wrestling / Video Reviews
Dark Pegasus Video Review: Survivor Series 1995
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| Survivor Series 1995 by J.D. Dunn Wow! Look at the juggernauts on the babyface team. The Kid is a surprise partner for the heels after turning on Razor Ramon a week earlier. Ramon runs down and tries to get at the kid before being dragged away. Interestingly, both Janetty and Holly were tag champions with the Kid. Rad Radford (the late Louie Spicolli) is a “Bodydonna in training” according to Sunny, which makes *no* sense because his gimmick is a grunge guitarist and the Donnas are health gurus. Plus, Spicolli is kind of chunky. I guess that’s that clever situational irony that Vince loves so much. At any rate, Dr. Tom Prichard would leave the Heavenly Bodies and join Skip as the New Bodydonnas. We get a lot of pair-offs. Holly gets a rana on Radford and then counters his rana to a powerbomb. Kid gets a frogsplash on Hakushi to HUGE heel heat. Dr. Tom gets a sideswipe powerbomb on Holly, but Sparky comes back and pins him with a flying bodypress at 5:40. Oh, but Holly stops to soak up the adulation and gets schoolboyed by Skip at 5:46. Ross starts citing the Redskins game from the same day. Do they not understand the concept of the passage of time? I mean, surely they must know that the Coliseum Video wouldn’t come out for several weeks by which time the Skins game would be irrelevant. Kid and Hakushi do some nice stuff, with Hakushi getting big pops from the crowd for his athleticism. Kid cheats, of course, kicking Hakushi in the back and letting Radford roll him up with a handful of tights at 8:32. Horowitz comes in to check on Hakushi and promptly takes a thorough beating. Radford smacks Barry around, but Sunny and Skip keep telling him to pick Horowitz up. Radford stops to do some jumping jacks and push-ups, so Barry rolls him over into a cradle at 11:49. Kid gets the blind tag, hits Barry from behind and gets the pin off a legdrop at 12:47. WHATCHA GONNA DO?! Janetty and Skip do some okay-ish stuff for 1995. Janetty rolls through a powerbomb for two and gets the Rockerdropper. Perfect notes that move could break your neck, which is kind of in poor taste. Dibiase crotches Marty on top, but Marty blocks Skip’s superplex and finishes him with a top rope powerbomb at 15:25! Quite the finisher there. Kid jumps Janetty immediately and hits a corner dropkick. Janetty avoids a cannonball senton and fires away in the corner. Sid wanders down and distracts Janetty. Janetty hits the Rockerdropper anyway, but Kid gets his foot on the ropes. Dibiase distracts the ref while Sid snaps Janetty’s neck on the top rope. That’s enough for the unsurprising Kid win at 18:35. Good match, but only the Kid was going anywhere. ***3/4 Sadly, the Japanese women dumb things down considerably, and this is still better than anything the WWE women’s division has come up with since. Asari hits a Sky Twister Press, and Blaze finishes Lioness with a Bridging German Suplex at 1:42 Hasegawa tags in and hits freakin’ ROLLING BUTTERFLIES! Watanabe hits her with a Vertical Senton off the top, though. Kong, who is basically a female Samoa Joe, tags in. Hasegawa start firing off suplexes but takes a kick off the top. BACKDROP DRIVER! That’s enough to send Hasegawa packing at 3:57. Asari tries a crossbody on Kong and just bounces off. Kong splashes her at 4:25. Inoue, who is one of the bigger stars in Japan, goes for a sunset flip and gets squashed by Kong at 5:02. That leaves Blaze alone in a 3-on-1. Blaze fights out of a tripleteam and dominates Watanabe in a fair fight. She pins her after a piledriver at 6:31. Bertha works Blaze’s thigh with some weak stuff. A heel doubleteam backfires as big girls Kong and Faye smash into one another. Blaze German Suplexes Faye for the elimination at 7:12. That leaves Blaze versus Kong, a situation that Blaze really didn’t want. Kong smacks her around a good bit and finishes her with a spinning backhand at 10:01. The prospect of facing off with Kong allegedly sent Blaze running to WCW where she dumped the Women’s Title in the trash on Nitro. With a few minor exceptions, North American women’s wrestling has sucked ever since. (Edit: Can you tell I wrote this before the advent of SHIMMER?) *** This would be Goldie’s PPV debut. At this point, he was just a weird sort of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” creep. Bigelow has no idea how to deal with Goldust’s psyche tactics, so Goldie is able to dominate and send Bigelow to the floor with a clothesline. Things start to get boring and uncomfortable — boring because Goldust’s offense is so slow and uncomfortable because I’ve become acutely aware of his penis poking out of the banana suit. You know how something is disgusting and yet you can’t *not* see it no matter how hard you try? I guess I should count my lucky stars because Bigelow has to rub it against his neck when he powers up into an Electric Chair drop. Finally, Bigelow misses a charge and gets bulldogged at 8:18. Goldust would turn into a gay stalker, targeting Razor Ramon shortly after this. Not much of a match, but the Goldust character was a great heat-getter. This would be Bigelow’s last match of note in the WWF. * Mabel squashed Undertaker’s face with a legdrop, necessitating the silly “facial appliance” that the Take is wearing. Everyone here, except Lawler, underwent radical gimmick realignment. Taker became a semi-dead Biker. Vega would become a Caribbean gangster. Fatu would go on to become a dancing Samoan with Too Cool. HOG would become a member of Southern Justice. Hunter would become a degenerate and power-hungry madman. Mabel would go on to be a love machine. And Issac would go on to be a crazy trucker and semi-undead burn victim brother of the Undertaker. Thank God for second chances. HOG, who actually isn’t that bad of a worker, dominates HHH. Hunter tags out to Yankem to make sure he can come back in with an advantage. Things go back and forth with nothing really to report until Mabel catches Savio with a Bossman Slam. Yankem actually busts out a dropkick! Vega actually kicks out of Lawler’s piledriver, but I guess that’s okay since we’re not in Memphis. Vega hits Helmsley with the ROCK BOTTOM and no-sells another piledriver. HOT TAG TO TAKER! Lawler tries to tag out, but the rest of his team drops off the apron. Taker finishes Lawler with the Tombstone. Yankem jumps Taker from behind but takes a Tombstone. Helmsley tries to run but HOG threatens to slop him if he doesn’t get back in the ring. Taker chokeslams him from the apron to the ring to eliminate him. Mabel jumps in and hits a belly-to-belly suplex and legdrop. Taker sits up, so Mabel runs away for the countout. Mo winds up taking the chokeslam in his stead as all four members of Taker’s team survive. Boring match, but the story behind it was solid. Don’t mess with Taker, he’s one crazy mofo. * Just to be a stinker, WWE Interim President Gorilla Monsoon mixed up the teams so that heels and faces wound up teaming with one another. Ahmed Johnson is making his PPV debut. Dean Douglas was already quickly falling out of favor, having been screwed out of an Intercontinental Title reign by the Clique, and the WWF brass just didn’t care. Shawn does some good stuff with Owen and then some surprisingly good stuff with Douglas. Ahmed cleans house and tries to slam Yoko, but Owen and Douglas jump him from behind. Ahmed comes back with a powerslam on Douglas and tags Shawn. Shawn and Razor actually pinball Douglas between them, despite being on different sides. Shawn rolls up a surprised Dean for the pin at 7:31. Owen and Davey Boy each tag in and try to double-cross each other. Funny. They do a quick sequence before tagging in buddies Razor and Shawn. Shawn tosses Razor to the floor, but Razor comes back in and hits the Razor’s Edge. Ahmed makes the save. Shawn falls into a tag to Sid. Sid and Razor knock each other down for a double KO tease. Sid tries to go up (he’s a Sycho, you know). Ramon catches him and slams him to the canvas, but Sid chokeslams Razor. Sid wants to be a jerk, so he brings Shawn in, demanding that he superkick his friend. Razor ducks out of the way, and Shawn tags his own partner. They hate each other, though, so Shawn doesn’t care. Great stuff there. Ramon gets the pin on Sid at 16:22 after Davey Boy makes a blown save. Sid is pissed, so he jumps Shawn and powerbombs him. Davey Boy jumps Ramon and leaves him lying, so it’s a double KO. Yoko tags in and kills the excitement with a nerve pinch. Actually, after all that action, it’s probably a good idea to settle things down. Shawn gets the hot tag to Ahmed, who cleans the heels clocks. Owen ducks his head and gets hit with the Pearl River Plunge at 21:49. Razor fires off rights at everyone on the other side (including Shawn). Ahmed takes him down and stops to pose on the ropes, so Razor hits the Razor’s Edge. The Bulldog jumps him, though, and Ramon gets distracted by Sycho Sid and The 1-2-3 Kid who have come down to yak at him. The Bulldog catches Razor with the powerslam at 21:09. That leaves Yoko alone in a 3-on-1. Yoko dominates Shawn but misses the Banzai Drop. Ahmed tags in and slams Yoko, but Bulldog makes the save. The faces get rid of him and his sandbagging. Shawn hits Sweet Chin Music, and Ahmed finishes Yoko with a splash at 27:26. Davey decides to celebrate with his teammates, which is pretty funny. The match was pretty good thanks to all the crazy heel/face inversions. *** Diesel spent almost exactly a year as the lowest-drawing champion in WWF history. Not entirely his fault. Bret spent a year languishing in the mid-card before being called on to give the title credibility before handing it over to Shawn Michaels. Both guys undo the turnbuckle pads in order to intimidate the other. The Dies dominates Bret physically, just measuring him with hard shots to the chest and back. Bret takes a breather, but Diesel is smart enough to follow him. Bret runs, drawing the ire of some of the fans. Bret starts kicking Diesel in the leg out of desperation, but Diesel just shrugs him off and slugs him through the ropes. Diesel slams him with a chair as a receipt for what happened at the 1995 Royal Rumble, which was the last time Bret challenged Diesel for the title. “I THINK WE KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS!” screams the champ. Bret appears to be out of it, but he blocks the Jackknife Powerbomb by hooking his legs in the ropes. Bret bites Diesel’s arm and rakes his eyes. Although it seems like Bret is being heelish, the crowd accepts it because of the size disadvantage. Figure-four by Bret. Ross recalls that Bret used this move three times when they faced off before, but Diesel made the ropes each time. Diesel also makes the rope this time. Diesel shoves his way out of a Sharpshooter attempt, but he’s limping around the ring. Bret works the injury further by wrapping his leg around the ringpost. He ties Diesel’s foot to the ringpost with some sort of cord. With Diesel helpless, Bret grabs a chair and goes after him. Diesel boots him in the face, but Bret recovers and grabs the chair. He viciously attacks the leg with the chair in a precursor to his heel turn against Austin. Bret goes up top with the chair, but Diesel crotches him and slams him off the top. Diesel unties himself and sideslams Bret for two. Bret takes the Bret Bump off a corner whip. Bret reverses a Snake Eyes and rams Diesel into the buckle. The Hart Attack Clothesline gets two. A bulldog gets two more. Bret clotheslines him over the top, but a pescados misses. Big Daddy Cool returns to the ring for a breather. Bret staggers up to the apron, not conscious of what is going on, so Diesel rams him off the apron through the Spanish Announce table. Bret appears to be dead. Diesel drags his carcass into the ring, but he can’t even get Bret upright enough for the Jackknife. He tries again, but Bret pops up suddenly and small packages him for the win and the title at 24:52. The Dies gives Bret a sickening pair of Jackknifes after the match and destroys a group of referees. Excellent match from both guys. I especially appreciate how both guys were able to walk that fine line between desperate babyface and turning heel. Of course, this match would serve as the catalyst for Diesel’s newfound attitude over the last few months of his WWF career. The only knock is the very, very methodical pace early on. **** |
The 411: This show can be seen as something of a turning point for the WWF as they struggled through a horrible 1995 before righting the ship here. Not that it was smooth sailing over the next two years, by any means, but they had at least started back down a profitable path. Most of the matches were pretty good too (or interesting, at the very least). Thumbs up. |
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| Final Score: 7.5 [ Good ] legend |
