411’s Wrestlicious Take Down Report 03.17.10

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We are TAPED from some studio somewhere for episode number three of Wrestlicious. As always, if you are interested in watching the show that I’m reviewing here or either of the past two Wrestlicious episodes, check out Bite.ca.

Leyla Milani and Jimmy Hart open the show, claiming that the “response to Wrestlicious has been truly amazing.” Jimmy talks about how he’s feeling neglected, because everybody watching the show talks about Leyla and not him. This leads a gag about Hart carrying Milani’s bags.

Our unseen, unnamed announcer plugs the “Beauties vs. Beasts” main event for this evening, featuring Amber Lively and Lacey Von Erich taking on White Magic and Draculetta.

After a plug for the Horny Goat Brewing Company, this week’s Wrestlicious Rewind gives us highlights of last week’s Paige Webb vs. Autumn Frost match, which seem designed to highlight the bad puns on commentary more than they are to highlight the actual wrestling.

Three more names are announced for the battle royale that will help determine the first Wrestlicious Champion. They are Glory, Autumn Frost, and Tyler Texas.

Leyla Milani is reading a romance novel on a CGI beach. She says love is like a bodyslam, because you get turned upside down and have no choice but to fall back down to earth. As I mentioned when Kandi Kisses compared wrestling to love on the first episode, all of these analogies fail in comparison to Koko B. Ware informing us that love is just like a piledriver.

The Takedown Spotlight – a.k.a. gratuitous bikini footage – for this week features Cousin Cassie. The “down home” music they play in the background while she poses is so irritating that I don’t understand how anybody could possibly be turned on by this segment. Cassie spends most of the time putting the left side of her body towards the camera, presumably to hide her decidedly un-cowgirl-like tattoo on the right, which does slip in to the shot once or twice.

Felony, Cousin Cassie, and Bandita are still fighting over who gets to name the upcoming battle royale. I just realized that the name proposed by Felony is “Hard Justice,” which might raise an eyebrow or two in a wrestling promotion that used to employ her.

Amber Lively is visiting the Wrestlicious physician, Dr. Gross. He informs her that her regular doctor is at home in bed with Flo. She tries to tell him that he means flu, but it is confirmed that he does in fact mean Flo. The joke wasn’t that good in video form, but it plays even worse in text.

White Magic & Draculetta vs. Lacey Von Erich & Amber Lively

We’ve practically got a TNA special here. Lacey Von Erich is obviously in that promotion right now as one of the Beautiful People, though what you may not realize here is that Wrestlicious cheerleader Amber Lively is one of her TBP tag team partners, Madison Rayne. (Who, before being known as Madison Rayne, was Lexi Lane and then Ashley Lane on the independent circuit, mostly in Ohio.) Their first opponent, Draculetta, is being played by current TNA wrestler and former WCW Cruiserweight Champion Daffney. It’s pretty funny, because this is the most blatant example of the woman who was hired to play a character when the original promo video for Wrestlicious was taped not playing her when it came time to film the actual wrestling. I suppose it’s for the best, because it means one less untrained model in the promotion. Rounding out the foursome is a woman who has never been in TNA, namely the Lacey of ROH fame as White Magic. She has recently disappeared almost entirely from professional wrestling so that she can attend graduate school in her native Minnesota, though this was taped prior to her hiatus.

White Magic is out first, and they actually do a hokey bit in which she walks over to a coffin that just happens to be positioned at ringside and uses her black magic to raise Draculetta from the dead. They do a funky bit for the Draculetta entrance in which everything goes back and white aside from the red that would normally be in the shot as Daff hangs upside down from the ropes like a bat . . . or like Shelly Martinez. Amber’s entrance isn’t quite as good. She’s dressed like a cheerleader, so she has to do a cartwheel. Unfortunately, as good as she may be in the ring, her cartwheel looks like something most ten year olds could do in tumbling class.

Once we get to the match, White Magic and Amber Lively kick it off for their teams. They head into a Greco-Roman knuckle lock, and I can guarantee you that neither the Romans nor the Grecos had a show like this in mind when they were using that hold. Amber gets the early advantage with a hiptoss, causing Ms. Magic to tag in her vampiric partner. The two women lock up, with Drac scoring a knee and trying to bite Lively’s wrist as she holds her in an armbar. LVE makes the tag and works an armbar of her own, but it’s revealed that White Magic has a voodoo doll on the apron, which she pokes it with a needle to cause Lacey pain. I’m not making this up. At this point the announcer notes that Von Erich is wrestling barefoot as a tribute to her uncle Kevin. Well, that and as an attempt to get a certain fetish subculture to watch Wrestlicious.

The heels double team Von Erich in the corner for a bit, after which White Magic officially tags in for LACEY ON LACEY ACTION~! (I’ve been waiting all week to write that one.) Magic chokes her opponent in the corner for a bit before hitting a high knee that Draculetta follows up with a butt-butt to the face. Lively breaks up the ensuing pin attempt, and Draculetta is annoyed enough that she goes after Lively. That distracts Drac, though, letting Lacey sneak in to tag her partner. Amber gets in some offense and applies a submission hold that, I swear to god, the announcer claims that she learned from “Lord” Alfred Hayes. There’s your off the wall refernece of the week. White Magic breaks the hold by using the voodoo doll, though, causing Amber immense abdominal pain in the process. Fortunately, referee Bryce Remsburg catches the use of the doll at this point and confiscates it. Apparently he believes in magic in a young girl’s heart.

Draculetta is in now, and she hits her plucky underdog opponent with a bodyslam and a clothesline before bringing Magic in so that the Ghouls Gone Wild can reel off a double team suplex. That gets a nearfall for Magic, and she follows up with a series of forearms. The last forearm is ducked and Magic is rolled up, though it only gets a two for the cheerleader. Draculetta tags back in and slaps on a chinlock, which LVE breaks up . . . only for Draculetta to go right back to the same hold before turning it into some odd stump-puller-esque move designed to show off Lively’s crotch to the audience. Von Erich makes the save again, but this time Draculetta goes to a sleeper hold. Lively gets out of it with a jawbreaker and avoids offense from both heels en route to getting a cross body on Magic, a dropkick on Draculetta, and then an enzuguiri on Drac as well. It only gets a two count, and there’s the tag to Von Erich. Lacey applies her family’s patented claw hold to Draculetta, and it looks like we’re going to see a submission . . . but White Magic runs in with her “voodoo staff” and blasts Lacey in the back with it to draw the disqualification.

Winners: Lacey Von Erich & Amber Lively via DQ

To close the show, we go to JV Rich’s Crib. Jimmy Hart is trying to make the bed. Rich asks him what he’s doing there, and Hart replies that “somebody’s got to make the bed.”

O . . . k . . .

Final Thoughts

Well, this followed the exact same pattern that the other two episodes of Wrestlicious have followed. There’s a bunch of nonsense skits which are either “horrible” or “so horrible they’re funny” followed up by a decent but not spectacular professional wrestling match to end the show. This particular match was noteworthy for several reasons, among them the fact that it took up at least half of the program and that it featured, for the first time, a wrestler’s ridiculous gimmick actually having an impact on the match thanks to the voodoo doll spots. Those weren’t the two things that stuck out to me the most, though. The two things that stuck out the most were: 1) Lacey (the ROH Lacey) was dumbing down her normal style of wrestling to a ridiculous degree. The match was still rather good, but you could tell that she was either taking it easy or was told not to work a high impact, technical wrestling match and 2) Either this company or the person who was in charge of putting together the match apparently had absolutely NO FAITH WHATSOEVER in Lacey Von Erich. She popped in the ring here and there for a quick stomp or a claw hold, but they didn’t let her come anywhere near making the traditional babyface comeback that would conclude a tag team match. Amber Lively didn’t get beaten on all match long only to tag out to Lacey, who cleaned house. Instead, Amber got beaten on all match and was then suddenly perfectly fine and dispatched her two opponents single-handedly before tagging Lacey so that she could use the claw. If that’s not a sign that somebody high up didn’t think it would look good if she tried to grapple, I don’t know what is.

Anyway, the show as the whole was exactly like the prior two. Not particularly bad . . . not particularly good. Aside from some occasionally amusing camp, Wrestlicious is really just there.