wrestling / Video Reviews

Guerrilla Reviewfare: PWG Threemendous VI

July 8, 2022 | Posted by Jake St-Pierre
PWG Threemendous VI Image Credit: PWG
8
The 411 Rating
Community Grade
12345678910
Your Grade
Loading...
Guerrilla Reviewfare: PWG Threemendous VI  

My return to reviewing Pro Wrestling Guerrilla proved to be a good idea. At least on my end. Its first show in 18 months, Mystery Vortex 7 was devoid of any truly blowaway fare, but delighted me in its consistency and the high notes it still managed to hit. Its newsworthy ending with the returns of Malakai Black and Super Dragon were an intriguing start to this new “era” of the company, even if it’s gone the way of most Super Dragon cameos and petered out. Hopefully Biff Busick can grab the curmudgeon back out of his hole one more time.

Tonight is PWG belatedly celebrating its 18th (!) anniversary, bearing the name Threemendous for the sixth time, a title it shares with some of the promotion’s best work. Depending on the day, I still think 2012’s Threemendous III is the best PWG show ever put to disc… even if Drake Younger’s debut doesn’t seem so inspiring now. The card following it 9 years later has a lot to it, including notable returns of Davey Richards and Alex Shelley to the PWG lineup after years away from either the company or the spotlight altogether. Despite Davey’s past as a flaky, polarizing sort of guy, he’s earned nothing but acclaim from fans and wrestlers alike in this latest run, rehabbing his image and earning some real credibility back on an independent scene that he did a lot of work in cultivating all those years ago. Shelley has spent time everywhere including an underrated run in late-stage Ring of Honor, but he hasn’t touched a PWG canvas since a fairly forgettable return at 2011’s All Star Weekend 8. He remains an underrated legend of indy wrestling, a profound influence on just about every guy you see whether they know it or not, and it’s going to be interesting to see how he blends in with this new crop of PWG talent. With regulars like Bandido, Brody King, Dragon Lee, and such around it’s still a PWG show to be sure, but with the notable returns you can’t help but be a little more excited than usual for the novelty of it.

We are TAPED from the Globe Theatre in Los Angeles, CA.

Your hosts are Excalibur and in a welcome surprise, Chuck Taylor. I think one of the least talked-about negatives of this newer PWG is the lack of guest commentators. Excalibur by himself is perfectly fine, but hearing him riff with guys like Chuckie T. and Kevin Steen really upped the fun factor of some of the older shows.

Tony Deppen vs. Evil Uno
This was a very serviceable opening match that didn’t set out to be more than that, which has its drawbacks sometimes, but it worked like a charm here. The crowd was interested from the jump and the chemistry between the two’s personalities alone made for a nice foundation to what was a pretty run-of-the-mill babyface vs. heel match. Deppen’s explosiveness makes for an exciting turn of the tides, as he’s really able to up the intensity of a match’s pace within a few movements and make it work without seeming forced. Uno is just generally an underrated asset as a singles guy and he did a wonderful job of keeping this together by playing the hits and acting as Deppen’s foil down the stretch. The action itself didn’t wow me, but for its spot on the card and the goal they seem to have set, I’d say it was a success. **3/4

Aramis vs. Dragon Lee
Barring a scary botch from Aramis down the stretch, this is the exact sort of quality you expect out of a longform Dragon Lee affair. He’s such a master of taking his Lucha roots and implanting them into a more Western (or Japanese, depending) pacing that he can elevate simple spotfests into great matches on that alone. Oftentimes when you see some Lucha transplants in PWG – see Arez at Mystery Vortex last time out – it’s tough for them to adapt to what the LA crowd is looking for. It doesn’t mean they can’t do it, but it comes as a bit of a culture shock and makes for an underwhelming product. Dragon Lee has no such affliction, and that worked beautifully for him here.

That’s not to downplay Aramis in any way either. By and large, he did a really great job playing an understated babyface role, really working his way up to larger offense and making his spots count. You won’t see me sit here and try to convince you this was a storytelling clinic, but Aramis’ fiery timing played a great role in the excitement that this match dished out. I especially liked how he and Dragon Lee fought for lariats on each other the whole match and as things turned up, he finally was able to send Lee for a loop with one. It’s subtleties like that that give you an idea of the sort of talent on hand and with some extra seasoning, I think Aramis is going to be an absolute force in wrestling here in a few years.

So with Lee’s explosiveness and Aramis’ spirit, it’s not hard to see why this match delivered in such great fashion. It takes everything good about the balls-to-the-wall approach these men take to wrestling and molds it into a perfectly paced affair with just enough in the way of valleys that the peaks become even more spectacular. It has sloppy moments so I won’t sit here and shout that it’s perfect, but I will say that I was surprised with how much I ended up appreciating what I saw. And it’s not like I came in skeptical. ***3/4

#1 Contender’s Match: Jonathan Gresham vs. Alex Shelley
Hold onto your seats, but Alex Shelley and Jonathan Gresham wrestled for an extended period of time and it was great. This was yet another barnburner from a man in Gresham that seems physically and mentally incapable of having anything but a great effort. He is such a master of his style and physicality that even when he slows it down to a crawl, it doesn’t really feel like it. He sets traps, he moves and shakes, and he uses every little opening he finds to further his goal of winning. There are few wrestlers in the world right now that are as unique, intelligent, and efficient in the ring. He’s just a star between the ropes.

But before Jonathan Gresham came Alex Shelley. In fact, before many wrestlers came Alex Shelley. It’s difficult to find a technical wrestler worth his salt in 2022 that wasn’t heavily inspired by Alex Shelley, whether it be moves themselves or the effortless manner in which he can chain them together. And even scarier – near 20 years on – Alex Shelley is still just as much a wizard as he was coming up. The speed and fluidity in every movement of his, corresponding and reacting to Gresham’s… they were all flawless and created what felt like a competitive environment despite being within wrestling’s staged boundaries.

But it was worked that way too. I absolutely adored the psychology this match employed, mostly letting the limbwork take a backseat to the shockingly even wrestling on the mat. That’s not to say they didn’t wear out one another’s arms. In fact, most of that shockingly even wrestling involved one another’s arm. But I think just boiling this down to “arm vs. arm” is a reductive way to look at this match when you realize how much better that work was when you took into account the context with which it was being done.

You so often see Jonathan Gresham completely ransack wrestlers on the mat, tying them up every which way and forcing them to go to the depths to keep their heads above water. Lee Moriarty just last month is a prime example. He was not the technical wrestler Jonathan Gresham is, but he’s damn sure tough and used all the fire he had in his arsenal to have a long, grueling match with someone who theoretically outmathed him. Alex Shelley wasn’t about to let that happen. It wouldn’t make sense to make him the sympathetic veteran going on a last stand or a fiery legend with some still left in the tank. It’s never been his style. He was doing this kind of wrestling before Gresham had even had his first match. Yes, they’re only five years apart in age, but this is a generational battle when you think about it.

The story they told paid off gorgeously with a shock Shelley victory (preceded by the Shellshock no less), really sticking the landing and making the previous minutes you invested in feel earned. It’s not as if a Gresham victory would have harmed the match by any means; they were presented as equals in a lot of ways and it would have made total sense if Gresham caught a similarly quick W. He has done it before and will do so again. But Shelley’s rising to the occasion and outgrappling Gresham to win so cleanly puts a stamp on the story they told, rounding their efforts out and giving the match a pronounced identity.

Part of me wants to argue about the suddenness of the finish, but I can’t argue it with much gusto because it was a slight act of brilliance when you take into account who these two are as wrestlers. Shelley got a definitive victory, hitting his move and tapping out his opponent with his hold. He outgrappled the guy that tortures fools with his grappling, because he’s just better and more experienced at it. That’s what makes this match great, meaning the battle of arm work was just a cherry on top… especially since that paid off at the finish too. Now I just want to watch Gresham vs. Garcia from the next show, but I’ve got to be a good boy and keep pushing through. ****

Jack Cartwheel, Dante Martin, & Alex Zayne vs. Trey Miguel, Lee Moriarty, & Myron Reed
This was a schlocky, contrived, silly, stupid, cheap, indyriffic spotfest. The Venn Diagram featuring people who like this match and people who like Battlarts and UWFi are two completely different shapes on two completely different planes in two completely different galaxies of existence. Nothing made sense, the points didn’t matter, and a bunch of goobers just sailed through the air for a long time. By all rights, I should be condescending you and writing some overlong blog post about how insulting this match was. But I’m not going to do that, because I friggin’ loved this thing.

And surprisingly, this isn’t an ironic love either. I’ve ironically liked bad matches before, as have we all. I am not above laughing at the women’s season of NXT. However, I am of the opinion that if you’re going to do this sort of match, filled with asinine spots and weird detours into ref chicanery, you need to do it with your entire heart and Jesus Christ, did these six ever. What I especially liked about the shtick they tried was that it wasn’t the only reason this match worked. It made an impression for sure, but they backed it up with legitimately innovative spots that you can only really get away with in this PWG environment. That’s why I came away almost stunned by its quality. It had legitimate substance behind it.

So often you see hacks who try to use comedy as a way to get the crowd on their side because they don’t have much else in the tank. And that’s not about guys with legitimately fleshed out gimmicks like Danhausen or Orange Cassidy. I’m talking about indy dorks who can’t put together a match, so they decide to try and involve the ref and the fans and whatnot in their match to camouflage things. That’s a pet peeve of mine and it has happened in a PWG ring before, and not all that long ago. My anxiety still flares when I think about Sami Callihan’s buddies getting half the PWG undercard every month. Unfortunately, Dave Crist these days has more to worry about than not being very good at wrestling.

And it’s not just that these guys did cool moves either. They need to either be sequenced correctly or be out of this world. While perhaps the sequencing could have used some fine-tuning, I cannot say that about these six’s creativity or athleticism. And when it comes to that last point, it reminds me how giddy I am to watch Jack Cartwheel grow as a wrestler as time wears on. I think his gymnast-chic style is tailor made for pro wrestling in a way many other athletic wrestlers can’t step to. He’s so fluid and graceful with everything he does. His moonsaults and dives have an elegance to them that no one else can match, not even some of the most premiere high-flyers on Earth. That’s a mindblowing thing to say when you realize Dante Martin was in this match, because Dante is a special talent all unto himself. But when it came to who truly shone in this orgy of springboards, I find myself the most impressed with Jack Cartwheel. He has a level of potential I don’t think people have quite caught onto yet.

So in most ways, this is a trios match featuring high flyers that happened in a PWG ring. You can kind of write the script on how the match is going to go from there. I’m not going to pretend this was a revelation in the art of spotfest wrestling. It was, however, a great match that capitalized in spades on its ambitions when it could have absolutely fish-tailed into the abyss of its own stupidity. Instead, it reveled in that stupidity and crafted something unashamedly wild around it, and I think that’s a heck of accomplishment. Really, I’m just using this many words to tell you what an overachievement I believe this match truly was. ****

JD Drake vs. AJ Gray
I respect the ambition of both men to go out there and have a fight, but when it feels as plodding and aimless as this, that’s kind of where the plaudits end for me. I am a big fan of JD Drake as the big fat guy who goes out there and clubbers people because he can follow it up with airtight structure and pacing. He can make it work because he has a foundational level of psychology and a sense of timing. You lose the appeal of a guy like that when he doesn’t have the mental acuity to follow up on the “novelty” so to speak. This is a match where it felt like he and AJ Gray decided they were gonna slap each other a lot and hope that the crowd didn’t actually want substance behind it.

There are very few wrestlers that can make that work. I watched a match last year between Minoru Suzuki and Bryan Danielson that was almost all forearms and slaps and it was my favorite of the entire year. Kensuke Sasaki and Kenta Kobashi spent almost half of their famous Tokyo Dome match chopping each other, and it’s one of the best matches this entire industry is ever going to see. Those matches are so special because of the commitment to the “bit” as it were, and the fact that everything was so soundly built psychologically that those outrageous exchanges felt earned. With Gray and Drake, it felt boilerplate. The moves between these strikes were not sequenced in a way that built suspense, nor was there any real change in gears. It felt like two guys who thought that they could have a hoss fight without really having a hoss fight.

Given my only exposure to AJ Gray prior to this was a pretty embarrassing dive onto nothing at that wonderful and totally cool Hammerstein show in GCW, I wanted to at least give him the benefit of the doubt here. I was not given much to go off the second time around, truthfully. He did nothing to dissuade me from thinking he was a run-of-the-mill short “bruiser” who throws lariats and slaps people a bunch without actually understanding why that sort of stuff works. It’s like these guys watch a Tomohiro Ishii match and think it’s cool that they hear a lot of reverby slap noises and turn it off before the finish. And in truth, it was an off night for JD Drake as well as he seemed content to rest on his laurels and swing on a strike with a guy that does a poor man’s rendition of his shtick already. I appreciate that I could be very wrong about young AJ Gray, but I gots to call what’s in front of me, and what’s in front of me here felt painfully average. At least he’s better in the ring than he is at Twitter… not that I’m in any position to talk. **

PWG World Tag Titles: Kings of the Black Throne vs. Black Taurus & Demonic Flamita
If my shoulders could physically do so, they would be shrugging to the highest of heavens. I hate to say that, because I expected a heck of a lot out of this match based on its sheer existence written down. But as it turns out, none of my expectations were met by any stretch of the imagination, which kind of befuddles me. Individually, all four of these men have great things to offer to a wrestling ring. I have been a gigantic fan of Tommy End/Malakai Black since I first saw him and I continue to be so. He would be one of my top guys if I ran a pro ‘rasslin show. Brody King is a continuously underrated force in whatever promotion he’s in, and he’s had some damn great showings in a PWG ring. Black Taurus has a fantastic menacing aura to him. Flamita is one of the best athletes in the entirety of wrestling. So if you mix all of those things together, you’d have to imagine that you’d get a beautiful amalgamation of chaos in a way that only PWG knows how to foster… but I didn’t really get anything out of this.

I think the prevailing theme here is that this was a little bit too much of a styles clash to work like I wanted. While I do like Taurus and Flamita a lot, their best matches have come against performers cut from their cloth of the wrestling world. Taurus is a fabulous base for his speedier opponents while Flamita is more-than-proficient at working a torrid pace for 15 minutes at a time. This is a wonderful thing when you’re wrestling guys like Fenix, Pentagon, Dragon Lee, Bandido, Puma King, et al. But in hindsight – where we’re all geniuses – I think it was a little bit of wishful thinking to expect a total killer of a match out of this foursome.

Malakai Black’s style simply isn’t a lucha-friendly way to wrestle. He can do dives and this and that, but when it comes to the meat and potatoes way of pacing and structuring a match, I wouldn’t be all that keen to send him to Arena Mexico or Tijuana. He is not the sort of guy that can go in there and just do these outrageous balls-to-the-wall PWG style spotfests because it’s not what he’s best at. His fluidity is different and does not mesh with the sort of fluidity you look for in a Flamita match. You wouldn’t expect to see Malakai Black have the kind of match Aramis and Dragon Lee had earlier, right?

But heck, part of me was still optimistic because I remember how amazing the Tommy End & Chris Hero vs. Lucha Bros match from BOLA 2016 was. I still think that’s one of the best matches PWG has ever put on. But then I realized that as good as Black Taurus and Flamita are, they are not Pentagon and Fenix. They can work with just about anyone on any country and get something great out of it. They’re that good, and very few tag teams can lay that claim. And the longer this particular match went on, the more it smacked me on the head that no one in this match is quite diverse enough to rise to that level of excellence.

And if I’m being honest, this match just didn’t have enough thought to get to any real level of intensity. The menacing aura of Black Taurus that I mentioned did not come through. The scary carnage that follows Malakai Black was nowhere to be found. The blistering meanness of Brody King was absent. It did not feel like any four of these men put their own spin on anything in the match, and it felt soulless as a result. I don’t know if that is something to be chalked down to the ugly styles clash or what, but there was not a single moment where I felt like I was watching a semi-main event on a PWG show. It felt like I’d turned on AEW Rampage and saw a ho-hum opener in front of a knackered crowd. That’s a bummer to say the least, because these are all four supremely talented wrestlers. But sometimes, even in today’s diverse wrestling environment, oil and water still don’t mix. **1/2

PWG World Title: Bandido (c) vs. Davey Richards
While calling this Match of the Night would be a bit hasty, it’s a great reminder of what Davey Richards can bring to the table. It’s been long enough now that there are tons and tons of wrestling fans who were not around when Davey was the big name on the independent scene, or if they were, they only heard about him when he said something stupid in an interview. And make no mistake about it, he did not have a shortage of stupid things to say at the wrong times. But with that and the fact that he hasn’t been around the wrestling business for so long, I think we’ve all forgotten that the guy is absolutely tremendous when he has his head straight. And judging on this (somewhat disappointingly short) return to his old PWG stomping grounds, he’s still got everything he had when he was on top.

But making this all about Davey is a disservice to Bandido, who I thought looked outstanding here. His signing to ROH may have gotten him paid with a work visa, but under no circumstances did it help his audience grow. Bandido is a guy, much like Rey Fenix, who is sneakily great at everything. I word vomited earlier about guys like Flamita and how they struggle outside of their archetype. Bandido is not one of those workers. He rises to every occasion that confronts him. His performance as the come-from-behind, hobbled high flyer with a resilient explosiveness was muted, but in reality brought this match into “great” territory. Davey, in all honesty, did not do much outside of his normal repertoire. But that was absolutely fine, because Bandido was his dance partner and worked off of his intensity like a charm.

Bandido’s selling of the leg didn’t exactly buoy the match, but it was something I appreciated. Oftentimes, selling is melodramatic. Sometimes it works, but it can be a little much. “Oh dear CHRIST my KNEE. This DRAGON screw has CRIPPLED ME~!” feels hackneyed after a while. Bandido’s selling was brilliant in comparison. Davey hadn’t done enough work on it to completely derail him, but still did juuuust enough to make sure that he couldn’t hit everything with the exact amount of torque needed. So when Bandido would explode into these Tope’s, he couldn’t complete the hat trick and left himself wide open for Davey to continue his onslaught. It wasn’t a long, drawn out story but it gave us a little bit of a reason to invest in some of the earlier goings, as well as justified the pacing. Davey took the lead and did a lot of the offensive work, but Bandido held up his end of the bargain just as well.

This didn’t feel like a big anniversary show main event like some in PWG’s past, but I don’t think it really needed to be. Selfishly, I feel like the show really could have used a big cap, exclamation point to hammer everything home, but that’s not always necessary. Sometimes, you look at wrestling to be logically done, well-executed, and exciting enough to make you feel like you spent your time and money wisely. Not everything has to be thirty minutes and five stars. And this match was neither, but it was still a damn good match that made me happy to see Davey Richards back in his element, so I’d call it a win across the board. ***3/4

8.0
The final score: review Very Good
The 411
I was ascending the staircase to the rooftop to scream about the quality of this show for the first four matches. It was just like the PWG of old, with different styles being showcased in genuinely state-of-the-art matches. The technical stuff was there to bring you down from the outrageous flying... it was all beautiful. But even though I can't quite scream about this show, I can tell all of you good folks at 411 to watch it. Because even with the later bumps in the road - one being an uber-disappointment in my nearsighted eyes - Threemendous VI was still a damn good couple hours of wrestling. Those who value athleticism and spots will be overjoyed at the trios and Dragon Lee vs. Aramis match, while those who appreciate good PSYCHOLOGY~! and storytelling will revel in Bandido vs. Richards and Gresham vs. Shelley. Those with a refined taste, such as myself, will like damn near all of it and find a $20 well spent from PWG's second post-pandemic offering.
legend

article topics :

PWG, PWG Threemendous, Jake St-Pierre