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Jack Reviews Pro Wrestling Revolver Pancakes & Piledrivers

April 7, 2017 | Posted by Jack Stevenson
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Jack Reviews Pro Wrestling Revolver Pancakes & Piledrivers  

Pro Wrestling Revolver generated a huge amount of buzz for their Wrestlemania weekend effort through the novel idea of offering free pancakes to all attendees. Also, some really exciting wrestling matches which I will now review! FULL DISCLAIMER: I am not eating pancakes while watching this. I MAY make some toast about halfway through and I will probably enjoy a glass of orange juice as well.

1- DAVID STARR VS. JEFF COBB
This is a decent little opener. They don’t play up the potential clash of styles much though, and at times Starr even beats Jeff Cobb at his own game, just about landing a tilt a whirl slam and then dropping him with a suplex across the knee. I could watch that fantastic deadlift German suplex Cobb does all day. The Tour of the Islands is also very cool and secures Cobb the win on this occasion. ** 3/4.

2- DEZMOND XAVIER VS. MATT PALMER VS. A.C.H VS. MICHAEL ELGIN VS. MOOSE
Gotta admit, I really don’t know anything about this Matt Palmer fellow. But he swiftly impresses with a crazy plancha dive onto all the competitors on the floor! Moose arguably one ups him by landing a Moonsault onto the whole gang (Moose-sault?). The brawl goes through the crowd, which is mostly an excuse for everyone to snack on pancakes and throw them at each other. But then Dezmond Xavier cleans them all out by diving off the bleachers to the floor! Wowzers! Elgin and Xavier have the most enjoyable interactions in this, but it’s Matt Palmer that picks up the upset win, spiking Xavier with a Top Rope Tombstone just as Elgin’s about to drop him with a Super Elgin Bomb! Don’t think Xavier would have had a strong preference either way which one of those killed him. *** 1/4. Lots of energy and fun spots in this one, although it would have been nice if everyone was taking it as seriously as Dezmond Xavier was. I think possibly this would have been cooler had it been at the start of the weekend and we were all a bit less jaded, but it still worked rather well.

3- STREET FIGHT- EDDIE KINGSTON VS. KRUGAR
Krugar is of course the former Adam Rose, whose booking on this show earned Pro Wrestling Revolver a fair bit of social media backlash, for reasons you can probably imagine. For what it’s worth, and staying away from his personal life, I actually quite enjoy his deranged South African hunter character. The response he receives from the crowd is just about on the right side of ‘go away boos,’ but we’ll see how this situation develops.

Krugar certainly gets off to a good start, dropping Kingston across a trash can lid propped between two chairs, and then wiping him out on the floor with a somersault senton! He also lands a cool tornado DDT, driving Eddie’s head into the trash can. In all honesty, none of this is quite as much fun as just watching Kingston fuck him up, hurling chairs at his head and on one occasion sending him sailing from the top rope into the barricade. Jesus, Kingston just starts powerbombing Krugar into the front row! He gets him back in the ring, but Krugar kicks out at one! So Eddie just bludgeons him with the chair, and it’s still only enough for one! Two Backdrop Drivers, two Backfists, and despite Krugar’s attempts to keep firing up, Kingston keeps him down for the three. *** 1/2. Whisper it quietly, but that was great. Krugar took a creditable beating with no ego whatsoever and managed to land a few nice moves of his own as well. Kingston was his usual no bullshit self and it just worked really well. A really really pleasant surprise.

Bull James attacks Kingston with a chain post match and then cuts a sweary promo at the crowd. Not sure what the purpose of that was.

4- FANS BRING THE PRESENTS- OI4K VS. JACK EVANS & ANGELICO
It’s Jack Evans birthday you see, so we get this instead of a Fans Bring the Weapons match! Also, this could kick a lot of arse.

OK, this starts out with a sword fight between Angelico and Dave Crist, and then Jack Evans and Jake Crist duel with lightsabers. The tone of the match veers from serious to comedic and back again- Angelico backdrops Jake Crist into the laps of the front row, but roughly a minute later Dave Crist is mauling Evans with pancakes. Some butthole humour follows, which I don’t find super endearing but hey, clearly someone likes it. Dave goes face first into Jake’s bare arse, and Evans follows that up with a bridging roll up for the win! Bit weird, this one. It was reasonably entertaining but barely felt like a match at points, more just a procession of random events. ** 1/4.

5- RICOCHET VS. SHANE STRICKLAND
The show is just begging to be stolen, but this match didn’t quite do it. It is, of course, a really good match, but it doesn’t quite push into that zone of utter insanity these sort of bouts sometimes do where the guys are pulling off feats of athleticism at such a jaw dropping pace that your jaw just plummets. It’s actually wrestled at a surprisingly methodical pace. Strickland controls a lot of it, which makes sense because the story going into the match was his frustration that he’s not seen as being on Ricochet’s level, so it was cool to see him prove that he definitely was. The finishing stretch swung back and forth, lots of lovely, fluid sequences, but again, nothing that completely took your breath away. Ultimately, Ricochet picked up the victory after dropping Shane with the Vertigo- this felt a bit out of nowhere, although that might have been because the crowd never quite warmed to the action in the way you’d hope. Considering that both guys were in the midst of a million match schedule over the course of the weekend, it would be stroppy of me to complain too much about a more restrained effort here. There was still a lot of hard work and it was a very enjoyable and breezy watch, but maybe not the Match of the Weekend contender it could have been. *** 1/2.

6- SU YUNG VS. JAKE MANNING
Manning cuts a shitty sexist promo before the match for some cheap heat. Yung horrifies him by stealing his Manscout Manual during a figure four and ripping pages out of it. She drags Jake around ringside and invites fans to chop him. Manning gets sat down in a chair, and Yung flies off the apron onto him with a plancha! Neat! AH FUUUUCK Jake’s first real move is a powerbomb into the ring apron and it’s fucking brutal! Seems kinda out of place in a match like this, especially because the bout calms down again straight after. Yung’s Arachnarana out the corner is really cool. Manning’s valet distracts Su Yung, and that allows Manscout to piledrive Yung into a pile of pancakes for the win. * 1/4. I’m not really sure what the point of this was, but Yung seemed to have a smattering of funky ideas at least.

7- SAMI CALLIHAN & BRIAN CAGE VS. FENIX & PENTA EL ZERO M
Brian Cage just kills Penta before the bell’s even rung with a tope, which is a promising sign indeed! And, brilliantly, the pace doesn’t slow down from there, it’s just an unrelenting barrage of huge moves and slick sequences. The pace is too one note for it to become a properly great match (if Fenix had been given more room to fly all over the place it might have improved the match a little), but it is a colossal amount of fun and an admirably unpretentious, straight forward effort. Too much action happening at too fast a pace to attempt play by play, which is a high compliment indeed! What I will note is thatm with a snazzy assist from Fenix, Pentagon dumps Callihan on top of his head with a Canadian Destroyer, and that’s enough for three! *** 3/4, and a really energising effort on the whole.

8- AR FOX INVITATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP LADDER MATCH- AR FOX VS. JOEY JANELA VS. JASON CADE VS. DAVEY VEGA VS. TREY MIGUEL VS. ARIK CANNON VS. ZACHARY WENTZ VS. CALEB KONLEY VS. TREVOR LEE VS. SERPENTICO VS. LIO RUSH
Erm, OK! This is ambitious. The problem really is that you reach a saturation point in big scrambles like this where there are just too many wrestlers for it to be coherent. It’s really hard to build to a satisfying crescendo with so many moving parts in the match, and that’s the main problem this one has. It starts off exciting and stays that way pretty much the whole way through, but it would have been all the more compelling if there was any sense they could be building to something. Instead, it was just a series of great spots, none of them particularly more meaningful than the other. But, having said that… there are some great spots here. Jason Cade tries for a tope, misses, and ends up crashing into a ladder propped between the ring and the guardrail! Penelope Ford gets involved on behalf of Joey Janela and takes an utterly ridiculous chance, flinging herself off the top of a huuuuge ladder onto a crowd of people on the outside! Slightly less death defying but no less impressive is Trey Miguel snapping Zachary Wentz off the ladder with a springboard huracanrana off the ropes. And in fairness, having criticised the match for not really building to anything, there is a slight shift in gears right at the end as people all eat their final bumps of the match. Caleb Konley powerbombs Jason Cade out the ring and through a board propped between two guardrails, and it wouldn’t surprise me to discover Cade only narrowly escaped paralysis. Penelope Ford says goodbye as Trevor Lee DVDs her through another board. People start crashing through more boards and chairs and ladders and there’s a real demolition derby feel to it, bodies strewn all over the place. Ultimately, Jason Cade recovers to fight AR Fox for the belt atop the ladder, and it’s a bit of an awkward, tentative slugfest actually, one that kind of detract from the drama of proceedings. Cade ends up snagging the belt and securing his second big win of ‘Mania weekend! *** 1/2. It would make for a ****+ highlight package, but as a full length match this didn’t quiiite have the forward momentum to see it through. Still high quality entertainment, though!

6.0
The final score: review Average
The 411
This is an OK show with plenty of good-very good matches on it. That is not enough to earn a recommendation within the context of 'Mania weekend when there's so much else going on, unfortunately. Both the RevPro and WrestleCon shows had more to offer, and by this point in the weekend we'd also had a brace of Evolve shows and the PROGRESS show to distract us. It just doesn't stand out sufficiently. But, if you find the time, there's enough here to stop you from turning the show off in DISGUST.
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