BRM Reviews the 5/4/2016 Lucha Underground (No Mas)

[Big Red Machine]

DARIO & CATRINA IN DARIO’S OFFICE-
This started out with Dario… fixing his ceiling? Or maybe hiding something up above the tiles?
Catrina says that Mil Muertes almost destroyed Matanza. Dario responds by saying that it was Matanza who almost destroyed Mil Muertes. I don’t what match he was watching, because that’s sure as hell not what I saw.
Dario says he will give Mil his rematch next week, and to prove that he’s not afraid of Mil beating Matanza, he will even make the match Mil Muertes’ signature match: Grave Consequences. Didn’t Mil Muertes LOSE the only Grave Consequences match we’ve seen so far? Maybe it’s like Kane and the Inferno Match, where it’s totally his signature match even though he always loses.
Then it got a little weird as Dario decided that we would raise the stakes and instead it would be a “Graver Consequences” Match, with FOUR coffins. Sooo…. What does that mean, exactly? Are Dario and Catrina going to be involved, too? And wouldn’t that only require three coffins? Or do you have to force your opponent into four different coffins or something?

WINNER GETS ONE OF THE SEVEN ANCIENT AZTEC MEDALLIONS: Marty “The Moth” Martinez vs. The Mack- 3.75/10
Props to Melissa Santos for being totally professional and ignoring Marty’s creepy antics, while also doing teensy little things to show that it bothered her. The match was surprisingly short. The Mack won.

CATRINA AND KING CUERNO BACKSTAGE- good little bit of set-up for the next match.

DARIO & SEXY STAR IN DARIO’S OFFICE- the performances were good and the idea is cool, but the storytelling kind of suffers here to me for this one reason: In Dario’s story, saying “No mas!” is standing up for yourself. It’s a good thing. But in the No Mas match (I Quit match) saying “No mas!” is giving up and losing. A bad thing.
Then we had the ending to this, which was fantastic. Dario tells Sexy Star that even when Mariposa quits, she should keep beating on her until she has put the same look of fear into Mariposa’s eyes that Mariposa put in hers. In other words, the cycle of abuse will continue just as it has with Dario. His mother abused him and his brother, so now Dario abuses others.

There was a commercial with Dario Cueto (in character) promoting tomorrow’s “Cinco de Mayhem” marathon on the El Rey Network. First I must congratulate El Rey on that BRILLIANT name. After that, though, I must laugh at them because they are going to be celebrating Cinco de Mayo with that great Mexican tradition… Kung Fu movies.

WINNER GETS ONE OF THE SEVEN ANCIENT AZTEC MEDALLIONS: King Cuerno vs. Sinestro del la Muerte (w/Catrina)- no rating, good segment.
Vampiro tells us that “everyone’s got to pay attention to this Aztec tribes thing” while season one BRM screams “HA! I TOLD YOU SO!” at the top of his lungs. Still… this was a surprisingly clumsy and heavy-handed way to get this point across. It almost felt like a direct message meant for Dave Meltzer, who has flat out said that he doesn’t pay attention to any of the backstory stuff on LU.
In a rare successful attempt to be clever, Striker referred to Catrina as the “Queen of the cunning, underhanded, nasty, tactics.” There’s no way that one was an accident.
Speaking of said disreputable tactics, they clearly have big things planned for this No Mas match so they need to give it time, which meant that this match had to be short… so they found a way to both allow this match to be short while also building up the budding feud between Catrina and King Cuerno. Good booking.
After the match, Catrina gives Cuerno the lick of death, then hits him in the head with Mil Muertes’ special rock again.

FAMOUS B HAS FOUND SOMEONE WILLING TO PUT HIS AZTEC MEDALLION ON THE LINE AGAINST MASCARITA SAGRADA TONIGHT- sure. Why not? I mean… other than time constraints, obviously.

CHAVO & DARIO IN DARIO’S OFFICE- Dario won’t give Chavo the chance to win an Aztec Medallion because he always fails to seize the opportunity. Chavo stormed off, saying that he would seize the opportunity. For the first time since Los Guerrero broke up, Chavo Guerrero Jr. just got interesting.

AZTEC MEDALLION MATCH: Cage(c) vs. Mascarita Sagrada (w/Famous B & Brenda)- squash.
After the match, while everyone was tending to Sagrada (including Cage being a good babyface and making sure this poor guy wasn’t seriously hurt), Chavo stole Cage’s medallion right out of the referee’s hand.


NO MAS MATCH FOR ONE OF THE SEVEN ANCIENT AZTEC MEDALLIONS: Sexy Star vs. Mariposa- 6.25/10
I was quite shocked to hear dueling chants here. It just goes to show you that even while wearing a goofy mask, pigtails, and ugly pajamas, Cheerleader Melissa can still get over. Imagine how much talent it took TNA to be able to screw up with her.
Mariposa threw chairs at Sexy Star. Sexy Star would later respond by trying to violate Mariposa with one of the chairs. That wasn’t something I needed to see.
Once again the announcers talk about Sexy Star’s mask like losing it will have some big psychological effect on her and vaguely talk about how it helped her in life or something like that, and I have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. This is Lucha Underground for crying out loud! Can we please get a backstory vignette or something?
Sexy Star was allowed to scream “F*CK YOU!” into a microphone and it wasn’t censored at all. That surprised the hell out of me.
For me this was very much a tale of two matches. I really liked the stuff they did in the ring and on ground level, but I didn’t like the stuff up in the rafters and on the second level. Fighting up in the rafters just to climb down later always looks really silly to me. To make matters worse, in this case when Sexy Star came down, she was bleeding all over and I have no idea what caused it. I also didn’t like the finish very much, simply because I think it looks extremely lame for Mariposa, the greatest warrior of the Moth Tribe, to give up because she can’t take the pain in her first big match.
After the match, Sexy Star kept going after Mariposa, even shoving the ref down when he tried to pull her off. I thought this played into her earlier conversation with Dario very well.
I was very doubtful that they would be able to make the Aztec Medallion stip feel like it mean anything when it was attached to a big blow-off I Quit match, but Sexy Star’s reaction to The Mack handing her the medallion managed to pull this off perfectly.


Striker: “Marisposa picking Sexy Star up and slamming her down right onto the ancient Aztec seal”
BRM: “And the winner of this match will also get to keep the mittens!”
Sorry. Couldn’t help myself.


An interesting episode of LU. Awarding so many medallions in one show makes it feel like they are rushing towards crowning a new champion before Ultima Lucha, but doing such a thing would leave several key players with very little time to set up angles for Ultima Lucha.


Also… am I the only one who finds it a little creepy when everyone just addresses Sexy Star as “Sexy” like it’s her first name? I mean… I guess it is her name, but that doesn’t make it not creepy.

STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. Matt Striker tells us that the deer head that King Cuerno wears to the ring is “a message to his opponents that he collects trophies in the form of souls.”
Really, Matt. Because it seems a lot more to me like it’s a message that he collects trophies in the form of heads.

[cero2k]

It's been a while that Meltzer's ( and Bryan's) reviews of Lucha can be soo short sighted, but Dave's review of this No Mas match really bothered me. It annoyed the fuck out of me that they say that Sexy Star saying Fuck You was 'going back to the attitude era'. Like No! Not everything revolves around WWE and their stupid attitude era, saying Fuck You like she did was the most real human reaction to seriously hating someone and being pissed off. I fucking hate that Bryan and Dave keep saying that Lucha is keeping audience away with intergender matches and blood and shit, don't be fucking pussies, they're the ones still living in the past. They shit on TNA for trying to be like WWE, but they shit on LU for not being more WWEish, what the fuck do they want!?

I remember a comment last week that was around 'WWE is not even gonna look at Taya after she's doing these Lucha matches'. Well fuck yeah! Lucha is not a fucking farming ground for WWE! No one should be!

FUCK!

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