DVD Review: XPW TV: The Complete Second Season

Courtesy of Steve Rockamaniac:

Living on the east coast, I like many others had almost no access to XPW when it was alive and well. Now with Big Vision Entertainment releasing much of the video library on DVD im getting to see exactly what they were all about. Most recently they put out The Complete Second Season of XPW TV. In the past I had been told by those who saw the show to expect a lot of corny humour, especially from the second season as the dvd cover warns you that not many actual wrestling matches took place that season as the company had venue problems and thus couldn’t hold tv tapings. This fact didn’t stop XPW from putting on a full season of TV, instead they turned much of the season into a soap opera featuring their stars as stories of owner Rob Black going crazy, cars being stolen, porn pasts coming back to haunt individuals, and a bitter personal feud nearly turning deadly were all major features of the shows each week, and yes much of it was corny, but in a odd way also entertaining, after all, how many times has wrestling been called a male soap opera?

Season 2 kicks off as XPW was building towards their big 1 year anniversary event “Go Funk Yourself” which was headlined by challenger Terry Funk taking on champion Sabu. Owner Rob Black and his army was in the midst of a crusade to get the title off of Sabu and his manager Josh Lazy, and had called in a favor to “Uncle Eric” Bischoff over in WCW to lend Terry Funk to him in hopes of accomplishing that goal. The sub plot to this was the ever decreasing mental status of Rob Black who would often be found in a bathrobe in the streets, asking his magic 8 ball for answers, or talking to a “negro claus”.

During the season, Black would need to step out of character on a couple of occasions, most importantly when the ECW/XPW incident went down and a brawl ensued between the two companies in the parking lot of a ECW PPV event. Black goes on a personal shoot on Paul Heyman revealing the lawsuit Heyman had tried to send Black’s way accusing him of using Sabu when he is under contract to ECW and that Black had stolen the name “extreme”. As you can tell Season 2 is Rob Black TV, much of the show involves him, in fact, there is also side stories such as his wife, Lizzy Borden’s car being stolen by White Trash Johnny Webb, and Rob Black has to take care of getting it back, which involves him dealing with a mob boss who Webb had pawned the car off to.

When the soap opera isnt playing out, you do get to see a few solid matches from the time period, including the aforementioned battle between Sabu and Terry Funk, also a sick deathmatch between Supreme and The Messiah, as well as matches featuring stars such as Tracy Smothers, Nosawa, White Trash Johnny Webb, The late great Dynamite D and his never ending imitations of wrestlers popular in the 80’s and much much more.

There are full match DVD extras included in this set as well, one of which features a younger Christopher Daniels taking on Donovan Morgan. Also The late great Big Dick Dudley vs Damien 666 vs Johnny Webb, Homeless Jimmy vs Supreme, Michael Modest vs Carlito Montana and “Good Times with Guido” the ring announcer (which is kind of a useless extra but whatever) and

After watching the nearly 11 hours of content in this DVD boxset, I must say it wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be. If your gonna pick up this DVD your probobly best to watch the first season as well because you maybe a little lost in the first few episodes of the second season, but if you love the idea of a corny wrestling soap opera, mixing in some actual wrestling action here and there then you’ll probobly like XPW TV. I am one who falls in that category and because of that I found the show slightly addictive and was able to watch most of it in one shot cause I wanted to find out what was happening next.

XPW: The Complete Second Season DVD is now available from Big Vision Entertainment for 24.99$. For more information check out www.bvdvd.com or www.thexpw.com And to read my previous reviews of Big Vision and other wrestling dvd’s head on over to www.maineventradio.com/reviews.htm