Stranglemania!

By Jimmy Squarejaw

What I’m about to discuss might seem like a questionable choice on my part, and I am still reeling over my decision.  I stumbled upon STRANGLEMANIA at a thrift store a little while back and being a huge wrestling fan growing up I naturally had to inspect these videos out.  Unbeknownst to me, my hand picked up a pair of wrestling VHS tapes created by an entity known as the Insane Clown Posse.  After plugging my nose so all of my vomit didn’t spray everywhere and I could swallow it back down, I gave the boxes a second glance and saw pictures of people beaten and bloody, captions reading “Fuck Hulk Hogan,” “Fuck Ric Flair,” and “watch at your own risk,” because it contained Japanese Death Matches.  I got a 2/3^rd boner without even knowing and that made me puke a little bit more.  I figured what the hell, if these are a collection of Death Matches, it can’t be all that bad even if it’s hosted and narrated by The Insane Clown Posse.  I came to find out that STRANGLEMANIA is quite the little entertaining wrestling collection but it didn’t sway my opinion in anyway on the juggalo culture.  For me, and I don’t know if a lot of people think this way or not,  it’s not about how shitty or not shitty music is, people like what they like and that’s it who gives a fuck.  What I despise in the average juggalo is the general lack of ambition in life and their complacency for being obnoxious drug abusing, fast food eating, obese, disease spreading drunks that will spike the amount of the population with diabetes and emphysema and being that no one will be able to afford health care eventually I don’t want to foot their bill with taxes off my paycheck.  But let’s get to the matches!

A hilarious FBI Warning screen stating physical harm will happen if you bootleg this tape and that you’ll be killed by a “Milly” aka Nine Millimeter opens STRANGLEMANIA.  A second screen pops up and says who cares if you bootleg it because they didn’t get permission to release these matches either.  Like true business professionals Insane Clown Posse include a quick plug for their new album before we get to opening video commentary.  Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope adopt new monikers for their ringside commentary and they’ll now be known as 3D and Gweedo for the rest of the video even though they have the same makeup, they just wear black suits now.  I get the impression that the characters of 3D and Gweedo must have been cultivated and fine tuned by true artists because they mumble and scream almost incoherently as they bumble through cue cards they fuck up while trying to adlib terribly as they announce the highlights to STRANGLEMANIA.

Match one according to the Insane Clown Posse is Cactus Sack Vs. Lama Namaneumi.  It’s really Cactus Jack vs. Japanese Death match Legend Shoji Nakamaki and this match is a fuckin’ doozey!  This particular death match has boards with huge nails affixed to it and boards covered in heaps of barbed wire laid around the outside of the ring.   The match starts off with standard wrestling fare until Cactus Jack brings in one of the nail boards and drags Nakamaki’s head across it.  Not the old razor in the wristband trick Ric Flair used to do EVERY FUCKING MATCH, Nakamaki’s head gets the skin ripped open and he starts bleeding like crazy. Cactus Jack takes a tumble too into the nail bed and he starts bleeding like a stuck pig after a bottle of Rumplemintz (look it up assholes!).  The ring starts to have the appearance of the floor to an abattoir, or the shower stalls in a girl’s 8^th grade locker room.  Your pick.  Cactus Jack throws Nakamaki out of the ring and he lands halfway onto the nail bed and gets about 6 or 7 nails lodged into his arm.  At this point a slew of photographers surround Nakamaki to capture the gore up close.  It’s similar to the way photographers surround the emotional black holes known as celebrities in our country.  From there Cactus Jack gives Nakamaki a few good suplexes onto the barbed wire and eventually gets a pin.  Mind you 3D and Gweedo are rambling non-stop during the match and really don’t add too much to the experience, few funny outbursts but not many. 

On the back cover for STRANGLEMANIA it boasts to show highlights from The Battle Royal of the Nobodies.”  That is the second segment shown and that is an accurate description to what it is.  About seven or eight not very fit wrestlers in unremarkable costumes all battling each other.  A clip about one minute long is shown before the second real match starts and is shown like this between every match until the end of the video.

For the second match we watch two overweight twin brothers, who 3D and Gweedo refer to as the Mushroom Brothers, beat the living shit out of one another.  I have to admit, Mushroom Brothers is a spot on description of these two and eventually they end up looking like manatees that got caught in a boat propeller.  This death match is in a smaller, more intimate, venue as they say in the music industry and a lot of the action leaves the ring and gets integrated with the audience.  This is a huge difference from American wrestling and it’s too bad because seeing people flee out of the way in the nick of time from being wounded is very fun to watch.  This match has barbed wire and boxes containing full panes of glass set outside of the ring, just waiting for one of the Mushroom Brothers to plummet into it. After a few close calls and regular ol’ wrestling moves the brothers finally make use of the glass when the bigboy dressed in red gets a shard of it and cuts into his brother’s head.  Like the previous match the photographers’ circle around the carnage like they would if Christina Hendricks’ tit fell out at the grocery store in the states.  It makes me think how many publications could possibly have this picture utilized in it in Japan?  The brothers make there way through all of the glass and at separate times end up as the meat in the middle of sandwiches made with the boards covered in barbed wire. Eventually after the red suited brother falls off the turnbuckle, you can tell it was a mistake, he jumps off the top rope with an atomic belly flop and gets the pin.

Instead of reading about every fuckin’ match in this video, which is about as interesting as reading the details of consensual penetration and light bondage, looking at you E. L. James, here’s a synopsis of the final matches on STRANGLEMANIA.  The Japanese wrestler from the first match, Shoji Nakamaki, fights another Japanese wrestler 3D and Gweedo call Deadly Fred.  They duke it out with a barbed wire covered bat in a ring with a box full of tacks.  This match wasn’t even mentioned on the box and it is fucking insanely brutal.  Tacks lodged into skin and skulls give me the willies but so do people who have 3 kids.  After that is a tag team match, or more like a four way brawl between Cactus Jack, Deadly Fred, Shoji Nakamaki, and Leatherface from TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.  Yeah, I guess the Japanese have a thing for American horror movie villains in wrestling matches because there are other matches out there that have Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger.  The final match is Cactus Jack versus Terry Funk.  These guys are considered legends in extreme wrestling and they live up to that by beating the ever-loving shit out each other.  They use everything imaginable to gash, rip, and debilitate each other in the “main event” match including explosives rigged outside of the ring and on boards covered in barbed wire. 

STRANGLEMANIA is a great watch.  It’s violent as hell and if you grew up with or grew into watching wrestling you will love this tape.  Sure it’s Insane Clown Posse, and sure they get a little annoying and can’t hold a candle to commentators like legends Bobby Heenan, Gorilla Monsoon, or Jerry “The King” Lawler but the matches make up for their inept rambling.  Worth a watch and great to put on the background of a get together on mute but if you see people start showing up with clown makeup or very large jeans with zippers and metal chains all over them, grab the gun!

Blake and Jimmy’s Extreme-O-Gauge!

Realistic Gore: 3 out of 5, this is real as it gets just shy of actual murder.

Rape: 0 out of 5. I’m sure a few Juggalo’s have slipped in their junk into passed out Juggalette’s during this flick though.

Animal Death: 0 out of 0

Necrophilia: 0 out of 0

Torture: 3 out of 5, some of this shit has to be fuckin’ torture and painful-especially the next day when the cocaine wears off!

Overall Movie: 3 out of 5, Fun watch but the Juggalo element was not my cup of grape soda flavored tea.