WARNING STRONG VIOLENCE AND LANGUAGE AHEAD

Welcome back to 31 Days of Deathmatches Volume 2. The second edition of the annual deathmatch advent calendar put together by yours truly. Each day we will open another bloody door on the calendar and explore another deathmatch until we hit Halloween. We’re going to explore a ton of different companies, wrestlers, and stipulations as the days go on with a few surprises here and there. So, strap in as we prepare for another round of blood, broken glass, and barbed-wire on our road of deathmatches.

Well, it’s finally time to return to FMW. The grandfather of Japanese deathmatch wrestling got a healthy showing in last year’s calendar and it’s time to return to Atsushi Onita’s house of electrified barbed-wire and Thunder-Fire Bombs. For our first foray this year, I decided to tackle one of their most infamous matches. Through some of it’s more extreme elements, this match became one of FMW’s most talked-about matches. I am of course going on about the No-Ropes Exploding Barbed-Wire, Dynamite Pool Elimination deathmatch, or as it’s more commonly known, the match where the guy got gutted with a sickle. It would see the team of Atsushi Onita, Katsutoshi Niyama, and Mr. Gannosuke look to best the team of Hideki Hosaka, Mr. Pogo and The Gladiator Mike Awesome in a ring floating on a pool rigged to explode.

Yes, it was every bit as insane as it sounds. Within seconds Pogo was attacking people with barbed-wire bats and trying to throw people into the wire. The next minute, Onita was trying to drown him in the pool. Everyone was hitting moves in the ring like no one’s business as everyone was tossed, thrown, hit with piledrivers, and nearly drowned on several occasions. The Gladiator scored the first elimination by dumping Niyama into the pool, causing an explosion. After a minute more of in-ring action, we got the infamous gutting as Pogo plunged his sickle into Onita’s guts after throwing him into the barbed-wire. They weren’t shy about it either, you saw Pogo really going at it, stabbing and twisting the blade. Somehow Onita survived this and went back to fighting. He bludgeoned down the Gladiator and Gannosuke speared him off into the exploding pool. Pogo and Hosaka wasted no time in beating down the other two, stabbing and cutting them up with barbed-wire and the sickle, Gannosuke taking the blade to the head. Gannosuke got blown up in the wire and hit with a Pogo fireball. Just when things looked to be at their worst, Onita dodged a fireball and Gannosuke knocked himself and Mr. Pogo into the exploding pool with a diving crossbody. Onita quickly capitalised and threw Hosaka into the exploding wire and won the match with a Thunder-Fire Bomb.

This match became pretty well known for its extremely violent stipulation and the very visceral cutting up of Onita. As this took place in 1994, many people outside of Japan hadn’t been exposed to this level of sheer insanity. It became a cult legend and no doubt helped propel FMW’s popularity as people have bloodlust and this seemed to be the company to satiate it. FMW will forever be a company tied to some of the best and most violent wrestling. This is just yet another example of the explosive match types you could see from the company. Come back tomorrow for the next deathmatch delight.

All images courtesy of YouTube, Reddit, Video courtesy of CFSoldier YouTube