Grunt! The Wrestling Movie

Grunt! The Wrestling Movie (1985)

Runtime: 90 minutes

Directed by: Allan Holzman

Starring: Greg “Magic” Schwarz (yes, that’s his name), Steven Cepello, Marilyn Dodds Frank, Jeff Dial

From: New World Pictures

Now, here’s something interesting for Memorial Day. It’s a movie that I got on VHS tape when I was a kid. My dad got it for a dollar (he over-paid) at a store as he knew I was a huge pro wrestling fan at the time. I watched it, and even back in those days when I enjoyed watching feces, I thought this was awful. I then didn’t watch it again for many years, until finally today. I wanted to see if it was as bad as I remembered it being.

So, here’s how this lame cash-in on the then-popular WWF turned out. It’s a faux-documentary about an old wrestler named Mad Dog who wrestled for the title in ’79 but ran into trouble when he accidentally decapitated his World Champion opponent (!). He gets into trouble for that, falls into a depression, then allegedly kills himself. But, six years later, the title is finally stripped from the dead champion (yes, that’s the type of “humor” you have in this movie) and it’s going to be up for stakes in a battle royal. A new wrestler creatively called The Mask arrives on the scene, and the director (Dial) and a weasel fan club president-really-want to find out if The Mask is Mad Dog or not.

Who cares?!

That’s my reaction to the whole thing. It’s like Spinal Tap, only the complete opposite in terms of droll humor. Here, “jokes” are made about arm transplants to get rid of tattoos, or the director being named Leslie Uggams… no, not that Leslie Uggams, he says often. The real Uggams is an African-American singer/actress from back in the day. Like I said, that’s the type of comedy you get in this movie. It’s an idea for a short that is brutally stretched out to an hour and a half. You get to see some old wrestlers that hardcore fans would know, like Dick Murdoch, Adrian Street, Dan Spivey, John Tolos, and some local wrestlers from the dying days of the Los Angeles wrestling scene. Plus…

The movie has Wally George appearing as himself briefly. Think Rush Limbaugh… or maybe better yet, Glenn Beck in terms of schtick. He apparently had plants on and he’d rant and rave about liberals and Soviets and all that. See what I mean about Glenn Beck? The studio audience was Springer-ish, too. Bizarrely, he was the father of Rebecca De Mornay! True story. If Fox News would have been around back then… he’d be a big star. I guess we should be happy then that it wasn’t. And yet he was the best actor in this film! Trust me, much of the “acting” you see is rather poor.

So, the wrestling action you get to see (to pad out the run time) is fine, I suppose for the time period, but the stuff besides that is mainly awful and a total fail when it comes to being funny, so it’s not worth watching unless you are a hardcore fan and you wish to see those old faces or laugh ironically at it 26 years after it came out, especially at the 80’s-riffing tunes you get to hear throughout. If you do that, I’ll presume you won’t enjoy how you often get the message from the movie that pro wrestling sucks and that some of the people involved with it hate pro wrestling. What a message pro wrestling fans want to receive, right?

I'll be back Friday night.