DVD Review: Forever Hardcore

Written by Stevie J

 

As such I stumbled into this two-disc set completely by accident. I was actually not even looking for wrestling DVD's the day I stopped at Best Buy and picked this one up. I had entered the store heading straight for the hip-hop CD's when their resident pro wrestling employee fan flagged me down. In fairness I was probably easy to spot because I was still wearing a John Cena t-shirt I had dug out of the closet the night before for Raw on USA. Normally I like to shoot the breeze but this day I was in a hurry because seven new rap albums were out, and I needed to review no less than three of them. However I made small talk for a minute anyway and he pointed out all the new stuff they were carrying, including some of TNA's "Best Of" compilations - I own most of them already but I was still happy to see that. Then he told me they had the Hardcore Homecoming documentary, but he looked around in vain and couldn't find it on the shelf to show me. I told him hey no big deal I gotta split B, talk to you later. While I'm up front paying for my purchases he literally RUNS over with a copy in his hand, telling me it was misfiled, after I had already handed the clerk a wad of cash. Shit. Why do I feel like the asshole now? I never really said I wanted it, why did he come racing across the store with it, especially when I was done and ready to leave? I scanned it quickly: "Forever Hardcore. $17.99. Two discs. Includes extra footage and bonus matches." Oh what the hell. I pulled out my credit card, told him thanks, and had the clerk ring it up. Might as well give somebody other than WWE and TNA a few bucks for a change.

Now if you know anything about Hardcore Homecoming you know it's the show put together by Shane Douglas that ran two nights before WWE's own version of an ECW show called One Night Stand. Despite not being able to use the ECW name and trademark because they were owned by WWE lock stock and barrel, Shane had cleverly promoted his show as being more authentic by holding it in what used to be called the "ECW Arena" in South Philadelphia and by getting some top names from ECW's glory days that wouldn't be appearing for WWE. Jerry Lynn. Justin Credible. Raven. Terry Funk. Shane Douglas himself, "The Franchise" if you will. Plus they promised to re-enact one of the most famous matches of ECW's history; the big "three-way dance" between Douglas, Sabu and Terry Funk that first took place the night The Franchise won the NWA world title (also the same night he threw down the belt, disavowed the NWA and proclaimed himself the ECW heavyweight champion instead). Some guys were appearing at both shows but Douglas didn't seem concerned and neither did WWE, who in fact called Hardcore Homecoming a "house show" and felt it was free promotion for their own. History will judge which was the more authentic representation of ECW's heritage but I for one was sorely dissapointed by the fact WWE's show didn't include Jerry Lynn or Raven; just as I'm sure some of the people who attended Hardcore Homecoming were hoping for Rob Van Dam and Taz.

By all accounts both shows were a success, selling out all of the available seating and doing land office numbers on merchandising. WWE quickly churned out a DVD of their PPV event. Unfortunately theirs was repackaged from the original broadcast; some things missing, some added. A promised version that would include an extra disc of ECW material as a "collector's edition" was ultimately scrapped. Hardcore Homecoming on the other hand took a completely different tack. Not only did they release the show in it's unaltered entirety as a two-disc set, they re-released it as part of a national distribution deal - the same one which landed this "Forever Hardcore" documentary on store shelves. Now here's what you should keep in mind - while WWE's "The Rise and Fall of ECW" told the story of ECW from start to finish, even for those who were not intimately familiar with it, "Forever Hardcore" pretty much assumes that you're the kind of person who would have bought or watched Hardcore Homecoming and is already intimately familiar with ECW's history. They don't both to present things in chronological order, date exactly when certain events took place, or even go into full detail about how WCW and WWF undermined ECW's chances to thrive and survive. Of course the WWE video had the unparalleled advantage of having Vince McMahon, Eric Bischoff and Paul Heyman all available to comment on that situation - HH has NONE. Still the two sets do have something surprising in common - they are slickly produced. The video is high quality, the interviews are interesting, the footage is cut together to get different people discussing the same things, so on and so forth. With a couple of exceptions you'd think something this good came from WWE Home Video, and I do mean that as a compliment.

Hardcore Homecoming does offer a few things that the WWE documentary didn't though. For starters there's Tod Gordon though, the founder of ECW going back to when it was Eastern Championship Wrestling, an NWA offshoot. While the WWE video more or less presented Tod as "the bad guy" who was selling out ECW and was eventually asked to leave, this DVD paints it a little differently. The chapter entitled "The Mole" goes into detail about the situation. Gordon says that based on one phone call, an urban legend spread about how there was a mole inside ECW who was working to take the company down. He goes so far as to say that he and Paul both knew about the rumor and went to great lengths to play it up for publicity purposes. "As Paul and I got to talking more and more about it we started realizing WOW - if the boys bite, you know the fans are going to bite." So from Gordon's point of view it was a work all along. Terry Taylor remembers it a bit differently though - his contention was that Tod Gordon called him and promised he could "deliver" a group of ECW talent to do an invasion angle similar in style to the N.W.O. invading WCW. Taylor says that he told Gordon to clear it with Paul Heyman and call him back, and he contends Gordon said this wasn't through Paul and was his deal alone. Unfortunately the DVD moves along so quickly to discussing RVD's influence that this point is never really settled. Still Gordon's presence throughout Forever Hardcore serves not only as a reminder that there's more to it than just Heyman's or WWE's side of the story; furthermore (and this could in truth be a work on his part) he comes across as a genuinely sincere guy who cared about the promotion and the talent. He really doesn't have anything bad to say about Heyman or anybody in the company. Some of the wrestlers are a little less kind though - most say he's a genius, some say he was a demented genius, and others say he was just plain demented.

And speaking of demented, it's truly a pleasure to hear Raven's own take on some of the infamous historical events of ECW. For those who didn't know, Sandman actually built the cross that Raven and his followers hung him from. Furthermore Sandman was all in favor of the idea, due to the fact they had built up a year long feud and needed something really dramatic to keep it going. Raven feels it was not bad heat at all, saying he should know being as he was in the middle of it, and that apologizing for crossing the line after it had already been crossed was a huge mistake. I really don't want to jump on Joey Styles case for being a hypocrite too much, especially since Raven already has on his own website, but when he says "80 percent of this country is Christian, it's the religion that changed the world" it really is a little too much to swallow. So we should let that 80% (if that # is even accurate) dictate what gets said or not said, what's offensive or not offensive? And haven't the Muslim, Buddhist, and Jewish faiths among others "changed the world" too? And what do these Christians think of the fact Styles continually uses the Lord's name in vain everytime he screams his trademark phrase "OH MY GOD!" Sandman is appropriately flippant about the whole thing when Heyman wanted them to kill the angle by brawling from the back out to the front afterwards: "He just killed me, left me hanging on the damn cross! I can't rise from the dead yet, it's not Easter!" Oooh. I can hear angry Christians gnashing their teeth right now, but as a non-practicing Christian myself that remark tickled me down to the funny bone. I personally believe 95% of this world's problems come from people taking their religion, ANY religion, way too seriously. That kind of seriousness causes jihads and holy wars. What if we could all take a step back instead of getting up in arms about each and every little thing that mocks faith? Here's Raven's own two cents: "You're Jewish, Tod's Jewish, and Paul E's Jewish, why didn't you crucify him on a Jewish star? I'm like yeah that would have worked, I put him on a Jewish star he'd just roll away." HUMOR PEOPLE. This shit is funny.

Okay maybe the act of crucifying someone isn't in and of itself funny, unless of course you're watching a Monty Python movie (you should always look on the bright side of life). The fact it offended people though proves it a success. Raven says earlier on the DVD that the hardcore smarks are the easiest people to work, because they're so convinced they know what's going on they don't even how much they're getting worked. He's absolutely right. Sandman sums it up nicely thus - we only apologized for it because we were trying to woo Kurt Angle (who left the show that night pissed about it) but did he tell WWE he was offended the night the Undertaker crucified Steve Austin? Oh that's right, WWE called it a "symbol" and claimed that it was different. Yes, and so is the cross. In fact the cross wouldn't even be symbolic if Jesus hadn't been hung. If he was stabbed and bled out would people wear little gold daggers? If he was stoned to death would people wear sharp pointy rocks around their necks? Frankly were I a practicing Christian I'd rather wear something that celebrated Christ's life rather than his death anyway. Maybe a fish, or a loaf of bread, or a bottle of wine. You can say this much about "our savior," he knew that people liked to eat drink and be merry. Right on. And what you glean from listening to all of these people talk about ECW is how much fun they had, both with each other and performing in front of a live audience. They tell stories about each other. Kid Kash describing New Jack: "That guy has lost his fucking mind!" New Jack describing Sandman: "I ain't got a bad word to say about him {*alcoholic, drug addict*} but other than that nothin'." Sandman describing Sabu: "Before he was using the table in his matches and stuff like that, at the end of the match he'd just went up on the top rope and started moonsaulting a table." Sabu: "I did that for years, before I even came to ECW."

That's one of the biggest revelations of this documentary - HEARING SABU SPEAK. On TV and/or in front of the audience he's a man of mystery - never cutting promos, letting his actions speak louder than his words. You'd be surprised to learn from watching this DVD that not only is he a very personable and talkative guy in real life but a very intelligent one as well. In fact the one thing that really comes across on this documentary is how sharp many of the guys in ECW's history were and are. WWE's DVD set hinted at this a little bit but kept defaulting to Paul Heyman as the charismatic hyperactive demented ringmaster of the circus. What "Hardcore Homecoming" shows is that given the book and the same talent a lot of these guys could have produced the same kind of results. In fact on some level you almost start to believe these guys did such fucked up crazy things to each BECAUSE they were so smart. It wasn't just a case of "can you top this," it was more like a case of "I know I can think up something better than you can to pop the crowd." My good friend Mad Monk has also long held the theory that it's the most intelligent people who do drugs, probably because they need it the most to cope with the stupidity of everybody else. You could make a case for it when you hear someone like Raven, who has a reported IQ of 143, describe having a mental breakdown and going into rehab for ten days only to come out and immediately buy a bunch of pills and a 12-pack of beer. Then there's Father James Mitchell (the Sinister Minister) and Sandman himself, who would challenge each other to answer obscure trivia questions about world geography and military dictatorships while getting completely pickled on alcohol. Mitchell was in fact too smart for his own good, because when he nearly killed himself with explosives the boys backstage thought he was playing a rib on the lockerroom. That's just the kind of place ECW was back then. As unscripted and out of order as Forever Hardcore might be, the charm of it is that it all seems to make perfect sense that way. It actually seems in some ways to be a little bit more "true ECW" than the WWE version which strictly followed a timeline and hammered the points they want to make. Hardcore Homecoming goes into a lot more depth about certain events too: New Jack cutting up Mass Transit, Shane Douglas and Pitbull Gary Wolfe each giving their own take on Wolfe's neck getting broken, how New Jack nearly killed himself in a match falling over 25 feet, so on and so forth.

The interesting thing is that while it's nice for "Forever Hardcore" to have included a bonus disc of material it's in some ways unnecessary and in other ways actually detrimental. First there's the cut interview footage itself, in which we actually hear Jeremy Borash asking the questions and sometimes stammering over himself to ask the same thing twice. Not good. I'm glad he did such a good job putting the documentary together but that good job also included leaving himself out of it, so while the extra footage is nice to watch it's not nearly as good as the cut and edited first disc where wrestlers, promoters and fans of ECW seem almost to be responding to each other when it comes to whatever topic's being discussed. Second of all there's the "bonus matches" themselves, which are all culled from XPW. Now I'm not going to go into length about ALL the problems XPW had here, that's for another review on another day. Suffice it to say a short list would include the fact they were run by a porn mogul who fancied himself as ECW reborn, but couldn't hold a candle to ECW on their best day despite having hired some of their talent. Maybe Sandman was never a great technical wrestler to begin with (on the first disc Kid Kash is openly amazed he got so over despite a lack of skill) but even he would be embarassed by how sloppy he looks in a match with Konnan and his "lWo lite" faction. It somehow seems horribly inappropriate to include a Shane Douglas vs. Chris Candido match, not because it's so soon after his unfortunate death but because it so poorly showcases his talents. This match is well before Candido got cleaned up and in shape during his final run in TNA and it shows. He takes whips like he's moving in slow motion, climbs up the ropes so slowly for a high spot that Douglas actually repositions himself to take it while the camera's on him, and generally only looks less worse than an even more bloated Tammy Sytch who is far from her glory days in the WWF. XPW's announce team is quite frankly atrocious and couldn't hold Joey Styles jockstrap with a pair of salad tongs, particularly their wannabe hispanic commentator who can't decide if he's Jerry Lawler, Hugo Savinovich or Tony Montana. I appreciate the thought guys, and I'm sure XPW was one of the few places you could get footage featuring ECW guys that Vince McMahon doesn't own (especially since XPW went bankrupt a while ago and the rights to this footage was probably dirt cheap), but if I was Vince I wouldn't want to own this stuff anyway. I've seen Monty Brown squash matches that were more entertaining in 30 seconds than these bonuses are over 10 minutes.

This is the one case where WWE's "Rise and Fall" truly wins in a landslide. Other than that I STRONGLY recommend Forever Hardcore. It's good if you're an ECW buff, you can most likely get a lot out of it even if you don't know the whole enchilada, but you should ESPECIALLY consider getting it if you already bought "Rise and Fall" because it tells a wholly different and entertaining side to that story you never got to hear 'til now.

--- Stevie J.