If you didn’t catch episode one, welcome to 31 Days of Deathmatches. This is an advent calendar-style countdown to Halloween offering you a door of deliciously gory wrestling per day. Our trip to the spookiest day of the year will take us around the world and through time. This will chronicle some of the most significant deathmatches throughout the years but will mostly consist of my absolute favourite barbed wire bouts and glass shattering matches. Without further ado, let’s open the next door.
David Starr and Joey Janela didn’t like each other very much in 2018. The man of many nicknames had his beef with the Bad Boy and we learnt just how the pair would settle it, by battling in a no rope deathmatch as the main event of Beyond Wrestling’s biggest event of that year. It was also being billed as Janela’s final deathmatch so it had to be special. The icing on the cake, this match featured commentary from two deathmatch legends, Bulldozer Matt Tremont and The King Nick F’n Gage. Who would be the ace of Beyond Wrestling by the end? More importantly, who would still be standing?
Absolute insanity last night with @JANELABABY vs @TheProductDS at @beyondwrestling #americanrana18 was bonkers from start to finish. pic.twitter.com/S9KuRA4tHP
— Rob Dobi ? ?????? ???! (@Robdobi) July 30, 2018
Things didn’t start slow as the pair started brawling and it wasn’t long until Davey Wrestling had Janela back first into the barbed wire, chopping the shit out of him. We then had a Jaws like sequence as Starr was inched towards the barbed wire. He escaped but ended up back first in the wire a second later. It wasn’t long before Janela was introducing other toys to the match, including an 8×10 of Scott Steiner. You’ll never know you wanted to see a duel between a barbed wire bat and a staple gun til you see it or a lightsabre battle with barbed wire bats. Both men took their cuts. The crimson flowed as strongly as the hatred between the pair. No DQ means no rules so the Bad Girl, Penelope Ford tried to get involved and save her then man but ended up backflipping into a barbed wire board. The spot of the match though is Starr sacrificing his body to deliver a Russian Leg Sweep through a barbed wire board to the floor. It was not pretty.
@JANELABABY vs @TheProductDS was absolutely insane. #Americanrana18 pic.twitter.com/tAKgUV0Jo9
— Michael Laney (@MichaelLaney) July 30, 2018
By the end of it, both men were bloody, twitchy and covered in cuts. They’d had to be cut out of barbed wire, been exposed to weapons of mass brutality and Starr had been Death Valley Driver-ed onto a cinder block chair after being betrayed by a ref. It was madness. Janela had wrapped himself in barbed wire and methodically cut down the “ropes” and fought with a barbed wire mane. He looked like a character from a macabre version of The Lion King. A Piledriver onto cinderblocks and three refs later we had David Starr cement himself as the Ace of Beyond Wrestling. This was deathmatch fun with high stakes and a lot of personalities. Before this, I never realised how hardcore David Starr could be, I was pleasantly surprised.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPATu1NNTDY]
Come back tomorrow for your next deathmatch treat!
Images courtesy of ProWrestling5Star (Twitter), MichaelLaney (Twitter), cozysuperkick (Twitter) Video courtesy of Beyond Wrestling YouTube, Robdobi (Twitter)