Dark Match
There are very few fast tracks into the top tiers of fame and success, and sometime it seems like there is no way out of the trenches at all, manager Rusty having taken his amateur wrestling outfit as far as he can, playing to cheering home crowds but unable to rise to the next level despite hopes pinned on Kate the Great, while notwithstanding her talent and huge ambition Miss Behave is never going to be popular enough to rank up.
An offer of a $50k down payment made by a persistent caller who wants to book the Stars of Amateur Wrestling, far too much to refuse, of course there are conditions attached, a long trek to a remote corner of Canada and immediate departure for the troupe; upon arrival, the greeting and hospitality is no stranger than they have had before, but “Mean” Joe Lean senses something is off, recognising a face in the crowd as a former teammate who drank the Kool Aid and reinvented himself as a religious messiah before vanishing.
A merging of the worlds of semi-professional wrestling and horror movies, Dark Match is written and directed by WolfCop’s Lowell Dean, starring 12 Monkeys’ Ayisha Issa as Miss Behave and Solis’ Steven Ogg as Joe Lean with Antlers’ Michael Eklund as Spencer, sinister host of the remote venue, and Terrifier 3’s Chris Jericho as the self-styled Prophet who runs the games, with Jonathan Cherry as Rusty.
Accustomed to taking hostile crowds and turning them into a profit and dishing tough love to his team when they get out of hand, Miss Behave’s growing resentment of a position she knows is beneath her becoming a problem when Kate the Great (Influencer’s Sara Canning) starts tallying grudges alongside the bruises, the Prophet’s plan to celebrate the Roman festival of Lupercalia is not something he could have anticipated, the five rounds to the death and the matches rigged.
Set in 1988, the era before mobile telecommunications and easy access to cross-referenced information, like the sporting extravaganzas which it is built around Dark Match aims for lowest-common denominator entertainment, the characters secondary to the business of men and women getting bloody in sweaty spandex as they beat each other while the crowds cheer at the killings and free hot dogs.
Bread and circuses for the masses, each of the rounds ultimately presenting variations of the same routine while realisation dawns to slowly backstage in the green room, Dark Match squanders what little potential it has, content to sit back and say the bare minimum is enough to tick the boxes of what the target audience expects, a satire on the parallels between the extremes of devotion of religious fanatics and the obsession of wrestling fans waiting on the ropes but never tagged to enter the ring.
Dark Match will be available on Shudder from Friday 31st January
