wrestling / Video Reviews
Furious Flashbacks: ZERO1 Naniwa Super Fireworks
Loading...ZERO1 Naniwa Super Fireworks
23rd January 2015. Aired on Samurai TV 14th February. Valentine’s Day. One for the romantics who also like no rope barbed wire explosion deathmatches. Tonight we will crown a new Blast King champion, the winner will be the survivor of the exploding ring deathmatch between explosion veteran Atsushi Onita and Yoshihiro Takayama. My main reason for tolerating a show headlined by an explosion is the secondary main of Suzuki & Sato vs. Sekimoto & Otani. I’m also rather intrigued by some of the undercard guys that I’ve never seen before.
We’re in Osaka, Japan at the Bodymaker Colosseum #2.
GUNSO, HAYATA & YO-HEY vs. Hideki Hosaka, Ichiro Yaguchi & Kenichi Fuji
HAYATA looks like a ladyboy, only without the tits. YO-HEY has multi-coloured hair and two greetings as his entire name. He is a skinny punk. GUNSO is a rather non-descript 30 year old. Hosaka, I vaguely remember from AJPW. I don’t think I’ve seen him wrestle in 10 years. He’s only early 40s though, not a relic like some guys who still work. Think of him as an overweight Toshiaki Kawada in appearance. Yaguchi is a crazy old dude in a red superhero cape with white-paint and a red cross on his forehead. He teams with Onita sometimes. Fuji is another totally non-descript guy. The match is shown completely unclipped, which is actually a disappointment because it’s over 10 minutes and most of these guys suck.
As in: ‘this is unwatchable, please go away’. Apart from Hosaka, they all come across really badly. GUNSO is the drizzling shits. He’s fucking terrible. At no point does it look like he understands concepts like selling, working or professional wrestling. The match continues to expose the business one move at a time as these assholes kill all belief I have in ZERO1 as a promotion. Why would anyone allow this to happen? It might be the worst match to take place in Japan in 2015. The only thing that saves it, in any way, is the lack of botches but the level of difficulty is so low that if they botched any of this shit then they wouldn’t belong in the business. Some asshole gave this over 11 minutes. Why would you do that? The match only scrapes by when Hosaka is in there and even he can’t do anything with HAYATA and his insistence at hitting bullshit Indy flip stuff. GUNSO is even worse than that. It’s like watching Taichi’s clueless cousin. He’s an embarrassment and from now on when I see his name I’ll run away screaming before he kills my love of the wrestling business. YO-HEY decides to carry his team with lots of flippity business, which is much better than the other two but this is an environment where someone who has three flashy moves will look vastly superior to everyone else. It doesn’t mean he’s good. It’s business exposing stuff from the others. I honestly can’t believe it made it onto TV. YO-HEY finishes the bland jobber, Fuji, with a triple twister off the top. YO-HEY needs to put on some mass, because he’s a scrawny looking runt, Hosaka needs to get booked elsewhere and everyone else needs to crawl into the gutter and DIE.
Final Rating: -***
Tangent: I’m usually nicer to Indy scum when they wrestle because they’re blatantly not full-time and deserve to be cut a little slack. Normally because they’re not experienced in any way and you can’t judge two kids in kick-pads who trained in a basement against New Japan Pro Wrestling. In this case I’m prepared to make an exception as it was actually promoted on a real, honest to God TV production. ZERO1 aren’t trying to draw 300 people to a high school gym somewhere in the dirty south, they’re putting on a professional production. And in the world of professional productions, there is no room for this abysmal standard of wrestling. It is unacceptable.
Miss Mongol vs. Kanjyouro Matsuyama
Miss Mongol has been around for 20 years or so. Her makeup, a Warrior-esque purple superhero-style mask, reminds me of her in FMW. She’s still quite chunky. Matsuyama is a guy. He’s from Osaka Pro, if that helps. That’s a weird promotion. He has white face-paint, is dressed like a geisha and isn’t taking this seriously, at all. Like the first match this also gets over 10 minutes, completely unclipped. What the hell is wrong with ZERO1? Inter-gender matches are generally a disaster, unless the female wrestler is exceptional (like Aja Kong) or the man is exceptional. Matsuyama wants to do comedy and Miss Mongol isn’t sure how and she botches their first exchange, forgetting it’s a trip spot and looking stupid for falling on her face. Matsuyama’s insistence at doing weird spots, like the Top Rope Walk, while yelling information to the crowd reminds me of the link pieces in Dynasty Warriors. A comically slow slap duel is actually quite funny. As is Matsuyama distracting Mongol so he can punch her in the arm and pinning by lying on her face missionary position. It is a pity they attempt wrestling around these spots as the wrestling is garbage. Miss Mongol wins with a sloppy Samoan drop and a Superfly Splash. The match was sporadically funny but generally awful.
Final Rating: *1/2
Masato Tanaka, Magnitude Kishiwada & Ikuto Hidaka vs. Ryoji Sai, TARU & brother YASSHI
Just what this show needed; the goddamn Voodoo Murders. At least their entrance features multiple ringside fans letting off balloons to a bizarre “fffffffffffffff” noise that sounds like brother YASSHI farting from the ceiling. Voodoo Murders at least have Sai on their team so there’s someone competent and the flipside is Masato Tanaka beating the piss out of that dreadlocked fool YASSHI. Magnitude Kishiwada you might know from his run in Dragon Gate. He works very slowly nowadays, a lot slower than I recall (a possible Nakanishi Syndrome, where chunkier men lose speed via beer belly). Sai decides to belittle Hidaka by putting a blank mask over his face while chinlocking him. One small problem, he drops the mask. And yet Hidaka stays lying in position despite not being held there. If that’s not humiliating enough YASSHI whips Hidaka with his dreadlocks. The match really comes to life when Tanaka gets in there and starts smashing people to bits. Aside from that it’s a poor match. Hidaka insists on inserting silly spots and TARU puts in miscue that reflects his old age. It’s painful to watch. Tanaka takes it with Sliding D and this show is 0-3.
Final Rating: **
Kohei Sato & Hideki Suzuki vs. Shinjiro Otani & Daisuke Sekimoto
On paper this is easily a showstealer. Compared to the rest of the show it immediately wins me over with sheer competence. Sekimoto grabs a headlock and there’s no space in between his arm and the head. Technical competence goes a long, long way with me. If you work loose and sloppy then your match will never be any good. Here they work snug as fuck. You can feel every strike. Every hold looks legitimate and if there ever is any space then the move is logically countered. Take heed Ikuto Hidaka’s of the world! The match, structure wise, sees four burly heavyweights barrelling into each other. It never reaches a high gear. It never needs to. The striking alone is enough to wear any of the four down to a logical conclusion. Otani gets picked off and has his leg dismantled by Suzuki. Otani’s comeback is sensational stuff as he lies on the mat mumbling “Otani” in a low level chant and it starts to ripple out across the arena as he gets to his feet. His comeback is more adrenaline than an old man overcoming the odds. Without the fans chanting he’d probably just fall back down. If this match was viewed in isolation it probably wouldn’t come across quite so well but the competence of these wrestlers, compared to everyone else on the card, is palpable. Sekimoto demolishes everything in his path but Otani has to come back in to do the BOOOOT SCRAAAAAAPES.
The crowd’s response to Otani shows why he’s allowed to dominate big chunks of the match despite his size deficiency. It’s the same reason Steve Austin got to beat up people twice his size in 1998. The way Otani stops selling the knee is a bit off-putting but at least it happened when he was tagged out and resting. Hideki Suzuki, if you’ve never seen him, is like a bigger version of Katsuyori Shibata. 3 inches taller and 60lbs heavier but just as mobile with all the stiff strikes and ring presence. He’s a bit lacking in moveset, compared to the more exciting Shibata, but he’s a decent poor man’s substitute. The team he forms with Sato might not be the most thrilling but considering they’re both big heavyweights their style is entertaining enough. For me the match doesn’t have enough Sekimoto. When he does intrude upon the Otani love-in it’s generally to great effect. Otani gets picked off a second time though and Suzuki puts him down with a butterfly suplex. Thank God they booked this match as it’s salvaged a remarkably bad card.
Final Rating: ***1/2
Blast King Championship:
No Rope Barbed Wire Current Blast Death Match:
Atsushi Onita vs. Yoshihiro Takayama
Onita has a reputation as the guy who blows his wrestling rings up with explosives. It worked for FMW. He’s still incredibly popular in Japan, despite his advanced years (he’s 57). Anyone who walks out to “Wild Thing” and specialises in exploding ring matches has got to have a certain fanbase. If Ricky Vaughan was a pro-wrestler, he’d work in exploding ring matches too. This being an Onita match, everything is hooked to explode if touched. If you’ve seen one barbwire match, you’ve pretty much seen them all. They tease the possibility of violence before avoiding it for as long as possible. Red Mist from Onita sets up the first explosion on Tak. It’s a bit dim to use red mist because it covers up any potential bloodshed. To be fair to the hardcore duo, they try to wrestle a bit in between the big spots. Tak takes the second explosion and sells it much like the first, as if he’s replicating Willem Dafoe’s famous ‘Elias falling to his knees’ scene in Platoon. The third explosion catches them both and the burn marks on Takayama’s back start to get a bit unsettling. Onita gets caught up in the barb wire for the fourth explosion, which he sells by opening his mouth and not moving. You ever hurt yourself so bad you can’t even scream in pain? The whole thing is a bit silly and the exploding barbwire gimmick gets old in a hurry because every explosion is exactly the same. I’m glad it’s quite safe, considering they’re using explosives, but that doesn’t make it anymore entertaining. Tak uses the exploding barbwire bat (yeah, really) for another near fall. Any time there’s a pin near the ropes I keep thinking; don’t get your feet on the ropes to break the pin or they’ll explode! Eventually Tak wins with a back suplex, which shows the importance of wrestling, even in a ridiculous environment. Both guys have burns to the back but in terms of brutal matches this didn’t live up to the hype. All the bumps were the same.
Final Rating: *
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