[From 411 Mania]- Last week marked a very important first for me. I actually still get a little choked up about it now that I’m recalling it. Last week I received my first “Swag” from working at 411. some of you may remember a while back I mentioned something called “Not-Rated Pro Wrestling”, which was a small company running up in Bakersfield that had the tag line “When Pro Wrestling and Porn Stars Collide”.

To my surprise the result was a bunch of bruised up porn stars and sticky wrestlers, but rather a wrestling company that marketed itself by having porn “stars” show up at events and in some cases, wrestle.

I made mention of the promotion in a joke last week and lo and behold I got an e-mail from Alexandria who works for the company that distributes the DVD and she said that she had made a package for me a while back and it was supposedly sent to 411mania, but wasn’t sure why I hadn’t received it.

At first I thought this was all a clever rouse to confuse me, then I thought…damn that Ashish…he probably intercepted that package and is stroking it to his ill gotten gains as I read this e-mail. Then I realized, hey, we’re a website…we don’t have a 411mania office.

So I figured I’d risk the chance of this being a set up and having Vampire Warrior track me down to deliver a vampiric beat down on me and gave her my home address. BINGO. I am now in possession of “Not-Rated Pro Wrestling 2: Slammin’ at the Strip Club”. Boo……YAH!!

I really didn’t have much of a clue what to expect when watching this thing, but I kept expectations low and figured that if nothing else…it was “swag”.

I actually began watching the DVD with my girlfriend, but at some point she actually fell asleep. She’s kind of a narcoleptic though, so it was to be expected. The tough part was explaining to her why she woke up with no pants on and her forehead was sticky but…well…that’s how heroes are made.

Anyways the basic concept of this is Sex, wrestling angle or match, sex, more wrestling angles or interviews and a match, some more sex, wrestling, sex, and wrestling again. Pretty straight forward right? It’s a bit difficult to really rate this DVD because it’s half porno and half wrestling.

The price tag for this is around $25 so I guess you can look at this as buying a bargain $10 wrestling DVD with 5 “matches” and a $15 bargain porno DVD with 4 scenes.

To be honest the 5 “matches” were really 4, with one being a kind of “finger poke of doom” match between David Young and Vampire Warrior (aka Gangrel from the WWF). There was one porn stud vs porn stud match involving a Craig Valentine who looks like a fat Matt Hardy.

I kept debating whether to refer to him as Fatt Hardy or Matt Hearty, he’s also in the opening sex scene and is the current X-Champion and apparently the owner of the company. His sex scene was average and his match was just God awful. I wish they would either teach these guys a few basic moves and train them, or just teach a wrestler to do porn. I have to think the latter is much easier than the former.

Overall the sex is standard, not spectacular or mind blowing, but decent plus at least half the women are cute to fairly hot. The whole concept itself was interesting if the quality of the actual production was a bit lacking.

I hate to admit it, but other than the really, really, REALLY horrible wrestling match between Evan “Stone Age” Stone and Matt Hearty (yeah I prefer that name better) and the one match that never was, the other 4 matches are…passable.

They are fairly short, maybe 3 to 5 minutes each, but they aren’t anything worse than you might have found on your average Sunday Night Heat. The names of note that wrestled were Vampire Warrior (who finally got a real match in the “main event”), Bull Buchanan, and for those FIP fans there were two guys wrestling as the “Scumbag Agents” who were actually Phil and Sean Davis of the Heartbreak Express.

I would have to say that the worst thing about this whole DVD is that Ron Jeremy is a commentator and is just f’n horrible. Seriously, he made me mute the entire DVD.

On the Brightside however the surprising thing is that some of the acting is actually pretty good. All of the wrestlers actually do a decent to passable job in backstage interviews (although the sound is HORRIBLE on the sound system) and surprisingly Evan Stone is a pretty decent actor in his role, as is Tommy Gunn, and the backstage interviewer, Dale DaBone is better than most of the random bitches that TNA and the “e” have now. Now is that pronounced De-bo-nay or Da Bone? I really wanted to hate this DVD, but…I didn’t. Of course that then got me thinking…could a porno wrestling federation really work?

I guess the answer is “yes”, at least currently. Apparently NRPW just ran another show in Bakersfield last weekend. Great job with the promotion guys, I’m all over the SoCal wrestling scene and I had no idea what-so-ever that this was even running. Maybe get on a message board or two and announce this stuff a couple weeks in advance.

I’m sure you’ve heard of socaluncensored.com and prowrestlingguerrilla.com. From the looks of that second DVD that was shot in the “strip club”, which by the way looked to be the size of a damn armory, there were maybe a few dozen people in the whole place. Then again…it’s Bakersfield.

More people have passed through Lita’s thighs than the town of Bakersfield. Considering that this is a Porno/wrestling company, why not just find a location to run in around “Porn Valley” aka the San Fernando Valley. PWG runs shows around there all the time. Actually I seem to remember going to an NWA taping that was in the Valley at a venue that was actually attached to a strip club. All I’m saying is, “Bakersfield”, really? Bakersfield?

I’m really surprised that no one made the connection between Stone and HHH and patterned his character after him. It would have been pretty sweet for him to roll out of the ring, reach under the ring and pull out a huge sledgehammer shaped dildo.

I was trying to figure a way to incorporate the pre-match water spitting into his entrance, but something tells me he’d either be too tired after his entrance to do more than eat a sandwich and take a nap, or he’d need a valet with a “special talent”. The other disappointments were that no one had any sex in the actual ring, no nudity happened during the show, and there wasn’t any kind of dirty talk involving wrestling puns or at least one “piledriver”. C’mon…you’re telling me they couldn’t have worked out a delayed hurricanrana spot just once? Then again with no inter-gender matches I guess that wouldn’t fit right. The more I thought about what could have been improved in the product the more I thought about porn and wrestling being a pretty damn good fit together.

If you look at TNA and the “e” now you realize how much sex is involved in wrestling. the WWE seems to recruit model after model hoping to strike gold with the next Sable or Trish Stratus, while they consistently make the legitimately trained wrestlers the support cast and the foil to the primped and preening “Divas”.

Even most of the women who actually can wrestle have had to do so after they’ve “enhanced their talents” so to speak. The last really natural “diva” I can recall was Stacy Keibler…and recall I do on a regular basis. *sigh* WWE has already gotten into the porn biz themselves by not only allowing their female wrestlers to appear in Playboy, but often encouraging them to do so. Chyna, Sable, Torrie Wilson, Christy Hemme, Candice Michelle, and Maria have all posed nude before and look how well that turned out for them. Okay…maybe that’s a bad example…I mean…Candice ain’t doing too bad right? While the WWE hasn’t gone as far as to actually allow nudity on their shows or PPV purposely (that’s the key word right?) they do certainly seem to condone it.

Women who are skinny with big fake tits and pretty faces are usually pushed as “faces”, they are featured as the ideal woman who isn’t just a sex pot, but can also take care of themselves, at least when it comes to the rest of the “lipstick jungle”.

But those women who are more physically imposing and have the strength and stature to stand against not just women but men as well (Amazing Kong, Chyna, Beth Phoenix) are usually cast as villains for the most part because the dominant female is always seen as evil. Isn’t that how most female “heels” see themselves during promos “as the most dominant female in the (name of company)”.

Its the same thing in porn isn’t it? You want a woman who can take care, especially against other women, but when it comes to men they are always subservient and submissive. For the most part until the Knockout Division originally started women were the window dressing to the actual “wrestling” which almost always involved focusing on the men exclusively.

But for a short time in TNA it seemed that the women’s division was just as much a focus as the men…of course at the expense of the X-Division, but I guess you can’t have too many spotlights. We’ve basically been trained to root for and fixate on a certain type of woman in wrestling, they just happen to look like slightly classier porn stars…okay not all of them are classier.

When you think about why the Divas that posed for Playboy became so popular it was because they were willing to bare it all for the fans. How many times have you watched Michelle McCool, Angelina Love, or Kelly Kelly and wondered what she would look like naked? For those of you who have the internet you’ve seen almost half of the other divas in the buff.

We are trained to look at female wrestlers now in a sexual manner and the next step of full nudity really is almost expected now. I’m sure there is a pool out there for who the next Diva is who will pose for playboy next. My money is on Mae Young. While there was a column a few weeks back by Jake Chambers which predicted that pornography might find it’s way to main stream wrestling, I don’t think it will go that far. The possibilities on an Indy level however are endless. Once again you can take a look at what NRPW is and what it has yet to become.

You have to wonder if you need full on sex to draw people into watching a wrestling show. If you think of all the former Divas who have shown the goods that aren’t under contract there are at least a half a dozen that might be willing to bare all again for a decent little paycheck. Sure you might not be able to afford Ashley, Sable, or Christy Hemme, but (and God help me for even suggesting this) I’m sure Chyna isn’t doing anything these days, hell book her with X-Pac and it can be like “Two Nights in Chyna” but with better booking.

I hear Shelly Martinez is desperate enough to auction herself off for dates, what about a little in-ring bondage? If you remember last week Tylene Buck, aka Major Gunns, is already doing porn, how the hell is she not in on this little venture? You realize that this whole “porn meeting wrestling” was done once before right?

Remember something called “Naked Women’s Wrestling League” where Carmen Elektra was the Commissioner? Only there were matches featuring semi or fully naked women wrestling around each other in awkward fashion, nothing more racier than you’d see in Playboy and certainly no “pink” if that’s still the term kids are using these days. It was originally on PPV and eventually DVDs were released and BOY was it bad. The women weren’t even hot.

I’m sure some of you have thought about the possibility of a Diva’s wrestling match breaking down into a total lesbo-fest. In fact some of the moves would transition pretty nicely into sexual positions. If only Maria were to hit her “Bronco Buster” sans panties right? Even some of the inter-gender matches would be more interesting if it were under “anything REALLY goes” rules. I think the problem here is that in that case it becomes a wrestling themed porno rather than a wrestling federation with porn. Really though I think that would be the better seller right there. Problem is that when you try to intermix wrestling and porn it really interrupts your “stroke” so to say, when you keep getting interrupted with a greasy looking dude in tights shouting about pinning another man to the mat.

If the NWWL proved anything it is that porn and wrestling might share the same audience, but deep down inside wrestling fans are more willing to part with the $40 to see men in tights than they are women in much, much less. The problem with trying to make a legit wrestling fed which is heavily reliant on porno scenes people can’t see is that you have to either have some really great wrestling take place for people to get into, or you’re just going to have to find a small enough venue and a willing crowd that will make the matches seem a lot better than they are.

While you might not be able to imagine an RoH DVD spliced with backstage sex scenes in the locker room going over really big, I could see a product like CHIKARA with it’s wackiness being the setting for some very interesting sexual situations. Lucha-porn anyone? “Oh yeah baby, cravate that nutsuck….yeah….I’m going to hit you with a shining bukkake.” Okay, you get the point.

Anyways it just seems like as much as you want to think that since the same basic demographic for adult movies and wrestling seem to intersect a great deal (not including Cena fans) it just seems a bit far fetched to have a wrestling company that intersects with pornography. That is unless you can book Major Gunns vs Ashley in a main event in the first ever “TLS Match”, that’s Tables, Ladders, and Strap-ons.

If there is one thing I’ve learned about both wrestling and pornography is that you just can’t take yourself too seriously. As wrestling fans I don’t know that we are fully ready to embrace the fully on sex with our violence. Then again I did read somewhere that the parts of our brains that are stimulated by scenes of graphic violence are the same ones that are stimulated by scenes of sexual content.

The real tough part of all this is finding a product that can appeal to a wrestling fan that also happens to enjoy adult videos. Because of the internet it is about 3 times easier to find good porn for free than it is wrestling.

The trick I would think is to be able to funnel the profits from the promotion into booking top level Indy talent and getting enough people to buy tickets to the show to break even before the DVD’s hit the stores…or websites as it were. Of course the trouble you might run into are the potential “crossover stars” that may want to try more than just their hand at porn.

I don’t want to be the first guy to ever see Nigel McGuinness hit a “Jawbreaker” on a chick in the ring. “I’m Nigel McGuinness…and I’m in it…to FINISH”. But you know, wrestling is becoming more and more prevelant in the mainstream world with reality TV and now a proposed show on HBO, I guess its never a bad thing to test the limits to see just how far you can go with it. I guess the line will finally be crossed once they give up those boring debates and let Obama and McCain go at it in the Ultimate X. Or maybe the “White House of Fear” match. someone tell Russo I just helped book another PPV.

The Truth

Look, if you’re going to have a wrestling company, make the wrestling good. If you’re going to have a porno company, make the women hot and the sex interesting. If you are trying to be both then you better make one of those two elements really shine.

In case of NRPW they came up a bit short of both. But then again maybe I was just lost from not seeing the first one…it’s episodic porn/wrestling I guess…just my luck the other DVD had all the Asian chicks in it. Still I’m going to give them credit for trying to re-establish an interesting concept.

The demographics are the same, but the execution of them are quite different, especially if you expect to have actual untrained porno actors wrestling in a ring and get a serious reaction. I kind of hope that the company sticks around for a while and gets set up with some people who know a thing or two about the wrestling business because while anyone with a few willing actors and a camera can make a porno, it takes a whole hell of a lot more to make a wrestling company.

It’ll be interesting to see where this goes, if for no other reason, it’ll give me at least a couple new porn related jokes for the leftover section. By the way, anyone wanting to check out NRPW for themselves can check them out at the lustique.com. I’d hook you up with a link, but I do have some impressionable young readers here.