Posted November 22, 200816 yr comment_5435886 DVD #16 October 4th: Ganryujima Antonio Inoki vs Masa Saito - Ahh ... the island death match. This has to be one of the strangest spectacles ever perpetrated in wrestling. Some of the stuff -- the arrivals by boat, Inoki emerging from his tent like a medieval knight preparing to joust, Saito grabbing a log and beating Inoki with it -- was really entertaining. They also bled buckets. But the footage of them lying around in the grass in holds came off poorly as did most of the wrestling until the brutal closing stretch. The Funk-Lawler empty arena match ran through my mind as I watched, because I think they were going for something similar. That was so much more focused and had two great talkers in Funk and Lance Russell leading viewers through the story. In this case, the weirdness of the spectacle overwhelmed any story they tried to tell. We should include clips as an extra. October 5th: Korakuen Tatsumi Fujinami vs Riki Choshu - This had a similar rhythm to their '83 matches. Choshu started it off hot with a lariat but they quickly moved into a long stretch of mat wrestling. That climaxed with Choshu attempting the scorpion and Fujinami struggling out of danger. His escape kicked off the exchange of higher impact stuff -- lariats from both guys, German suplex nearfall from Fujinami, the usual. They ultimately brawled over the rail for a no-contest. I'm going to leave this off, because they didn't strike new ground from their previous series, and because they did many of the same things better in those matches. This wasn't bad by any means. It just didn't come off as essential.
