Championship Wrestling From Hollywood Episode 381 (featuring David Arquette) Review

David Arquette wrestles on this episode. Yup. 2018 is no longer a year. It is a meme.

We started off with an expendable backstage personality interviewing Ryan Taylor and Tomsate about their match against the Reno Scum. Ryan Taylor seems to have developed a character that works for him. Adam Thornstowe interrupted them with Luster The Legend by his side and cut a promo to hype their match. After the promo, the Red Carpet Rumble intro video played and we headed to the first match. CWFH has a new entrance set from when I last watched the show. It is a very noticeable improvement over the old set.

Best of Seven Series – Match 6: Chris Bey (3) vs. Suede Thompson (2)

The story of this match was Suede was trying to fight back from a 3-1 deficit in their series. If Suede won, the final match of their series would take place at Championship Wrestling From Arizona. I know that show is on FITE as well, but I find it really dumb that CWFH is dedicating their own TV time to a product most of its viewers won’t watch at all. Guess some things never change with this promotion. I have other thoughts about a problem CWFH has in regards to this series, but I’ll save it for the end of the review.

The psychology of this match wasn’t good at the beginning. Suede, who was in a “must win” scenario, was relaxed and acting like he was ahead in the series. Seeing as he was down, it would’ve made way more sense for him to have fought with urgency instead of playing things off like he wasn’t in an important match he needed to win. The fans in attendance seemed to react to most of what was going on, but for some reason, somebody thought there was a need for fake crowd noise. So dumb.

At one point in the match, Suede Thompson hit a Sunset Flip Stunner off the ropes. The commentators said they had never seen a move like that before. Guess they’ve never watched a Masato Tanaka match. How did these guys get their jobs? Anyways, the layout of the match just didn’t work. There wasn’t anything wrong with either guy’s performance as far as quality was concerned though, The fans, who were into the first part of the match, didn’t seem to react to the near falls in the finishing stretch. Suede would get the win after countering a fisherman suplex attempt with a small package pin.

Post Match Shenanigans

At ringside, Kathy Campanelli (also known as Kathy From H.R. from Santino Bros) interviewed Suede Thompson. He cut a promo about their final match in Arizona. It was lame.

After a commercial break, expendable backstage personality spoke and was interrupted by Watts. He cut a quick promo on Robert Baines about a match next week and left. Expendable backstage personality then introduced the next match: David Arquette vs. R.J. City.

Before the match, R.J. City cut a promo inside the ring. He targeted Arquette’s wife and talked about himself for a bit. It was about as entertaining as the video I posted below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGA-GCq7JWM

David Arquette vs. R.J. City

The commentators kept talking about a bunch of angles that led up this match. Much like the problem with Suede/Bey, I’ll talk about this later in the review. Arquette had an elaborate entrance that included him standing on a pedestal. It honestly felt like I was watching a scene in a sitcom where a character is involved in a plot where they become part of a wrestling show.

The match began when R.J. City literally knocked Arquette off his pedestal and whipped him with Arquette’s belt outside of the ring. Once inside the ring, the match became your typical babyface vs. heel match. R.J. City played the cocky heel, while Arquette played the role of Ricky Morton in this match. R.J. worked over Arquette while playing to the crowd, and Arquette would mount a comeback. Arquette would put R.J. City in a Sharpshooter to get R.J. to tap, but R.J. would rake the referee’s eyes to keep him from calling the match.

For the most part, the action in this match was very limited. They did a lot of basic stuff and a bunch of comedy. R.J. City got the win after kneeing Arquette in the face as he came off the top rope. Obviously David Arquette isn’t someone who is at a level where he could put on a high-workrate style match, but this was a well-worked match. It was structured pretty well and Arquette had a good performance. He sold really well and had a better grasp on psychology than the majority of workers in this territory.

Part of me wanted to talk about how surreal this was, but then I realized that we’re in 2018 and that I shouldn’t be surprised by shit like this. At this point, if Adam Sandler doesn’t manage the Revolting Blob against Captain Insano in ROH in 2019, I will lose hope for humanity.

With all that said, what purpose did this match serve? Seriously. What does CWFH get out of this match? I’ll talk more about this later in the review.

United Wrestling Network Tag Team Championship Match: Reno Scum (Luster The Legend & Adam Thornstowe) (c) vs. The Soul Burners (Ryan Taylor & Tomaste)

The fake crowd noise was playing during the ring introductions. That shit really needs to stop. It doesn’t help anyone or anything. This match would start off with a basic formula where the Reno Scum worked over Tomsate before he made a hot tag to Ryan Taylor. This would lead to the Soul Burners getting a flurry of offense on the Reno Scum that included a Doomsday Tope Suicida, and a 450 Splash from Tomaste onto Adam Thornstowe.

After that, the Soul Burners would control the match and worked over Adam Thornstowe before Thornstowe mounted a comeback. Luster The Legend would be tagged in and had a showcase before he missed a top rope headbutt attempt. The finishing stretch would then see both teams hitting a series of moves for near falls.

Eventually, the Soul Burners would attempt the Burning Man, a move where Tomaste moonsaults off Ryan Taylor’s shoulders, but Adam Thornstowe would get his knees up to counter and roll Tomaste up for the win. During this, Ryan Taylor had his back turned, thinking Tomaste hit the move cleanly to get his team the win. This was a really fun match. Both teams had nice displays of offense, and the match had a good layout.

Final Thoughts

The wrestling on this episode wasn’t bad. The opening match suffered from poor psychology, but it was still decent. R.J. City vs. David Arquette was a match that you’d expect to be terrible on paper, but in the end, it turned out to be pretty decent. The main event was pretty good and the best match of the show.

Regarding David Arquette in CWFH, I honestly feel like having him face some random guy was a terrible booking move. I’m sure there’s a backstory behind why R.J. City was booked in this match, but from a business standpoint, it would’ve been a lot better to have someone from the CWFH roster working the match. Even if R.J. City returns as a regular, it’s a huge slight to the people who have been working for the promotion longer than R.J.

As for David Arquette himself, if he returns to CWFH the only logical way to go with him as a character would be for him and Peter Avalon to go at it. The story writes itself. Although I’m sure the average fan would understand how to book this better than CWFH could. Then again, who knows if he’ll return to CWFH. If he doesn’t, then I don’t see how CWFH benefitted in a longterm sense from this.

I touched on this before the Bey/Suede and Arquette/R.J. matches. One thing that I really wanted to point out was how CWFH continues to do a terrible job of informing their audience about past angles and telling stories. Every other wrestling television show you will watch features video packages and clips of stuff. This is done to remind the audience or show new viewers stuff they might not have seen before to help them better understand the storylines.

CWFH though? Nope. They don’t do that. Instead, they just say a bunch of shit on commentary and it all gets lost in the match and commentators’ shitty attempts at being funny. Now I haven’t watched this shit in months. I don’t know what angles are going on with what happened with Chris Bey and Suede Thompson. TMZ is not a place where I get my news, so I don’t know what happened with R.J. City and David Arquette in the past, nor do I know why they’re feuding in the first place. How is the average viewer supposed to become invested in a match or a character if they don’t know anything about it? This is shit CWFH doesn’t realize, and is what is holding them back from producing good television shows that people would actually watch.

Like I said above, the wrestling on the episode wasn’t bad. Aside from that, CWFH continues to produce subpar programming overall.