“Dark Match” took me back to those bad ol’ days when World Wrestling Entertainment founder/ex-chairman/megalomaniac/perv Vince McMahon launched WWE Films (now Studios) in 2002, forming a cinematic wing for his wrestling empire that gives his on-screen talent a chance to flex their acting muscles and become bona fide movie stars.
With a couple exceptions (like the Stephen Merchant-directed bio-dramedy “Fighting with My Family,” which stars Florence Pugh as younger, hungrier version of Brit wrestler Paige), most of the films that have emerged from WWE have been straight-to-cable/DVD/streamer clunkers that just happen to feature some of your favorite Superstars™!
There is a wrestling veteran in “Dark Match,” a non-WWE production that’s being shown on horror streamer Shudder. In it, sunbaked headbanger Chris “Y2J” Jericho, dons Undertaker black (he even has a cowboy hat!) as Prophet, a former wrestler-turned-cult leader who lures a wrestling promotion (cheekily, cheesily named SAW Wrestling) out to his compound for some duel-to-the-death matchups.
SAW’s sleazy, cokehead announcer/promoter (Jonathan Cherry) blindly accepts this lucrative invite, not knowing it’s literally a survivor series (sorry, couldn’t resist). As he and his crew of low-rent bruisers hop in a rickety van and drive through desolate snowy terrain to their middle-of-nowhere destination, resident female heel Miss Behave (Ayisha Issa, righteously pissy) is continuously in this-ish-ain’t-right mode. Along with her white, wrestling-vet boyfriend (Steven Ogg) and a masked, mute wrestler of color dubbed Enigma Jones (Mo Adan), Behave finds out just how raw (there I go again!) this slamfest really is.
Along with being set in the ‘80s (we know this because Cameo’s “Word Up” plays at one point), “Match” is a ‘80s-style cheapo chiller with a contemporary, racially sensitive twist: the final girl is also a sista. Before all this murder and madness erupt, the bitter, sulking Behave is already fed the hell up with being the bad guy, having to make charismatic (and white) babyfaces like her chief rival, the blandly-named Kate the Great (Sara Canning), look good in the ring. It’s bad enough that she has shot-on-old-school-video nightmares where she goes one-and-one with some kind of mysterious evil.
While I appreciate writer/director/Canadian horror slinger Lowell Dean for helming a thriller where the most sensible, resilient characters are either dark-skinned or an ally to dark-skinned folk, the rest of the movie ain’t that deep. In fact, it’s insanely clumsy.
Most likely written under duress, “Match” is clogged with contradiction and ill-conceived excessiveness. SAW Wrestling is portrayed as both an influential promotion and a rinky-dink operation. Prophet is predictably revealed as a sham cult leader, making his money by recording these bloodbaths on video for snuff-movie enthusiasts. But he and his minions also get their black magic on by rounding up bodies for a ritual that’ll make this movie pull an anger-inducing, supernatural twist out of its ass in the final minutes. And let’s not forget about the welcoming-party sequence in the first half, with several characters getting pointlessly roofied, drugged, raped, and even branded; that’s only there to immediately show that this cult is, indeed, shady. (With the movie clocking in at an easily chewable 94 minutes, I guess Dean just needed to get the carnage and chaos rolling.)
With the matches looking like they were shot in an abandoned Amazon warehouse, featuring an audience of cult-follower extras who randomly come and go with each elaborately staged wrestling sequence, “Dark Match” practically embraces its shabby, sketchy ineptitude. It appears to only exist just so Jericho (who’s also an executive producer) can be in his supervillain bag.
It almost seems like Jericho, who hasn’t done any big-screen time at WWE Studios, wanted to do a shitty, slovenly horror flick—like the ones WWE Studios occasionally drops—just to see what it felt like.