Audible sigh. Can you guess why we’re talking about this this week? So yeah, as bad as it was, what happened at WWE World Wrestling Entertainment WrestleMania 2: WrestleMania Backlash is no new thing. Wrestling has been trying to borrow some of the shine of movies, it’s much cooler older entertainment brother, for decades. Hell the entire main event of only the second ever SummerSlam was built around Hulk Hogan fighting Zeus, the main villain from Hulkster’s new movie No Holds Barred, and it didn’t stop there.
Triple H with his high-larious robo-poncho at Mania 31, cool Triple H, cool, to Hellboy showing up to wrestle in All Japan Pro Wrestling in 2019. No chill in this business, wrestling will show its ass at the mere sniff of cross-promotion. Some movie collaborations haven’t been terrible, Hugh Jackman I guess, that’s fine, others… oh no…OH NO. I’m Adam, hailing from PartsFunknown and here are the 10 Worst Movie Tie-Ins In Wrestling History.
Army of the Dead
Let’s get it over with shall we. What a load of undead b******s, and genuinely the only actual bad thing on the card. Seriously, Backlash might just have been the best WWE PPV of the pandemic, HOT TAKE. Were it not for the fact that, to shill Big Dave Batista’s Big New Zombie Heist movie Army of the Dead, WWE spliced zombies into the Thunderdome crowd, and you know what, if they’d left it at that, that’s borderline charming, wouldn’t be the first time webcam footage of a slavering cretin appeared in that crowd, but alas no, WWE had bigger plans for the night.
The Miz, who was WWE Champion three months ago and Damian Priest who seems to be WWE’s current pop culture liaison for some reason, wrestled with a bunch of actors in zombie makeup around the ring, and the Miz sold it, and I hate that they made him do it. I hate that the main wrestling company in the world is written in crayon. John Morrison did some parkour before getting [checks notes] killed and eaten, and then The Miz lost the match before getting…killed and eaten. Damien Priest won, but had to shoot the Army of the Dead logo into the ceiling and what happened to you Damien Priest, you used to be cool.
Shaft
And speaking of cool. Who’s the cat that won’t cop out, when there’s danger all about? It’s Shaft. Whenever anyone tries to tell you that WWE was cooler in the attitude era, point them in the direction of the June 15, 2000 episode of Smackdown and the storyline that ran through the episode of Patterson and Brisco searching New York for Crash Holly and his hardcore title.
Who does Crash run into but John Shaft and his woman, who is the only one who understands this complicated man. John Shaft. Yup that’s real Samuel L Jackson playing fictional John Shaft, talking to real/fictional crash holly and man it’s weird. Anyway Shaft agrees to be Crash’s bodyguard delivering a weak slap to Patterson and Brisco and what better way to promote a movie about a cool dude with attitude than having him mixing it up with the fucking stooges. Has wrestling ever been cool. Guy, it might not have ever been cool.
The Wrestler
This is…complicated. So The Wrestler, starring ancient wooden lion Mickey Rourke is a sombre movie about an industry that, in its heyday, left people physically spent at 50, washed up and addicted to adrenaline at best, and dead at worst.
It brought Roddy Piper to tears when he watched because he recognised the wreckage that the business used to leave it its wake, which makes it just super weird that WWE leapt in to help promote the bleakest possible look at their world, and did so by having Chris Jericho smack the s**t out of three old wrestlers, including Roddy piper, at WrestleMania 25, only for not a real wrestler Mickey Rourke to hop into the ring wearing his ‘so you want to start taking peyote in the desert’ starter kit and do his best Shane McMahon impression at Chris Jericho.
On the surface, a heartwarming tale about celebrities being better at fighting than trained athletes, but tonally it’s bleak, like if the guy who made supersize me screened the film’s premiere at the world’s biggest McDonalds.
Naked Gun
Ooh some of you are gonna disagree with me on this, and yeah I can kinda see it. The Undertaker vs Underfaker storyline heading into SummerSlam 1994 was a big plate of ham and cheese, but it was the kind of new generation silliness that give people a nostalgic twinge. Going back to re-watch it though, nah it’s pretty bad, sorry about that.
So the story in brief, at the Royal Rumble 94 the man with the Funereal Disease fought Yokozuna in a casket match in which he died and ascended to heaven. Yes. Undertaker vanished for months, before WWE started a storyline of people seeing the Deadman at the deli, bringing in none other than Frank Drebin of the Naked Gun movies to help crack the case, just in time to promote Naked Gun 33 ⅓ that had come out earlier in the year.
Cue Leslie Neilsen looking for ‘Taker backstage at SummerSlam, and lots of subpar Naked Gun one-liners that honestly aren’t as good as you remember. Leslie Neilson holds up a closed briefcase so he says, the case is closed. That’s it. That’s the whole joke.
See No Evil
Kane is genuinely one of the best and from all accounts nicest wrestlers to have laced up a pair of boots, but oh man he’s has waded through his fair share of slop in his career.
One of the Big Red Machines’ big red mistakes was the May 19th storyline, the entire point of which was to promote the WWE Studios horror movie See No Evil, which premiered on, yeah you guessed it. It was after ‘Mania 22, and Kane started to become mentally fixated on May 19th, the day his family perished in a fire.
Anyone who mentioned it to him would get a knuckle supper for their trouble and oh god this storyline for two months. At Backlash an unravelling Kane fought Big Show when May 19th began to play over the sound system, the source of this spookery pookery was an imposter Kane. Poor Luke Gallows, when they roll you out in a wig that looks like Bon Jovi on a humid day, your angle doesn’t stand a chance. At Vengeance Kane fought fake Kane, was beaten by him for some awful reason and WWE canned the gimmick the next day. Oof.
Nightmare on Elm Street
Of course it’s not just WWE that’s attempted to suckle at Hollywood’s withered gangrenous teat. Even down in Memphis during the, one of the most highly-regarded territories in its day and Jerry Lawler’s vaunted kingdom, wasn’t above a bit of naff s**t, to try and shift some tickets via recognisable intellectual property.
Step right up Doug Gilbert and his gimmick, Nightmare Freddy, a flagrant flaunting of copyright law that New Line Cinema had nothing to do with. A notable villain and terror of the schoolyards everywhere, Jerry Lawler could occasionally be seen with Freddy, who scared other wrestlers with his big dumb rubber mask, but like, he had to take off his finger knives when the match started, so why are you cowering from him Buddy Landel?
What’s he gonna do, other than call you a b*tch which is as we know the cruelest insult in wrestling. Oh and also a Jason ripoff gimmick called Jason The Terrible wrestled down there as well, because of course he bloody did. Freddy and Jason would take their schtick on the road to Japan, where footage of a Freddy vs Jason match can be found from 1992, over 10 years before the actual Freddy vs Jason movie came out.
Chucky
Poor Rick Steiner, you didn’t deserve this. They shouldn’t have made you talk to the puppet. So WCW was heading into Halloween Havoc 1998, and after years of stomping on the WWF in the ratings, the wheels have come off and have come off hard. To boost PPV buys, WCW had just spent a fortune on bringing in the Ultimate Warrior to rekindle a feud with Hogan mostly by hiding in his mirror, and the Steiners Brothers, one of the most dominant teams of the 90s had been feuding amongst each other for most of the year ever since Scott turned on Rick back at Superbrawl.
What was the best way to hype the upcoming match between brothers at Halloween Havoc? Why, that would be having Rick Steiner get into a war of words with Chucky, yes the serial killer doll chucky, who cussed him out while promoting Bride of Chucky and it’s so so sad. Rick challenged the doll to come down to the ring and fight, is promptly ignored and then made fun of for about three horrible minutes while the crowd wondered what might be happening over on Vince’s channel right about now, which btw was the episode of Raw where Austin filled Vince’s corvette with cement, which is slightly more badass than being teased by fictional puppet.
The Goods
Right now, Raw is bad. It’s a bad tv show. It’s been bad for a while, but somehow it’s still not as bad as the guest host era of Raw, which was f***ing unwatchable. For those of you who were lucky enough to not be watching raw at the time, and bloody hell I sure wasn’t watching at the time. From mid 2009 to 2010, every week a new celebrity would host Raw, often to promote a tv show or movie and it was nearly all horribly written, cheesy w**k.
Imagine every week being zombie week. THAT’S WHAT IT WAS LIKE. WWE is a baby show for babies. Bob Barker was good, the muppets were good and that’s it. MacGruber turning up and murdering R-Truth with explosives was bad, The A-Team showing up and chokeslamming Virgil was bad, The three stooges segment is one of the worst ever, and that happened in 2012 when wrestling was starting to get a little better, terrifying everyone. But then there’s Piven.
Jeremy Piven, who turned up to host raw with Ken Jeong to promote a movie no one remembers called The Goods, he stunk up a bunch of segments, infamously called SummerSlam ‘The SummerFest’, before getting rough housed by John Cena later in the night and wrestling is the worst, stop watching it. And many did. For a long time.
Robocop
Oh man. The original prototype. Robocop is a very famous wrestling embarrassment so I’ll keep it as brief as I can, Robocop 2 was released in 1990, and I don’t know how much money the producer threw at WCW but goddamn they took one of their PPVs, Capital Combat marketed the entire thing about the fancy metallic gentleman.
The full title of the PPV was Captial Carnage: The Return of Robocop, implying that Robert Cop was an old friend of the promotion. In fact he was an old friend of Sting, makes sense, both big heroic idiots running on basic. Sting was feuding with the Horsemen who attacked him and bundled him in a cage that was at ringside, out came Robocop, called totally straight by Jim Ross, who ripped the cage door off its hinges.
So yeah, that’s dumb, that’s real dumb, but a bit of context to explain why WCW fans hated it SO much. See 1989, the year before, if often regarded as one of the greatest years in WCW history. That was the year that saw Chi-Town Rumble, and the much acclaimed Steamboat vs Flair feud reach its peak. To go from that, still one of the highest regards feuds ever, to Robocop was seen as huge slap in the face to WCW who have always been famously more into traditional wrassling than cheesy pop-culture crossovers, which makes this next one all the funnier.
Ready To Rumble
Awww yeah, you knew it was coming. When they put the belt on f***ing Dewey. On April 7, 2000, bad movie Ready to Rumble, about two hapless dorks who try to help Oliver Platt aka the lawyer from the west wing, become WCW world champion, was released in theaters. Two weeks later, to help promote the movie, David Arquette, the lead actor from Ready to Rumble became WCW World Heavyweight Champion, pinning Eric Bischoff, who wasn’t the champion of course, in a match alongside DDP his best friend, and top babyface, but also top heel in the ready to rumble movie to make it extra confusing for the mainstream audience WCW was trying to attract.
Oh WCW.
Arquette didn’t want to do it, none of the wrestlers wanted to do it, but hell the title had been vacated four times that year already. He won the title, filmed some skits in a Hollywood backlot where everyone made fun of him for being the champion, cool, thanks for that Kurt Russell, and the whole thing came to a head at Slamboree in a stipulation officially called a Ready To Rumble Cage Match which took place using the triple decker cage from the climax of the movie, saw Arquette turn up in Spiderman villain stripper cosplay, turn heel because swerve and basically hand the belt to Jeff Jarrett as viewership crashed and burned like Kanyon being thrown from the cage.
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