Halloween Havoc 1992: This Show Has To Be A Big Joke On Somebody. It Has To Be.

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Date: October 25, 1992
Location: Philadelphia Civic Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Attendance: 7,000
Commentators: Jim Ross, Jesse Ventura

The opening video has the usual haunted house theme.

Tony and Bruno Sammartino do some hosting/analysis stuff.

The twelve matches on the wheel are:

Texas Bull Rope

Russian Chain

Dog Collar

I Quit

Barbed Wire

Cage

Lumberjack With Belts

Prince Of Darkness

Texas Death

First Blood

Z-Man/Johnny Gunn/Shane Douglas vs. Arn Anderson/Michael Hayes/Bobby Eaton

Ricky Steamboat vs. Brian Pillman

Pillman gets backdropped and slammed a few times, so he pokes Steamboat in the eyes to take over. See? Being evil does pay off. Steamboat is like screw this getting beaten up and chokes Pillman over his head. Brian blasts him in the back of the head when Steamboat has his back turned to take over. The headscissors gets two for Pillman and he chokes away a bit on the ropes. The Dragon blocks a superplex but jumps into a dropkick for two.

Rating: B. This is what you call a fast paced wrestling match between a talented face and a talented heel. To put it short, the idea worked. They worked very well together as you would expect them too, with both guys looking crisp the whole way through and the crowd reacting well to it. Good stuff here indeed.

Masahiro Chono, the NWA World Champion, selects Kensuke Sasaki as his guest referee. Harley Race will be the other one. Wait so why was it surprising to see him earlier?

Bill Watts has some announcements. Terry Gordy has been fired for breech of contract and Steve Austin will be replacing him in the tag title match tonight. Also Rick Rude has whined too much so Vader will substitute for him in the US Title defense.

US Title: Nikita Koloff vs. Vader

Steve Williams is glad to have Austin as his new partner.

Tag Titles: Steve Williams/Steve Austin vs. Barry Windham/Dustin Rhodes

Rhodes charges into a boot but he comes right back with a lariat to take over and get two. Windham comes in with another clothesline for another two and the same off a suplex. Back to Doc who is taken down immediately. They slug it out but Windham misses a charge and lands on the floor. Back to the future Rattlesnake as the challengers take over. Suplex gets two.

Rating: B+. I really liked that ending sequence with the false finish because it was the right call from a rules standpoint. The rest of it was really good as it was an extended formula tag match from four guys who were all very talented. This worked quite well and thankfully the MVC was gone forever. Williams and Rhodes would lose the titles to Steamboat and Douglas less than a month after this.

NWA World Title: Rick Rude vs. Masahiro Chono

Rating: T. As in THIS is why the NWA died around this time. We had a boring match with a guy that no one cared about with a bogus ending. Why am I supposed to care about this match? Neither guy was impressive at all and the match brought down what had been a good show so far. Just awful here.

We look at Cactus Jack training Barbarian for the world title match. This would consist of having Barbarian on all fours with cinder blocks on his back. Jack breaks them with a sledgehammer. This is in the montage used on Are You Serious.

WCW World Title: Barbarian vs. Ron Simmons

Back in and Ron hits the absolute worst sunset flip of all time for two. Barbie hooks a LONG cobra clutch which looks more like an armpit claw but whatever. A top rope elbow misses and Simmons gets a chance to breathe. They slug it out but Simmons channels the power of football to hit a bad spinebuster for two. Simmons misses a clothesline but Barbarian sells it anyway.

Rating: F. The Barbarian just co-main evented a show. This was treated like a worthless match and to be fair, there was good reason to do that. It came off like a bad main event of a C level TV show, which goes a long way to explain the troubles this company was having around this time. Just awful here.

Sting, Bruno and Erik Watts talk about the match we just sat through.

Sting vs. Jake Roberts

We get about four minutes of wrap up to end the show.

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