WHAT WORKED
Plain and Simple, Val Venis is the best worker in the WWE right now. That, of course, means Kane kills him in 19 seconds. Still, Venis is now had TWO balls to the wall great matches against Randy Orton. Fuck, they could have easily run this feud on the big shows and gotten Orton over. Like Orton needs the IC belt. Grr…. I am going to be bitter now. Venis gets to unleash a ridiculous amount of offense so I am guessing no one actually watches the Heat matches. The shot of Venis looking at the IC belt and settling his nerves as he gets over the idea of what a big match this is for him would have gotten this match onto this side of the column alone. Shit, in the first half of the match (before the commercial break) Venis does a follow through arm drag thingy, works over Orton’s knee in like three different way and goes for the reverse figure four. Any other Revolution match usually features some chops and some Germans and that is it. It also shows how amazingly frustrating Orton can be as he is fucking great at time to get out of the various leg locks – such as kicking V squared in the face to prevent the reverse figure four or trying to use the ref as leverage to reverse out of the submission – but he doesn’t actually sell the knee after managing to cut of Venis’ momentum. Had he actually been selling the knee earlier it would have made the finish of the fake knee injury a lot more effective. But getting back to Venis for a second, he breaks out the drop toe hold into the leg snap and THEN actually does apply the reverse figure four. If he breaks out the Stump Puller, I am personally going to CT and smacking heads until the put him a PPV main event. Shit, send him over to Smackdown, make him a heel again and feud him with Eddie Guerrero. Anyway, this match wasn’t as good as their first Heat match but what was really good about it was that they were able to work a completely different match with no repeating of spots or anything.

The following week, Venis’ match the following week against Rhyno was perfectly acceptable as Rhyno is another one of those guys who I like who never actually wrestles on regular programming. No body vice and no 18 different suplex variations but they did enough to get on this side of the ledger.

Garrison Cade has some great elbow drops and I don’t just mean his one off the top rope.

Teddy Long was working the pinstripe suit and I enjoyed the rundown of the LA crowd. He really is trying to shine a turd with getting Jindrak over.

WHAT DIDN’T WORK
I kinda liked Cade vs. Stevie Richards but I wasn’t a huge fan of depressed despondent Stevie Richards, which lead to the glorified squash with Richard’s entire offense being not being able to do the Shattered Dreams. I probably could have snuck this onto the other side of the column but here ya go.

There was a big 10 minute section that I got to skip because I sure as heck ain’t watching “The WWE feigns interest in the Presidential Election so Vince can hardened a few more hearts without fear of FDA crack down” nor am I watching Lita and Kane do the worst version of Beauty and the Beast ever.

Woof. Somehow Shane Helms managed to get stuck with a shit-tatstic gimmicky gimmick during that time when the WWE was moving away from the “wild, outlandish characters” to the more “realistic” ones. Now the WWE is back to making guys retards and racists and race car drivers and repair man and Helms soldiers on with his gimmick and anchor of a partner. There is some elaborate Glad Hands work going on in this match.

I am glad to see that Michael Cole stopped trying to front and just went ahead and grew the sex offender mustache. I am sure Gabe White can send him some literature.

There sure was a lot of recapping of Raw, which allowed me to shave about 90 minutes out of the three hours that I had to watch. Heck, one of these episodes showed so much of the Benoit/Michaels match that they actually split it over two breaks. Breaks were still abrupt as shit. Ah production values.

Ooof…. That Nidia vs. Jazz…. Yeah okay. I don’t really pay attention to too much of the women’s roster so maybe you can answer a question for me? Has Jazz always been 67 years old? Wow, I guess the expression long in the tooth would apply.

Awww… it has been so long that Brian Christopher still worked for the company before I wrote this. I don’t think Hustle will be contacting him. Local law officials maybe but not Hustle.

Phil