, and he drops Regal with a knife-edge chop. Regal uses a half nelson to keep Pillman grounded. More Pillman slaps. Regal fires back with some vicious elbows and a "desperation headbutt." Heenan advises Regal "pull Pillman's hair until it's straight." Pillman lands a dropkick and both men take a while to get back to their feet. Regal looks for a Boston crab but Pillman flips him over. And there's Pillman with the enziguri. Pillman goes for a monkey flip, Regal misses the fist drop and Pillman drop kicks him with a minute left. Pillman with a backbody drop and punches in bunches in the corner. Regal catches Pillman in a bear hug, they tumble over the top rope, Sir William takes a swing at Brian, and both men make it back into the ring right at zero. So yep - that means we've got ourselves a good old fashioned 15-minute draw, kiddos. 

Yeah, the ending was kinda' bullshitty and there were some botches here and there, but for the most part, that shit was entertaining as fuck. You really wouldn't expect the styles of Pillman and Regal to gel so well, but they actually put together a solid little, ground-based technical showcase there, complete with some of the stiffest striking you'll probably see in WCW outside of a Vader match. World-changing, it might not be, but I still had a hoot with this one. Let's give it a very, very solid [*** 1/2] and carry on our merry way, why don't we?

Of course, allowing another dude to smash him in the face for real with a snow shovel isn't even in the top ten list of stupid/dangerous/awesome things Mick Foley has let people do to him for money...

Up next, we've got a falls-count-anywhere "Chicago streetfight" between The Nasty Boys and the team of Cactus Jack and Maxx Payne (a.k.a., fuckin' Man Mountain Rock.) OK, I vividly remember this one from like three or four different compilation DVDs. LOL at Payne hailing "from a State of Euphoria" and Cactus literally wearing a tee-shirt reading "Superdad" to the brawl. Unsurprisingly, the Nastys go after Cactus and Payne before they even make it down the entrance ramp, and the carnage, it is ON. Payne spine busts Jerry Sags while Brian Knobbs goes after Cactus with a sawed-off pool cue. Oh shit, now Cactus has it and its time for Knobbs to chew lumber. Jack sends Knobbs over the top rope with the fattest clothesline you've ever seen in your life. Meanwhile, Sags beats the shit out of Payne with a metal folding chair. Fuck, this feels so comfy. Now Cactus has the chair and he's whaling on Knobbs. Payne hits an elbow drop on Sags. Repeatedly. Knobbs clotheslines Cactus INTO the ring. He's still bonking him with the pool cue. Sags does a one foot plancha off the guardrail onto Payne. Heenan makes a joke about Aaron Neville, which FINALLY makes sense in context now. Cactus and Sags are still going at it. Payne throws Knobbs into a souvenir stand and Knobbs clobbers him with a plastic garbage can and throws a table on top of him. We go split-screen so we can watch Cactus bite Jerry's face in the ring. Cactus goddamn WAFFLES Sags with a chair and Heenan makes ANOTHER joke about Aaron Neville. Payne grabs Knobbs and body slams him through a whole bunch of WCW merchandise. Then he tries to cram a Sting tee-shirt down Knobbs' throats, because goddamn it, back in the '90s the wrestling business knew how to do violence RIGHT. Now Knobbs is using the metal fragments of the table to beat up Payne, as Cactus gets launched over the guardrail like a 300-pound cruise missile that votes Democrat. The merchandise stand is absolutely destroyed at this point. Now Sags is bashing Payne OVER THE HEAD with a table and it makes the most satisfying "PLONK!" sound every time the balsa wood connects with skull. Cactus see-saws a table on top of Sags before setting it up on the ramp way. But LOL, here comes Knobbs with a fucking snow shovel to El Kabong him. Now Payne grabs it and fucking wrecks him with it. Then Cactus tries to piledrive Knobbs on the table but since combined they weigh about 600 pounds physics says "nah, fuck this shit" and the thing disintegrates underneath them. Knobbs back body drops Cactus off the ramp (that's a good six or seven foot fall, by the way) and Knobbs picks up the snow shovel and literally launches it at Cactus' carcass like a lawn dart. And to capstone all this mayhem, Knobbs picks up the snow shovel like the Sword of Damocles and fucking SMASHES Cactus in the face with it one more time before scooping up the 1,2,3. And because this match isn't awesome enough already, Sacks picks up the broken table, gets a running start and El Kabongs Payne ONE more time after the bell, just 'cause.

Shit, that match was INCREDIBLE. That has to be the most insane pre-ECW brawling the Big Two put on in the 1990s, and even now it's one of the greatest PLANNED train wrecks in the history of 'rasslin. The whole thing barely went ten minutes and these four fuckers didn't waste a second cramming as much over-the-top violence in there as the could. This stuff was super-entertaining in 1994, just as awe-inspiring in 2004, every bit as fun in 2014 and I'm pretty sure it's going to STILL hold up come 2024, 2034 and 2044, too. Yeah, it's hardly anything more than a glorified garbage bout, but it's easily one of the greatest garbage bouts ever. Call me crazy, but I think this is - from start to finish, every nanosecond in-between accounted for - one of the best WCW matches of the 1990s. Hell, maybe even top ten, pending I ever get around to rewatching a whole bunch of shit from the early '90s someday. I'd feel VERY comfortable giving that last one a stellar [**** 3/4] rating, and I'm not even being ironic about it, either.

Next up, we've got a bout with the United States title on the line. Out first is the challenger, THE GREAT MUTA, who comes out wearing  gaudy red sequin robe. And his adversary is the reigning, defending champion, STUNNING STEVE AUSTIN, accompanied to the ring by Col. Rob Parker (get it, because Elvis' manager was named Col. TOM Parker?) Shit, Austin's music was awesome. Of course, he still has hair at this point. LOL at Bobby Heenan talking shit about the Japanese owning Radio City Music Hall and "three quarters" of the rest of the country. Muta does some spin kicks and The Brain is gobsmacked by how big the Japanese grappler is. Muta with a headlock takedown. And there's the clean break. Austin with some hard right hands and a leap frog, but Muta counters with an abdominal stretch. The fans keep chanting for "Muta," which is pretty rare for a WCW crowd in the mid 1990s. I mean, shit, shouldn't they be screaming "U-S-A!" at the top of their lungs by now? Muta with a suplex and another headlock takedown. Austin with a backdrop and Muta counters it into a suplex. Now Bobby is saying Aaron Neville lip-synched the national anthem. Muta still has Austin in a side headlock. Muta with a shoulderblock, Austin leapfrogs and Muta hits him with a dropkick. Austin counters with a headscissors submission - which looks for all the tea in China that he's making Muta suck his dick on live television. Austin breaks the hold and rolls to the outside, where Col. Rob fans him with his slave owner hat. He grabs the tights on a school boy (I didn't know Steve was Catholic!) but Muta counters with a wristlock. Now Aaron Neville is sitting beside Bobby the Brain. Heenan, of course, acts like he's the best singer in history now that he's within earshot. Parker takes a couple of free shots at Muta after Austin dumps him to the outside. It looks like Muta's face is busted up, but since he's wearing red face paint, it's really hard to tell. Austin with a running elbow off the apron, then he makes Muta eat guardrail. LOL at Tony S. bringing up "winning Battle Bowl" as one of Muta's greatest accomplishments. Schiavone says the owner of the Blackhawks is in the house tonight. That's our cue for an extended abdominal stretch sequence. Heenan says the move doesn't look too impressive on TV, but he assures the audience it still hurts like the dickens IRL. Muta finally gets a rope break, but he whiffs on a dropkick. There's Austin with a fist drop off the middle turnbuckle. Then he chokes Muta on the ropes with his boot. Heenan makes a crack about Hillary Clinton as Muta drops Austin with a spin kick. Muta with a suplex and a standing dropkick. He goes up top and, of course, Austin dodges the attack. Austin goes for "The Hollywood and Vine," this really shitty look toe-hold, which Muta easily escapes from. Then Muta STUN GUNS Austin! Steve scrambles to a neutral corner and Muta hits him with his famous cartwheel elbow smash. Muta puts Austin on the top rope and almost breaks his own neck sticking the hurrancanrana. The crowd goes wild after Muta slugs Parker, but OOPS! He accidentally back body drops Austin over the top rope, so Muta gets disqualified. Still, that doesn't stop him from hitting a slingshot plancha on both of 'em just for the hell of it immediately after the DQ verdict is announced.

Well, that was a bit of a letdown. The hot crowd kept it interesting, buy by and large it just felt like both Austin and Muta were going through the motions. Far from being a bad match, I'd just say it was rather unremarkable, all things considered - let's give it [** 1/4] and keep chugging along.

The "International World Title" is on the line as Sting does battle with Rick Rude. Obviously, "The Man Called Sting" gets a huge pop from the crowd. And Rude gets booed, but goddamn, how anybody could boo entrance music THIS tremendous is simply beyond me. Of course, Rude immediately demands his music be cut so he can make fun of the crowd for being fat white trash, but he's interrupted by Harley Race. He says he's here on behalf of Vader and it doesn't matter who wins, his man's gonna' kick his ass regardless. This leads to Sting - rather unheroically - clobbering Race out of the blue and back body dropping Rude over the top rope. Rude begs for mercy and Sting - in these bad ass black and white pants - mercilessly pummels him anyway. Sting gets a two on a suplex. Nick Bockwinkel joins the announce team, even though he literally doesn't say a goddamn word. Sting with a headlock from the north-south position. Sting with a standing scoop slam and an elbow drop on the rebound. Two of them, actually. OK, make it three, just 'cause he's a fuckin' showboat. Sting goes back to the north-south choke. LOL at Heenan saying Sting has a Bart Simpson hairdo, because it's literally fuckin' true. Sting still working the neck crank. Rude crotches Sting on the top rope and clothelines him to the floor before. But it's not a disqualification, because like WCW ever gave a fuck about providing a logically consistent product. Rude slams Sting's head on the ramp and tosses him back into the ring. Fuck, Rude had some great punches. And his hairy, ripped abs are just so manly - not that I'm gay or anything like that. Uh, no homo. Now Rude is shaking is dick at the audience, because that's what real men do, damn it. Rude works a camel clutch. Sting goes for an electric chair drop and Rude counters it into a roll, but then Sting counters THAT into a roll, but he only gets two. Rude back on the offensive. Now he has Sting in a standing sleeper. The ref starts doing the old "I'm going to raise your arm three times" chestnut but Rude actually breaks the hold before the third drop. Apparently, he wants to beat Sting standing. He feeds Sting a couple of forearm shots but then Sting starts to, uh, Sting up? Sting lands an inverted atomic drop, then he botches a regular atomic drop. Clothelines galore. Rude lands really iffy on his leg on a backbody drop, and an errant Stinger Splash wipes out the ref. Still, the official being incapicated doesn't prevent the Stinger from locking Rude in the Scorpion Death Lock. Harley Race tries to interfere but Sting whups his ass. Then Vader comes out and Sting kicks his ass, but it allows Rude to clip Sting's knee like a no-good sonofabitch and then Race comes in with a chair and accidentally El Kabongs Rude, allowing Sting to pick up an easy 1,2,3 to win the International Title. 

Not the best match these two have had, but it was pretty entertaining for what it was ... and wasn't. The screwball finish took forever to come to fruition, though, so I reckon that's worth detracting a quarter star. Still, it's better than average fare - let's give it an admirable [** 3/4] and keep chugging along.

Shit ... with guns like those, Aaron Neville would be one of the most swoll wrestlers in the WWE today.

Now it's time for Dustin Rhodes vs. Bunkhouse Bunk in a Bunkhouse Match - which I suppose makes more sense than having them fight in a "Dustin Rhodes Match." Bunkhouse Buck, by the way, is Jimmy Golden, and to his credit, he literally looks like a dirty scummy chi-mo IRL, so props to him for playing the gimmick to its fullest. Also, because he's managed by Col. Rob Parker, the keep showing this one guy in the audience holding a bucket of KFC chicken and  - surprise - he's actually white. Dustin Rhodes makes a bee line for Bunk, literally flying over the top rope to give that motherfucker a clothesline before the bell even sounds. Now it's time for some heavy duty punches. Both guys are wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots, by the way. Also - I have no goddamn clue what a "bunkhouse" is, so don't even bother asking. Oh, and they also have their fists taped and one coal-miner's glove on the hand of their choosing. LOL at Rhodes wearing a tee-shirt that just says "Texas." Rhodes pokes Bunk in the eyes but he crashes and burns on a flying crossbody. Col. Rob chokes him on the outside, then Bunk clobbers his ass with one-by-two, which is a lot like a two-by-four, except, uh, only half as much. Rhodes does a full 360 rotation on a Buck clothesline. Then he chokes that honky motherfucker like a motherfucker. Rhodes takes a wild swing and falls down, allowing Buck to stomp the dog shit out of Rhodes with his cowboy boots. Oh shit, Rhodes is bleeding buckets. Huh - the more I look at Buck, the more he kinda' reminds me of Kenny Omega. Shit, he COULD be his dad, for all we know. Rhodes kicks Buck in the face a few times and falls back down. He reaches into his britches and pulls out a white piece of paper. Heenan wonders if it's his will. Nope, it's that good old fashioned "white powder," because apparently it's impossible to make "baby powder" sound threatening as a weapon. Buck pulls off his belt and starts lashing Rhodes like a runaway slave and Bobby makes a funny about how if Dusty had beat the shit out of his kid when he was younger, he probably wouldn't be in this mess. And there's Bunk with the old "kick to the cojones" chestnut. Man, this stuff is just grimy as fuck. Buck punts Dustin in the stomach. Repeatedly. Buck gets stuck on the top turnbuckle and that's our cue for Dustin to punt the shit out of that asshole. And there's the elbow smash to the noggin. Rhodes pulls off his belt and he clobbers Buck something wicked. Rhodes takes his cowboy boot off, climbs the top rope and hits Buck right in the middle of the forehead with it. Uh, wouldn't it have been easier ... and more effective ... to just jump on his head like Low-Ki or something? Rhodes rips Buck's shirt off and starts whipping Buck like Kunta Kinte. And there's another clothesline over the top rope. Now Buck is bleeding like a stuck pig. Heenan keeps talking about how much he likes "this brand of wrestling." Buck has a foreign object of some kind. He misses swinging it and Rhodes climbs the turnbuckle and elbows Buck in the head ten times, shakes his dick in his face, clotheslines him in the adjacent corner and bulldogs that fucker right out of his shoes. Parker interferes and Rhodes suplexes him into the ring and starts whipping him. Buck sneaks up behind Dustin for a schoolboy (just like Michael Jackson would!) but he only gets a two. Rhodes and Buck have a GREAT brawl in the middle of the ring and Dustin puts Buck down with another elbow smash. Parker gives Dustin a pair of brass knuckles, and of course, he clocks Rhodes right on the kisser to score the easy pinfall.

Well, that was some glorious sleaze right there, wasn't it? There are better all out brawls to be found from WCW - hell, including the Jack/Payne vs. Nastys donnybrook from earlier in the show - but this is still an immensely fun little bloodbath. It's *probably* one of the top 20 matches of Rhodes career and easily the best one of Bunkhouse Buck's career. Hell, come to think of it, I'm not sure I've seen *any* other Bunkhouse Buck match, the more I think about it. Let's call it a solid [****] and soldier forth.

Jesse Ventura is in the locker room with Rick Rude and he still looks goddamn ridiculous with that skullet-ponytail combination. Rude and Vader get into a shoving match and the Nastys have to break it up and we come THIS close to seeing Jerry Sags' testicles on live television. 

Up next, it's THE BOSS vs. VADER. And yes, "The Boss" is indeed THE BIG BOSS MAN. I'm pretty sure this is close to being the last match he wrestled under with that moniker, since the WWF was REALLY anxious to file copyright infringement suits back then. Anyhoo, this is billed as a "Gigantic Grudge Match," because why not? Vader, of course, fucking rules as always, so I've nothing to add to that, I suppose. Harley Race holds up the Boss and Vader goes to splash him on the ramp and, of course, the Boss ducks and Vader creams his own manager. The Boss (in a snazzy all black uniform) clotheslines Vader into the ring and he big  boots Vader back OUT of the ring because this is all about getting as much man meat and flubber flying around as possible. They brawl on the ramp some more and Vader drops the Boss with a hard jab. Then he slams Boss back into the ring. He takes a running start, jumps over the top rope and the Boss gets his knees up on the attempted splash. The Boss lands a couple of elbow drops and he clotheslines Vader to the outside again. Vader takes a WILD bump over the guardrail into the front row of fans. Then the Boss drops Vader on the rail, throat first. Man, WCW NEVER let anybody fuck up Vader this bad. It's hard to believe the company wanted to push the Boss Man THAT much, huh? The Boss with a headbutt, then he slings Vader into the turnbuckle post. Boss goes for a body slam and he gets it. LOL at Tony S. saying Vader weighs 450 pounds. Then they have an AWESOME slug fest. Goddamn, Vader had some brutal looking punches. The Boss takes a fucked up backdrop to the outside. Vader is bleeding heavily from his eye. God damn it, Schiavone is STILL talking about Aaron Neville. Vader suplexes the Boss back into the ring. VADER SPLASH, YOU MOTHER OF FUCKERS. Vader with more clubbing blows in the corner. Good, his jabs were the tits. Boss starts punching back and he connects on a sidewalk slam. The Boss lands a clothesline and Vader gets a boot to the face, followed by a fucking GRISLY lariat. Vader's eye looks like something out of a horror movie at this point. Boss launches Vader off the top rope and goes for a superplex. He botches it into a DDT then he climbs up the top rope hisself. He tries to clothesline him but he hooks it into a weird, shitty looking DDT at the very end. He goes up top again and this time Vader converts it into a power slam. Fuck, this match rules. VADER SPLASH, BUT THE BOSS KICKS OUT. Vader goes to the well again. AND THEN HE HITS A GODDAMN TEN OUT OF TEN MOONSAULT FOR THE 1, 2, 3. God damn it, that thing almost brought a tear to my eye it was so awesome. In the post-fight, the Boss grabs a nightstick and goes Rodney King on Harley Race, resulting in Nick Bockwinkel chastising him for excessive force. Meanwhile, Vader's bloody, flabby ass celebrates in the ring with all of his fat rolls jiggling and it's still freakin' awesome. In the locker room, Bockwinkel chews out the Boss for being a bad sport and LITERALLY takes his name away from him.

Yep. Nothing says "I'm an accomplished adult male" quite like holding up a KFC bucket and flipping off people pretending to hurt each other for a living.

Now that's the kind of wrestling that just don't exist no more. None of this flashy, soyboy, hippity-flippity bullshit, just two big old boys smacking the tar out of each other and bleeding buckets for the LOVE OF THE ART. Vader goddamn rules no matter what and when the Boss was allowed to go, he could flat out GO. A match of the year it may not be, but there's no denying this one was a fun as shit [*** 3/4] caliber match.

Time for the main event. Ricky Steamboat comes out to his awesome WCW music even though he's still wearing that stupid WWF "The Dragon" costume with the lizard wings and the whole fire-breathing shtick. And in the most '90s thing that has ever happened ever, the camera pans to a guy with a disposable camera taking a picture next to a guy holding a sign featuring Beavis and Butt-head calling Ricky Steamboat cool. Another guy has a sign that reads "This steamboat will run over nature," which, uh doesn't make any damn sense. And of course, Flair comes out to the theme song from "2001," or, as it is more commonly called, "fucking Ric Flair's music, motherfucker." Michael Buffer tells the crowd now is the appropriate time to rumble and pre-N.W.O. Nick Patrick is the referee. Buffer brings up Steamboat beating Flair at the Chi-Town Rumble five years earlier. He gets a surprisingly mixed reaction from the audience. Yeah, this is DEFINITELY a Ric Flair crowd here tonight. I love Heenan calling Flair Red Grange, Kareem Abdul-Jabar, Wayne Gretzky and Hugh Hefner rolled into one human being. And to his credit, Tony S. does an admirable job recapping the famous Flair/Steamboat rivalry without coming off as too marky (New Japan announcers, take fucking note.) We get some solid arm drags and pseudo-chain wrestling to begin. Flair with a front face-lock and a quick breather against the ropes. "This people in Chicago would boo the Easter Bunny," Heenan says. "They'd *mug* the Easter Bunny." Another collar and elbow tie-up. Steamboat with a shoulder-block takedown. More good ground grappling, with both men working some great headlocks and scissor takedowns. And holy shit, Steamboat just slapped THE TASTE out of Flair's mouth, and Ric sells the shit out of it the way only he can. A ton of leapfrogs from Ricky and then we get a power slam. He hits Flair with two funky headscissors and two beautiful dropkicks, completing the combo with a flying karate chop off the top rope. You know, I never understood why it was illegal to back bodydrop a motherfucker over the top rope in WCW, but clotheslining a sumbitch over the top rope was perfectly legal. Flair with an armlock and he keeps throwing Steamboat to the mat. And now, it's time for CHOPS. God, this is fuckin' terrific. Flair momentarily exits the ring and re-enters the fray. Steamboat with a side headlock takedown and a ring rope assisted bulldog. Heenan drops a reference to People's Court, for some inexplicable reason. Steamboat with a shoulderblock and another side headlock. Now THIS is a technical showcase, kids. I LOVE how Steamboat slaps Flair's face while he has him in a headlock. Steamboat keeps spamming the headscissors. Shit, Flair used to have some DEADLY sounding chops back in the day. Steamboat still working a neck crank. More shoulder blocks from Steamboat and Ricky skins the cat ... that sick bastard. Ricky only gets a two-count on the attempted schoolboy. You know, this match has been about 50 percent nothing but headlocks but its still better than 95 percent of what the WWF put out in the 1990s. Steamboat STILL has that headlock/neck crank submission locked in. Flair tries for an atomic drop but Steamboat blocks it. Steamboat with a drop toe hold and he goes right back to the headlock. Heenan wonders why Flair's opponents never try to take his legs out, which come to think of it, is a really great kayfabe observation. Flair with shoulder charges in the corner. Ricky whiffs on a dropkick and Flair chops the SHIT out of that motherfucker in the corner. God, this is so comfy. Flair hits a knee drop. "I can smell pineapple juice," Heenan hilariously comments. Flair with chops galore and another knee drop. Just a two count. Flair keeps trying to go for a pinfall, but Steamboat kicks out like 17 times in a row. Flair with a NICE spinning elbow off the ropes. Steamboat retaliates with some HARD knife edge chops, and Steamboat is MORE than willing to return the favor. Flair ducks a chop and sends Steamboat and himself reeling to the outside on a crossbody. Flair goes for a piledriver on the outside and Steamboat flips him over. Ricky goes for a flying clothesline but he (ironically enough) winds up clotheslining himself on the metal guard rail. Flair throws him back into the ring. Flair goes up top, so of course Steamboat pursues him and superplexes that motherfucker. Naturally, it's only good for a two count. Flair does his patented turnbuckle bump and Steamboat chops his ass off the canvas. And there's flying karate chop to the outside for good measure. Flair begs Steamboat for mercy and Ricky punches Ric ten times in the corner, per the wrestling constitution. FLAIR FLOP TIME! But Flair gets his foot on the rope on the pin attempt. Steamboat gets dumped to the outside and Ric goes for a sunset flip - but Ric counters by punching him right in the goddamn face and it is glorious. Ric goes for a knee drop and Steamboat COUNTERS IT INTO A FIGURE FOUR! Flair keeps trying to get a rope break, and when he can't get it, he just pokes Steamboat in the eyes. Flair is hobbling around the ring. He tries to suplex Steamboat back into the ring but Ricky reverses it into a fallaway pin attempt. After that we have about a dozen near-fall counters with reversals, backslides and headlocks galore and it is goddamn amazing. Steamboat with a small package and Flair begs for his life once more. Steamboat backs Flair into a corner and Ric chops him good. Steamboat shoves the ref out of the way and starts throwing a million billion backhand chops. Flair flops his way through the ropes onto the ramp. Steamboat goes for a suplex. Flair counters it, then Steamboat counters the counter and chops Flair back into the ring. Ric takes another wacky turnbuckle bump and Flair gets his foot up on a flying karate chop attempt. This is an OUTSTANDING match. This one black kid in the crowd rubs Stemboat's shoulders and its really, really funny looking. Flair lands some chops, Steamboat fires back with some chops of his own. Steamboat hits a flying crossbody off the top rope but Flair kicks out. Flair chops Steamboat again and lands a snapmare. He goes up top and Steamboat launches his ass halfway across the ring. Ricky goes up top for another splash but Flair rolls out of the way. FIGURE FOUR TIME MOTHERFUCKER! Steamboat tries to block it, but he can't prevent Ric from fully sinking that fucker in. Steamboat, however, eventually makes it to the ropes. Ric immediately starts kicking Ricky's knees and goes for the Figure Four again. Steamboat rolls up Ric, but it is only good for a two count. Steamboat with a backslide - just a two. Steamboat goes for a superplex, but first he's got to punch Ric fifteen times in the face. And he sticks the 'plex. Both men are splayed out on the canvas as the ref administers a ten count. Ricky makes a cover, and Flair KICKS OUT! The ref gets bumped to the outside, but Flair esacpes the pin attempt anyway. Steamboat has an awesome bearhug/chicken wing submission locked in and he falls down, allowing Ricky to chalk up the three count? Except wait a minute, both men's shoulders were down for the count? Here comes Nick Bockwinkel to render an official verdict. LOL, he says Flair won because, technically, he was on top of Steamboat at the time of the pinfall. Some piddly looking fireworks go off and the fans boo the bullshit finish. Bockwinkel tries to explain how Flair won the match, but his explanation makes zero sense whatsoever. Well, even when WCW was awesome, they STILL had to find ways to fuck things up, didn't they?

The goddamn 1990s defined in one picture.

Anyhoo, that was a SUPERB main event, even with the screwy finish. Granted, it wasn't as good as their 1989 trilogy, but there's no denying it was some of the best pure, no-bullshit-need-apply mat wrestling of the decade. I'd EASILY consider this one of the best WCW PPV main events ever, and an easy [**** 3/4] classic that, for some reason, doesn't get anywhere near as much love from the smarks as you'd imagine. BTW, Flair and Steamboat had a follow-up bout on the ensuing week's edition of WCW Saturday Night, which was also pretty fucking great (and with a far more conclusive finish.) If you haven't, definitely go out of your way to check that one out, too - it's one of the best TV 'rasslin bouts you'll ever see, regardless of the decade.

Needless to say, with one of the best all-out brawls of the decade and one of the decade's best scientific clinics ... plus a great man-meat festival with Vader/Boss Man, a scummy Hepatitis-C-spreading blood bath between pre-Goldust and some registered sex offender looking fucker, not to mention a way better than it had any right to be "throwaway" Pillman/Regal time filler ... on the same show, this is EASILY one of the best WCW PPVs of the 1990s, if not the company's absolute best ever. 

WrestleMania 34 might be really, really good, and it might not. Who knows with the product in this day and age. What we know for sure, however, is that this particular PPV is all kinds of awesome, and if you're in dire need of some good, old-fashioned, Southern-style, lights-out, hide-the-women-and-children pro RASSLIN' the way God intended, this is pretty much the most reliable pick-me-up I can think of.

This is a show WELL worth going out of your ways to experience, folks. If for whatever stupid-ass reason you never saw it back in the day, by all means, hit up the Vimeo or the DailyMotions or the Pornhubs or whatever you kids are using nowadays and see if this tape is still making the rounds.

Trust me; you won't regret investing the time to find - and enjoy watching every second of - this all-time mat masterpiece.

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Comic Review: 'Evil Ernie vs. The Movie Monsters!' (1997)

You want "random ass Halloween-themed nonsense," you've got it! Presenting a sucky one-shot comic from the late 1990s starring a whole host of unlicensed cinematic creatures getting done in by a ripoff of the Iron Maiden mascot!

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

By the time 1997 rolled around, I was pretty much through with comics. I was an avid collector (but not really an avid reader) of all the hot titles of the polybagged era, but once I was in middle school I just stopped giving a damn. Oh, I would pick up the occasional issue of Wizard and maybe scoop up an old back issue or two of The Untold Tales of Spider-Man, but my adolescent love affair with funny books was rapidly nearing its terminus - primarily, because I required more time to focus on other geeky (but slightly less culturally-maligned) bullshit, like pro rasslin' and PlayStation 1 games. Besides, next to being seen wandering the action figure aisle at the local Walmart, there was no quicker way to lose your coolness at my school than being caught reading a comic book, even if it was some weird, indie goth shit like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac; sorry, but eschewing the old four panel adventures was a necessary undertaking if I ever wanted to catch a whiff of what high school was like (which, yeah, involved way less sex and way more vomiting than the movies had led me to believe.) 

But with stuff like Evil Ernie representing the bulk of what was going out there in the world of comics at the time, maybe I picked the best time possible to exit the hobby. EVERYBODY these days likes to shit all over 1990s comics as being nothing but grimdark, convoluted, hyper-gimmicky bullshit with everything looking like Rob Liefeld drew it and everything reading like Todd McFarland wrote it, but there was certainly plenty of good stuff out there, pending you knew where to look. Even Marvel and D.C., at quite possibly their respective nadirs as publishers, were still pushing out relatively fantastic stuff like Major Bummer, The Infinity Gauntlet, Hitman and Skull Kill Krew, and of course you had all the indies out there flooding the market with top tier tomfoolery a'la Milk and Cheese and Give Me Liberty, so - for the most part - the ceaseless comic book nerd antipathy of the decade remains largely displaced and unwarranted.

But then you remember just how popular shit like the Chaos! Comics oeuvre was back then, and you just want to ball up your fist and punch the nearest windowpane right off its fuckin' frame. For those of you in need of some exposition, Chaos! was one of those fly-by-night comic imprints that (momentarily) hit it back during the "bad girl" era with its flagship wank-rag Lady Death. Alas, they just HAD to expand their universe beyond sordid tales of some white haired chick with humongous boobs fighting the devil, and lo and behold Evil Ernie was born (and yes, before you autists start sending me angry letters, I know Evil Ernie debuted before Lady Death, so go on ahead and just cram it.)

Next to Orbitz soda and NAFTA, nothing reeks of desperate 1990s-ness more than Evil Ernie. I mean, goddamn, that character was such a creation of its times - a zombified psycho killer with a haircut like Howard Stern who talked like Bart Simpson and was apparently modeled after the iconic Iron Maiden mascot Eddie. This thing was tailor-made for the 14-year-old, aspiring school-shooter set that listened to White Zombie but couldn't buy their CDs at Tower Records because that meant making eye contact with the 16-year-old blonde behind the cash register while simultaneously holding in their chubs. Evil Ernie is pretty much the comic book equivalent of Saved By the Bell: The College Years - hokey, cheesy, and so utterly cemented in its own cultural zeitgeist that today it's virtually impossible to ingest it as anything other than an unintentional self-parody. Some relics of yesteryear produce nostalgia, but Evil Ernie produces what I like to call nost-nausea ... the sudden recollection of just how vapid, empty and utterly pointless most bygone things actually where. And if you thought the mainline Evil Ernie series was nost-nauseous, just wait until you get a hold of its 1997 Halloween special!

Eh ... I still like it better than just calling him The Gill Man.

The title Evil Ernie vs. the Movie Monsters pretty much tells you everything you need to know, don't it? It's a one-shot special guest starring a whole bunch of parodies of classic horror stock characters, all of whom are given high-larious roman a clef names like Teddy Leugar and Jensen Vorhead. So basically it's nothing more than a gigantic unlicensed monster movie bash, so how in the world could it possibly suck, right? Well ... you'll see, and I'll just leave it at that. 

OK, so the Evil Ernie backstory. He was this one kid who was constantly abused by his uptight parents so one day he started killing people and he got caught and these scientists hooked him up to some sort of experimental dream-monitoring device and somehow he got astral projected to the netherworld and he made a pact with the living embodiment of death (who, naturally, had Dolly Parton-sized jugs) and he died in the real world only to come back as an unkillable lord of the dead who can resurrect corpses and command them to do his bidding. Oh, and he's trying to literally kill everybody on the planet because when he does, he can finally have sex with Lady Death. Wait, did I leave the part out about Smiley, his talking jacket lapel button? Well, he has one of those, too, and it's annoying as fuck.

So with that out of the way, I suppose the coast is clear to hop smackdab into the middle of this 'un. We begin the comic with Ernie playing golf at Cosmic Studios in Florida, where he recounts his abusive childhood while knocking balls into the hollowed out eye sockets of severed heads. After awhile Ernie gets bored, even though Smiley tries to motivate him to keep playing by telling him Iggy Pop is an avid golfer.

So he walks around the theme park, making fun of the rides based on the My Lai Massacre and Dirty Harry, then he thinks about the time his parents wouldn't let him go see "Exterminator 2"(*) because it was too violent and eroded their Quayle-ian family values (cue flashbacks to his parents making him watch National Velvet and The Sound of Music while taped in a chair with his eyeball lids pried open, A Clockwork Orange-style, and lamenting never getting to see all the old Hammer horror movies until he was institutionalized ... long story.) 

(*) Oddly enough, there is indeed a real movie called Exterminator 2, but methinks the writers were trying to make an oblique homage to T2 here. [THNX, MGMT.]

So, uh, I take it the writer had no idea two REAL Saturday the 14th movies actually got made?

Ernie takes a ride on the Ghost Train attraction and he's attacked by Dracula and the Wolfman (with Smiley, naturally, taking a chunk out of the Wolfman's hide.) Then a Jason wannabe whacks the head off Evil Ernie's cameraman (just like a reality TV star, he has a big entourage running around filming all of his nefarious activities) and then Ernie gets attacked by a mummy that apparently has Robocop's chassis underneath all that gauze.

Meanwhile, one of Ernie's zombie chums is captured by a rotund (and, presumably, mad) scientist. Ernie's fisticuffs with Dracula resume and the former tosses a giant candle holder through the latter's heart. Then Ernie throws Frankenstein into an electrical grid (ironic - that's what gave him life, and that's what gave him death) and encounters the Creature from the Black Lagoon ... who, for copyright reasons, is referred to as "the Gill Beast from the Haunted Lagoon." It isn't long before old Gill turns on Dracula, allowing Ernie to slam a giant tree through Drac's sternum, presumably killing him. 

Then the cast of Them! attacks and Ernie kills the oversized ants by blow torching 'em with hairspray (that was one of his favorite pastimes as a kid, you see.) Then a turd-shaped alien called What the Unconquerable (I have no idea what this guy is supposed to be a parody of - readers, do send me a line if I'm missing something here) shows up and puts Ernie to sleep with some kinda' mind control ray. He wakes up in the mad scientist's lair and he tells Ernie he needs his "green energy" - I guess it's an offhanded reference to the elixir in Re-Animator, maybe? - to turn his pet lizard into a giant Godzilla pastiche. Smiley the button escapes (complete with a "to infinity and beyond" quip), and frees Ernie, who immediately kills the scientist by tossing acid in his face. 

Speaking of acid-spewing no good-niks, some hive creatures (coughCOUGHthexenomorphsfromAliencoughCOUGH) arive and Ernie picks up a pulse rifle that was conveniently just laying there and blows them all to kingdom come. And that's a segue to our all-slasher donnybrook, as expies of Freddy, Jason and Micheal (this one, not this one) rear their collective ugly heads. "Buncha' losers," Smiley comments as Ernie easily dispatches (and dismembers) them, "shoulda' stayed in the '80s!" An aside, but I love how in a comic featuring insane amounts of hardcore, NC-17 level graphic violence, they still elected to replace all the fucks and shits with random, self-censoring symbols a'la #$!%. 

Somehow, that lizard from earlier has indeed grown into a full-sized Godzilla pastiche. Jason - err, Jensen - returns and the Godzilla-wannabe immediately squashed him underneath his toes. Ernie and Smiley shoot the shit for a while and then Ernie suddenly realizes that since all of these monsters are officially dead now, he can resurrect and control them, effectively making him the true "king of the monsters." Then the fine folks at Chaos! let us know the proceeding was a non-canonical Elseworlds/What If style affair and if you want to read a real Evil Ernie comic, they've got this new one out called Destroyer you can pick up. And barely 30 pages in, we are over and out, kids!

That is easily the best non-licensed appearance by Godzilla in anything other than an early Sega Genesis game.

Well, folks, there ain't much to say after that, is there? There just ain't a whole lot of meat to this one, and even as a one-off larf it leaves much to be desired. Nobody really went into an Evil Ernie comic expecting much beyond the usual juvenile instant gratification, but with a premise that at least had the potential for something interesting, I reckon it's safe to say Chaos! royally screwed the pooch here. 

I'd like to say there's some kind of halfway decent Evil Ernie or Lady Death book out there you can pick up for some light seasonal reading, but like fuck I know anything about the Chaos! bibliography (except that they made a couple of comics based on The Undertaker, which in hindsight, I prolly shoulda reviewed instead.) Wait a minute, I just checked out their Wikipedia page - did you know these motherfuckers did comics about Halloween and the Insane Clown Posse, too? Goddamn, those people got around.

So, as much as I hate to say it, this Evil Ernie one-shot (even as brief as it is) probably isn't worth your time or effort. If you're looking for some solid Halloween comic readin' fun, there's a ton of stuff out there - the whole Marvel Zombies line, that one mini-series where Ash, Jason and Freddy K. all fight one another, etc. - that are vastly superior to this totally irrelevant slice of late '90s nos-nausea. Hell, I think you'd be better off sticking with those old Kool-Aid Man comics from the 1980s - after all, unlike this Evil Ernie dud, at least those things had some pretty amusing activity pages.

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Double Review: 'Beauty and the Beast' / 'Power Rangers' (2017) Movie Review

In which we begrudgingly feed the Hollywood Industrial Complex Nostalgia Machine by taking a look at two totally unnecessary reboots revolving around beloved '90s pop cultural brands.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

Since our two movies of the week are predicated on an insincere faux-nostalgia for the 1990s, I reckon I needed to give all you Millennial and Gen Z whippersnappers who thought the decade was nothing but Nirvana and Super Nintendo and Cartoon Network and Tamagotchki  a goddamned reality check. Sager souls than me have already written about the misguided romanticizaion of the decade, so I'm not going to regurgitate the same old stuff about the Rwandan Genocide and the U.S. posting its all-time highest annual homicide numbers or having to pay $20 for CDs. Instead, I'm going to briefly trudge through nine things about the 1990s all you nostalgia obsessed dweebs who weren't even conceived until 9/11 ought to know about the REAL '90s, not the idealized '90s.

No. 1 - Sega was the shit.

The Nintendo dick sucking gaming media and furry nerd forum industrial complex has convinced Gen Z kids that it was all Ninny throughout the 1990s, when in reality, Nintendo played second console banana throughout the decade. The Genesis outsold the SNES in the U.S., and then the PlayStation outsold the N64 worldwide. And to be frank, all of these games that retro-assholes keep celebrating like they were gifts from God himself - A Link to the Past and Super Metroid and any of those Final Fantasy games that didn't have the number 7 affixed to it somewhere - were nowhere near as popular as games like Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat and the E.A. assortment of sports games. But since the shameless stewards of video gaming media jack off to Princess Peach every night, they've tirelessly tried to rewrite '90s gaming history and make it look like Sega didn't do shit and all their hardware was inferior and none of their games were as good as what you were getting on Nintendo's platforms. Of course, this is all a bunch of bullshit, with the Genesis library clearly a better (and more diverse) gaming line-up than the SNES. In fact, literally the only area where the Super Nintendo beat the Genesis in terms of software were RPGS, and since there are so many role playing geeks and aspiring school shooters over-represented in contemporary video gaming media, they've tried to retroactively act like people gave a fuck about Chrono Trigger and Earthbound when in reality, those games sold like shit and if you told the kids at the lunch table you liked them they would've called you a fag and went back to discussing the finer points of NBA Jam. Even now, you keep hearing from all of these Nintendo cock polishers about how lame the Game Gear and Sega CD were, when one objective look at their software libraries lets you know they were actually pretty fucking great. And of course, all those alleged "video game journalists" who want to give it to Yoshi up his big green butthole every night almost always refer to the Saturn as a "disaster," when it's prolly the most hardcore dedicated gaming console ever. You kids can keep your pansy ass Ocarina of Time and GoldenEye and Diddy Kong Racing - meanwhile, me and the rest of the gamers with pubic hair will be testing our mettle against REAL games, like Radiant Silvergun, Dragon Force and Shining Force III. So basically, I guess you could sum all this up by saying when it comes to 1990s gaming, Nintendo's actual popularity and quality is greatly overstated, while Sega's actual popularity and quality is greatly understated. And if you owned any Sega hardware, you were almost certainly a happier electronic consumer than those who were strictly Nintendo households. 

No. 2 - Arcades were fucking awesome.

Every year I do a write-up about the Southern Fried Gameroom Expo in Atlanta, and I am always taken aback by the magical aura of the arcade. Kids nowadays don't even know what arcades are, and they sure as hell don't know how important they were to video game culture in the '90s. Yeah, it was fun playing your portables and home consoles, but if you wanted to see the real hardcore shit, you had to sack up your tokens and hit up the local mall and/or pizzeria and/or bowling alley and get your goddamn coin-op on. I really can't describe that wonderful synesthesia of the arcade; the blinking lights, the amalgamation of dozens and dozens of arcade and pinball machine buzzers and bells, the smell of the cardboard tickets sputtering out of the skeeball machine. It was like you left planet Earth and literally got sucked inside some kind of futuristic virtual utopia, and even now, it's prolly about as close as I've ever gotten to a legit out of body experience. The games just didn't look better at the arcade, they felt more visceral. Playing Super Street Fighter II at the arcade felt so much deeper than on the SNES or Genesis, and that's not even counting up the novelty games like Title Fight and Lucky & Wild that were literally impossible to port to a home console. I loved the arcade so much that I demanded my allowance come in the form of quarters, and I literally marked my calendar counting down that great bimonthly visit to the good arcade two towns over. Kids in this cultural climate will never, ever know that kind of joy, and that makes my heart very, very heavy. 

No. 3 - Video stores were the best place on fuckin' Earth.

Before Netflix and Redbox - actually, before the advent of DVDs and the Internet, too - we had these things called "video stores." They were these places you could go to "rent" video cassette tapes; for an often nominal fee, you were permitted to take said video home with you for several days, and you could watch it over and over again as many times as you wanted. But hold on, that's not all. These places also let you "rent" console video games, too, and at a lot of stores, their video game selections were nearly as massive and diverse as their line-up of proper movies. The video store was pretty much the ultimate multimedia experience of the pre-Internet age. Here, you could waltz on in and take a gander at thousands upon thousands of pieces of media, running the gamut from just-released Hollywood flicks to hyper-obscure straight-to-video horror films to old pro 'rasslin tapes to deer hunting tutorial videos to Faces of Death. Oh, and a lot of them had a lot of pornos, too, but since they were kept under lock and key in a top secret room kids didn't know about, that was never really a big issue. As with the arcades, kids who grew up with the Internet always a thing will never appreciate the greatness of such tangible media emporiums, and the simple thrill of wandering the aisles and finding completely and totally random things and begging your mom to pick it up for you and going home and realizing the movie was nothing like what the box art depicted but you didn't give a shit because you saw about three or four other weird ass movies you can check out next week. From the giant cardboard promotional cutouts (one of the stores we went to had a gigantic Chucky one that scared the horse shit out of me) to that little aquatic plastic cylinder game you always squandered quarters on to the malfunctioning WWF Superstars machine next to checkout counter, these places were just total sensory delight and virtually temples of pop culture ephemera. Even in 1999, the highlight of my week was picking up two random movies from the horror section and a six pack of off-brand Dr. Pepper at the mini-mart next door and just grooving on it. And like Mr. T, I plumb pity the fool who never experienced such happiness. 

No. 4 - Going to Pizza Hut was a goddamn experience.

Today, Pizza Hut is just another fast food chain, but back in the day, it was fuckin' spectacular. No, this just wasn't a place to get pizza, it was a place squander quarters on random arcade games (our local one had Hang-On and Arch Rivals), the jukebox (which blasted music all over the restaurant, which effectively became a game of finding the most obnoxious song on the machine and spamming it like a motherfucker for the LOLZ) and pick up all sorts of random tie-in goods, ranging from X-Men mini-comics to Eureka's Castle hand puppets. Pretty much anytime a kid in the 1990s had a birthday party and their parents weren't too poor, they wanted to book that shit at Pizza Hut. I mean, you really got a comprehensive experience here, and when they wheeled out the pepperoni pie, it legitimately felt like a big deal. Granted, I suppose in hindsight the food wasn't that good, but compared to the soupy tomato paste bullshit the moms and pops in town were passing off as pizza, the menu at the Hut was like getting breast fed manna. I suppose a lot of other '90s kids have similarly fuzzy memories of Chuck E. Cheese and Showtime Pizza, but since we didn't have either of those anywhere near our backwoods country asses, Pizza Hut was fucking IT when it came to special event eating. Even now, I get a little misty-eyed whenever I encounter a title-pawn that clearly was a Hut in a past life ... oh, the memories of what once was. 

No. 5 - Road maps were the leading cause of the breakdown of the nuclear family.

I don't think there is a fundamental component of modern existence as underappreciated as GPS - and yes, that includes the Internet as a whole. Today, if you want to go somewhere you've never been before, you just punch the address into your machine, hit "go, you motherfucker" and then a robot voice tells you every road you need to turn on to get there. Next to faking a disability and collecting a SSDI check every week, it's pretty much the easiest thing in the world. Well, before those things were around, if you wanted to get somewhere you had to use a literal paper road map, and it was the worst fucking thing that's ever happened to humanity. Remember, we didn't even have Google Maps, so even finding a dude's house one mile down the road was often perplexing-to-impossible. So how well do you think that little setup boded for that summer road trip to Orlando each year? Well, it inevitably led to the same marital dysfunctions year-in, year out, with  your daddy coming this close to socking your mama in the jaw for missing the exit to Tallahassee and accidentally diverting your country asses on a 40-mile detour into Alabama. In hindsight, I honestly have no idea how we managed to make it anywhere with those damn things, and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't thank my lucky stars for Siri coming into existence. 

No. 6 - You were disconnected from everything, and it felt fantastic.

No social media. No smart phones - hell, for that matter, no cell phones, either. Need to needle somebody real quick? Well, you couldn't send 'em an email, and calling 'em long distance would've cost a million bajillion dollars. Basically, unless someone lived in the same area code as you, getting in touch with them was about as difficult as contacting some motherfucker in China somewhere. I mean, if you really had to get a hold of somebody pronto, I suppose you coulda' sent 'em a FAX, but even that took a good thirty minutes and required at least $45 dollars worth of ink. If you were really privileged you mighta' had a beeper, but all that did was let you know some phone number tried to call your other phone number that was all the way across town. While nowadays we can use the power of the Web to ping literally anybody in the world in virtual real-time, back in the day it was preposterously easy to go off the grid and practically impossible for anybody to keep tabs on you unless they had a time share in one of your shrubs out front. Yeah, the great interconnected Internet world has its pros, I suppose, but me? I reckon I'll take the kinda' existence that both respects and acknowledges my privacy, thank ya' very much.

No. 7 - You actually had to pay for media.

Thanks to the wonders of high speed Internet, you really don't have to pay for entertainment anymore. As long as you know the right sites to go to and the right URLs to click, you can watch current Hollywood movies still playing in theaters on your desktop RIGHT NOW. Want to hear a song, any song, ever recorded? Just pick up your phone, go to YouTube and there it is. Why go to the book store when you can get the whole thing in PDF form? Hell, you can even watch LIVE MMA and out of market NFL games on your tablet and play practically every console video game before the Dreamcast without even using an emulator anymore. Back in the day, partaking of any of these activities would've cost hundreds, hell, maybe even thousands of dollars a month. But today, they're 100 percent free of charge to all of us, and we don't even have to pay an ISP because our next door neighbor has a really strong signal and doesn't password protect his Wi-Fi ... that dumbass. 

No. 8 - There was no Internet, but you were somehow able to live anyway.

Humanity can no longer survive without the Internet. If Google went away tomorrow, civilization would fall into immediate chaos, and by noon, half the population would prolly be dead. We couldn't conduct any kind of business at work, we wouldn't even know what was going on with our own personal finances, we couldn't find out what's happening in the world and without somebody on the Internet telling us how pretty and smart we are every five minutes, we'd prolly all commit ritual suicide in a week. Yet somehow, without all of these "necessities" of modernity - Gmail and Twitter and Facebook and iPhones and YouTube and so on and so forth - civilization miraculously continued throughout the 1990s, and - for the most part - pretty harmoniously, too. Today, we've convinced ourselves that it's impossible to do anything up to and including wiping our own ass if the WiFi ain't working, but what do you know, we somehow managed to not only survive, but actually kinda thrive in a world were literally the only good thing the Internet was useful for was asking for titty pics in an AOL chat room for a whole guldang decade. Take away all these Gen Z motherfuckers' iPhones and in two hours, they'll turn into a bunch of feral retards. Meanwhile, we didn't even have the Internet for 10 years, and to give you an idea of how terrible it was, everybody who lived through it is now on the Internet today, telling everybody how much fuckin' better things were then than they are now. 

No. 9 - Dunkaroos were the best fucking thing ever.

They were edible kangaroo cookies you could dip in vanilla OR chocolate frosting, and the shit had rainbow sprinkles in it. I ate them with the reverence a good Catholic would've ingested the Eucharist, because even then I knew something so great was not long for this world. I mean, you can still buy them in Canada, but as the great statesman Steven Austin (R-Texas) once remarked, "fuck Canada." Take whatever stupid junk food ephemera you have for lame shit like Ecto-Coolers and Surge and shove 'em straight up your monkey asses - this is what the TRUEST essence of the 1990s tasted like, and unless you were around to experience it first hand, you'll never truly grasp the zeitgeist of the decade.

Just where do young girls learn to be so materialistic anyway?

Anyhoo, speaking of things that were a whole lot better 25 years ago, our first flick of the week, Beauty and the Beast, tries realllll hard to recapture the magic of the 1991 Disney classic. Alas, the suits at The House of Mouse appear to have forgotten a couple of things over the last two decades, like the fact that singing and dancing candelabras works a whole lot better as animated fodder intended for the bedwetter set than it does as live action nostalgia bait for overweight Millennial singles who get sloshed watching The Bachelor every Monday night.

I can't really say this is a scene-by-scene re-do of the 1991 cartoon, because they add a lot of shit in. For example, we get an entire subplot wedged in there about what happened to Belle's mom before she died, and there's a new scene where Gaston, being the no-good son-of-a-bitch he is, actually ties Belle's daddy to a tree so wolves can eat him. Granted, I'm not the target audience for this kind of stuff (indeed, I never actually watched the cartoon when I was a kid, prolly because I was too busy rewatching Predator and Suburban Commando), but my GF was pretty much weaned on Disney fluff and she can more or less quote the movie line for line and she kept nudging me in the shoulder and whispering "that's not how they said it in the original!" and "nope, they changed the last couple of lines of that song" and "OK, she wasn't a character in the first movie" and "in the original, there were more talking teacups." Meanwhile, I spent at least half the movie thinking to myself if they set Beauty and the Beast in a contemporary setting, would we have sentient Roombas and Keurig machines instead of talking clocks and feather dusters? Furthermore, I can't be the only person out there who's wondered whether or not Beast shits indoors or outdoors, and especially whether or not the toilet talks and sings, too. So basically, it's the perfect date movie; it'll keep your girlfriend occupied and sentimental for about two hours while you can just let your mind wander and dwell on what exactly Beast's dong resembles and how you'd use his magic spying mirror to gamble on pro football outcomes.

Of course, it's pretty hard to go into a movie like this one and NOT try to root around and dig out some kind of hidden agenda. Indeed, clickbait fakenewz hivemind pop cultural circle jerk sites are already praising it as furtive paeans to feminist empowerment and miscegenation, while other, equally shitty wastes of bandwidth are criticizing it for not being anti-misogyny enough. And since the film is directed by Bill Condon - a flaming homosexual that did everything he could to make the Mormon heterosexuality of Twilight come off as the most boring shit in the known universe - quite a few people have accused the flick of pushing the gayness on children (with the media powers that are, naturally, being upset the film doesn't shove the pro-homosexuality message hard enough.) You can tell the suits at Disney are buying hard into the diversity-uber-alles marketing Tao on this one, with damn near half the cast played by African-Americans (how 17th century France magically became a racial mixing pot, however, is never explained.) And the titular Beast's ill nature has been toned down considerably - most certainly an attempt to shake off those long-running theses that the original cartoon was abusive relationship apologia. But in that, the Disney execs lost sight of why so many girls loved the original cartoon: simply put, it looked pretty, it had a female antagonist they could relate to and for elementary school children, the idea of talking furniture is really, really fucking palatable. The movie's endured for so long because it gives little girls an overly romantic, hyper-unrealistic expectation of what housewife life is like. It's not a film about love, it's a film about routine and becoming the steward of your own domicile; I mean, what is Beauty and the Beast but the ultimate "let's play house" story, anyway?

And that's where this live action remake falls flat. It tries to make its simple, simple story about homemaking into something larger and more self-important and, sigh, socially cognizant. The original cartoon pretty much championed materialism like a motherfucker, while this movie champions ... well, come to think of it, absolutely nothing. It doesn't even really explore the whole "don't judge a book by its cover" dynamic that was pretty much the impossible-to-miss moral of the original fairy tale. It plays out like a movie that knows it's a remake that can't measure up to the original, so it just tries to tickle your nostalgia bone as many times as it can to make the audience forget it's paying $14.25 to watch the same goddamn thing they watched 457 times as elementary schoolers. Or, to put it a different way: yeah, it's pretty much the exact same thing as every other remake, reboot and relaunch Hollywood's shat out over the last 15 or so years. 

You know the drill by now. Belle is some bookworm broad who looks down on all her peasant villager neighbors because they don't like poetry, too (indeed, the class antagonism is strong with this one, with all of the bourgeoisie elites coming off as kind and goodhearted while all the dirt poor proles are depicted as brutish and backwards and generally uncivilized) but everybody in town still wants to fuck her, especially ultra-macho-man Gaston, whose best buddy Lefou is clearly gay for him. Then her daddy decides to travel to the Arctic wastelands that's inexplicably in the middle of the French countryside to get her one stinkin' rose and he decides to take refuge from a thunderstorm inside Beast's castle and he captures him and throws him in a jail cell for trespassing and then his horse runs back to town and takes Belle to the castle and they do a prisoner swap and the talking pianos and wardrobes kinda sorta manipulate her into falling in love with Beast so they'll turn back into humans. They do all the usual song and dance numbers and Belle finds Beast's library and THAT's when you can tell she first warms up to the idea of taking some bear-lion-monster dong for the team, but then Belle's dad returns to town and tells everybody his daughter's been taken hostage by a water buffalo with a British accent and they're about to take him to a loony bin so Belle uses the Beast's N.S.A. spying mirror to run back to town and show everybody he isn't crazy and the townsfolk see the Beast and freak out and grab torches and decide to invade the castle and then it's a wild peasant-on-sentient-furniture-donnybrook with a concurrent Gaston vs. Beast battle to the death. Interestingly, they decided to have Gaston shoot the Beast this time around, which I suppose could be taken as some sort of anti-gun statement, but by that point if you're thinking of anything besides how long until the credits roll so you can take a much-needed piss, you're way too invested in the movie as a grown-ass adult than anybody with federal tax liability ever should be.

So basically, what we're dealing with here is the most expensive episode of Once Upon A Time ever filmed. It's too juvenile to work as adult-tinged entertainment but too glutted with needless "mature themes" (hooray for the new watching-your-own-mother-die subplot!) to work as proper nostalgia bait. It ain't good, but it ain't necessarily bad. Like a fart that doesn't stink, it's just kinda' there, and also like those rare loud-but-innocuous butt whistles, you just have to scratch your chin and wonder what's the point again?

We've got two dead bodies. Multiple wolf attacks. One castle siege. One gypsy curse. Multiple song and dance numbers. Gratuitous repressed homosexuality subplot. Gratuitous interracial romance subplot. Gratuitous but ultimately self-defeating female lib subplot. Multiple gunshots to the back. Ceramic plate Fu. Bubonic Plague Fu. Reverse classism Fu. And, of course, the thing more or less responsible for the movie even existing in the first place - 'we're totally out of new ideas, so how about another nostalgic cashgrab, Mr. Iger?' Fu. 

Starring Emma Watson as the much flatter-chested, more class conscious Belle; Dan Stevens as the voice of the eponymous Beast that gives new meaning to the term "animal husbandry" and looks like a bisexual surfer in human form; Luke Evans as Gaston, who thinks murdering Belle's daddy is the best way to get her into the sack; Josh Gad as Gaston's secretly homosexual right-hand man LeFou, who at one point does an entire song and dance number using the Olaf voice and doesn't expect anyone in the audience to notice; Kevin Kline as Belle's daddy, who comes this close to getting shipped out to a lunatic asylum right after he nearly has his intestines ripped out by a herd of wild dogs; and Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellan and Emma Thompson all playing bourgeoisie elites transformed into random household goods, who are in high spirits after being turned back into humans despite the fact they're all prolly about to have their heads lopped off in the French Revolution.

Directed by Bill Condon - the man who made the last two Twilight movies suck on purpose as some sort of abstruse pro-LGBT protest - and written by these two blokes named Stephen Chbosky and Evan Spiliotopoulos, who think a scene where a talking dresser with a morbidly obese black woman's voice transforms a bunch of impoverished foot soldiers into crossdressers is the kind of thing nobody would think had any kind of anti-heteronormativity subtext whatsoever.

I give it two stars out of four. It's not as bad as it could've been, but it's still about as superfluous as a fourth nipple. And since it's making beaucoup dollars at the box office, rest assured we're going to be getting about 24 more live action cartoon adoptions over the next three or four years, when all we really want is fucking Heavyweights II.

Even in 1995 this would've been a shitty toy.

As underwhelming as Beauty and the Beast may have been, however, it's Casa-goddamn-Blanca compared to the all new Power Rangers reboot. This may very well be the most bamboozlingly bad kids-targeted action romp since The Last Airbender, and maybe even Dragonball: Evolution. It's annoyingly loud and frustratingly dark (literally) and filled with all sorts of woefully inappropriate subplots about slut-shaming and homosexual experimentation (indeed, the not so squeaky clean Power Rangers in this movie even drop the words "shit" and "bitch" from time to time) and there's a ton of forced messages about the importance of embracing multicultural differences but, no, none of that makes this one of the worst big budget re-dos in recent memory. What absolutely KILLS this movie is its teeth-grindingly slow pace. This thing is almost two hours long, but it feels more like two weeks. No joke, if they cut out the needless group-bonding montages and tracking shots of subterranean spaceship interiors and the pointless arguments with mom and dad and Zordon's painfully meandering monologues, this entire movie could've been over and done with in 45 minutes.

The film begins in the Cenozoic era, with the Red Rangers's great-to-the-800th-powered-grandfather holding an alien woman's beef jerky hand and telling her he's sorry over and over again. Then Zordon, in human form (even though he looks more like one of them guys without noses in Prometheus than a person) buries some power crystals in the dirt and Rita tries to steal them and he says "nope, fuck that shit" and summons a meteor to fall out of the sky to kill her and practically every other living thing on Earth. Well, flash forward about 65 million years later and these two kids try to steal a cow for a prank and end up wrecking a car in a police chase. The ringleader of the operation, Jason, loses his position on the football team and has to wear an ankle monitor and take classes with the special ed students down in the boiler room of the local high school, which in this movie, looks way more like The Class of Nuke 'Em High than Saved By The Bell. There, we meet the auxiliary cast, which includes this one autistic kid who looks like a normal sized Gary Coleman and this one Kim Kardashian wannabe who gets called a skank in the bathroom and cuts half her hair off because somebody sent her a poop emoji.

So one day after school, Jason goes to to see Billy, the autistic black kid, and he helps him hack his ankle monitor but only if he agrees to go with him to a rock quarry to test some kind of science project. So they get there and they run into Kimberly (the Kim K. wannabe from earlier) and they talk about all kinds of pointless, stupid shit for about 15 minutes and then night falls and you can't see fucking anything onscreen anymore. Then this Asian kid named Zach shows up outta nowhere practicing Kung Fu kicks while listening to death metal and then Billy's science project explodes and the kids find a whole bunch of multi-colored gems (get it?) and they each take one and then a bunch of bulldozers start chasing them and they try to speed away in a van but it gets smashed by a train and then a whole buncha' fishermen dig out Rita's 65-million-year-old mummified ass and for some reason, the kids just sorta' wake up in their own bedrooms and slowly realize they're stronger than the Incredible Hulk now. Take note parents and Comet Ping Pong patrons: this sequence also includes a scene where Jason shows off his impressive, hairless pubic muscles. 

After the kids go to school and all the junk food in the cafeteria starts exploding for no reason they go back to the quarry and find this Middle Eastern girl running around and jumping over mountains like Superman and then they realize they can all do that, too, and then there's this great scene where Billy almost falls off a cliff and all the other kids just kinda look at each other like "oh shit, we just killed a black retard" but he pops right back up and says "golly gee, guys, take a gander at this underwater cave I just discovered!"And triumphant music plays as the kids go spelunking for 20 minutes, which I think is supposed to be some sort of metaphor for the wonder and whimsy of adolescent sexual exploration, and then they run into Alpha 5, that annoying ass Short Circuit-wannabe motherfucker robot whose head looks like two flashlights duck-taped to a George Foreman grill. So he gives them the walking tour of Zordon's underground spaceship and he shows up in Max Headroom form as this disembodied computer screen head and we're all supposed to be impressed he's being played by the dad from Malcolm in the Middle but nobody can really understand what he's saying so nobody really gives a shit one way or another. 

Then the kids start having nightmares about Rita (who looks just like Angela from the Night of the Demons movies) breathing her zombie breath in their faces and making a volcano pop up out of the ground and melting everybody in town. Then all the kids have arguments with their parents and we learn Trini, the Middle Eastern broad, is prolly gay simply because she says she's having "girlfriend problems" (which, the media, naturally, is acting like it's some kind of monumental blow for LGBT rights) and her parents think she's on dope so they make her take a piss test. Then Rita kills a homeless man while he listens to Social Distortion and pulls all his fake teeth out (yep, just like the eponymous Leprechaun, she has a penchant for green and loooves gooold) then there's this long karate training montage where all the Rangers throw shitty head kicks at rock monsters that look like coral reef crossbred with herpes simplex 2 and then Alpha 5 shows them the woolly mammoth transformer (err, Zord) and of course, they let the Asian kid take it for a spin and because Asians can't drive worth a toot, he almost kills everybody. Hooray for breaking down those racial stereotypes, guys!

Then the Red Ranger and the Black Ranger - even though we're an hour into the movie and nobody has actually put on a Ranger costume yet - get into a fight and Billy breaks up the argument and Zordon says some bullshit about the importance of team unity and then Rita goes to a jewelry store and eats a necklace and no sells a cop's shotgun blast and blows the whole goddamn thing up then the Rangers go out camping to bond some more than Rita attacks Trini in bed and throws her around the room and Jason gives the most boring monologue ever and Rita whups all the Rangers' asses in a dark alley and she fucking kills Billy and then the Rangers haul his carcass back to Zordon and because friendship is magic, he manages to bring him back to life. Then we get this nearly 15-minute lecture from Zordon while the shittiest cover of "Stand By Me" you've ever heard loops in the background and at the 90 fucking minute mark, the kids FINALLY get to put on the iconic Power Rangers suits (complete with a bizarre homage to The Right Stuff) and, somehow, they look even gayer than they did back in 1995. 

And if you're expecting the last half hour "apocalypse porn" grand finale to save this movie, hoo boy, are you bound to be disappointed. As soon as the kids don the Daft Punk costumes, they hop into their shitty CGI transformer robots to fight a whole bunch of even shittier looking CGI rock monsters then they go full Voltron to fight this 200-foot-tall gold golem while Rita takes a breather at Krispy Kreme. The final mech battle is so bad, it literally looks like something extrapolated from a SyFy original movie (although I did chuckle when the Rangers literally slapped Rita to the moon.) And, of course, you KNOW there had to be a sequel hook, which in this case, takes the form of a Ferris Bueller inspired reference to a certain other Power Ranger from the old Fox Kids program - oh, like you folks want tact; the fucking Green Ranger shows up in a post-credit sequence. THERE, I SAID IT.

Starring Bryan Cranston as the giant screensaver that entrusts the fate of the entire universe in the hands of a bunch of remedial math students; Elizabeth Banks as the pasty-faced, gold chain eating psycho-bitch villainess; Bill Hader as the voice of the metrosexual robot servant who describes teenagers as being "between infants and full maturity"; Dacre Montgomery as the disgraced quarterback turned cow stealer turned Power Rangers ringleader; Naomi Scott as the depressed dark haired chick who later becomes an ace neon pink pterodactyl pilot; RJ Cyler as the world's first super-autist, who asks Zordon if he's supposed to be more Spider-Man or more Iron Man; Ludi Lan as the Asian ranger who plays chess with his mama and can't operate a stick mech; and Becky G. as the LGBT Ranger, who plays an apparent Muslim character despite the fact her birth name is Rebecca Marie Gomez.

Directed by Dean Israelite and based on a script credited to no less than five different people, so you really don't know who to blame for turning the Power Rangers from goofy, wholesome camp stock characters into a bunch of neurotics filled with more angst than the entire cast of The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire combined. 

We've got three dead bodies. No breasts. Two car chases, with one head-on train collision. 100 dead rock monsters. Phone crushing. One psychically possessed lunch room. Teeth roll. Exploding Kay Jewelers. Multiple mech battles. Gratuitous campfire bonding. Gratuitous monologues on teamwork. Gratuitous Krispy Kreme product placement. Kung Fu. Meditation Fu. And the thing thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place, multicultural acceptance Fu.

This might just be the most misguided kids' show adaptation since Masters of the Universe or The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, and the first two hour movie in cinema history that only has about 50 minutes of real movie in it. I give it one star out of four - Jimbo says you'd have more fun watching the Power Rangers talk about the Oklahoma City Bombing with John Walsh than sit through this laborious turd.

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