The Death Panel — May 2025’s Best and Worst Deathmatches

Welcome to the Death Panel, a monthly round-up of deathmatch stuff that looks interesting, either for good reasons or for bad ones.

Arez vs. Matt Tremont (GCW Crazy Scary Spooky Hilarious, 5/3/25 — via TrillerTV+)

The older that Matt Tremont gets, and the more that his body breaks down, the more of a cartoon he becomes. His body language when he sells is a collection of silly bits. He punches woozily at the air like that one GIF of Ronda Rousey; he wobbles his knees and stirs his body in place, like a Mortal Kombat character waiting to eat a Fatality; he Flair flops. It shouldn’t work, but it does. “Normal” behavior wouldn’t fit a guy who looks like him. When he’s selling, Tremont’s face often looks like a wailing toddler’s. He has a giant beard of ginger pubes, and an infected horse anus for a forehead. All of this somehow hangs together just right if a man is a pro wrestler who stabs people with a fork, like he’s the Black Abdullah the Butcher.

As the reigning and defending GCW Ultraviolent Champion, Tremont had a bevy of showcases in May, including singles matches with Jimmy Lloyd and Mance Warner, and a no-contest with SLADE that brought the signature Negociantes Traumado “brawl out into the street outside the venue” finish to Joppa, Maryland. The best match of Tremont’s May was in Los Angeles, against the King of Strange Style, Arez. Arez jams a gusset plate into the top of Tremont’s head, and then follows it up by throwing a steel chair, Sabu style, right into the plate. When the plate falls out, Tremont’s head wounds literally squirt blood high into the air, like the arc of one of those pissing-cherub garden fountains. The camera takes care to show the resulting crime-scene splatter on the hardwood floor. Somehow, this isn’t the most horrifying part of the match. That goes to Arez hitting a diving double foot stomp full-force on Tremont’s meaty belly, like he’s trying to pop him. Tremont can look and sell like a cartoon, and it’s fine, precisely because even when he’s hamming it up, you can’t deny how much pain his matches must cause him. When he makes a face like a baby about to tantrum, it’s because he’s not faking his agony.

Lil Sicko vs. Reed Bentley (ICW:NHB Vol. 75, 5/3/25 — via IWTV)

Sometimes, everything just falls into place. ICW No Holds Barred is the current standard bearer for American deathmatch wrestling. The quality is high, the fans are behind them, and they have as good a platform as any deathmatch promotion is going to have right now. Every show produces at least one GIFable, retweetable moment. The second show of their most recent Chattanooga weekend produced nothing but. Jamesen Shook vs. Hoodfoot and Anakin Murphy vs. Danny Demanto featured two locals going up against mainstays of the chains, trying their best to make the entire IWTV viewing audience remember their names afterward.

For me, the highlight was Reed Bentley vs. Lil Sicko, a match whose violence pushes into the “downright hateful” territory. It’s probably not the case that Bentley was pissed off and took it out on his opponent — more likely, Lil Sicko volunteered for the punishment. This might be the lasting influence of Darby Allin on the greater wrestling industry, as he’s opened up a new lane for young wrestlers to get themselves over. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that certain other industries have already long since made lots of money on the concept of “slender twink gets brutalized.”

Judge Joe Dred vs. Tarzan Duran (CZW Ante Up!, 5/24/25 — via IWTV)

Lasting twenty-three minutes, in front of maybe twice as many fans, this no-ropes barbed-wire match was billed as a “tribute” to Sabu. Tarzan Duran is as close to a Temu Sabu as you’re going to get in the year 2025, with his vaguely modern primitive gimmick, his reckless disregard for his own safety, his male pattern baldness, et cetera. The Tarzanian Devil’s best homage to Sabu was that he worked the match in a walking boot (albeit a walking boot wrapped in barbed wire). That’s the only detail that made this mess feel like an actual tribute to the man.

Hardcore Hillbilly vs. Mickie Knuckles (Loko No Rings, No Masters 4, 5/24/25 — via Title Match Network)
JC Extreme vs. Sinister (XBW The Ritual, 5/24/25 — via YouTube)

Here we find the two extremes of the “no ring deathmatch” spectrum. On the one hand, Mickie Knuckles and Hardcore Hillbilly brawl around the parking lot of a bar in Houston, with a sizable crowd making noise all around them. On the other, JC Extreme and Sinister do battle in what looks like a suburban Pennsylvania basement that’s otherwise mostly used for murdering sex workers, for the amusement of perhaps a dozen people. It’s amazing to me that one of these matches makes me feel like I’m watching something shameful and inappropriate, and the other match has Mickie Knuckles wrestling.

Mickie Knuckles has been doing this kind of thing for a long time, and knows how to put on a show that will make people react. Hardcore Hillbilly doesn’t have the same level of experience, but he’s just as game as his opponent to do stupid shit like suplexes onto uneven asphalt. Whether or not you would call their match “good” really depends on your tolerance for the kind of work they’re doing, but they’ve done what they set out to accomplish, and the surprisingly big crowd is with them every step of the way. Meanwhile, X Brand Wrestling can’t stick the landing for what they’re trying to achieve. JC Extreme and Sinister both come across like backyarders from straight out of 2000, just without a yard, or a ring, or any cool moves, or really anything else beyond the vibe you’d sometimes get, that maybe backyard wrestling was the only thing distracting some of these kids from planning a school shooting. Having these two fumble their way through bashing each other with light-tube-strapped drain pipes feels somehow inhumane, like watching a dogfight that swapped dobermans for dead-eyed white boys. It’s like the deathmatch equivalent of a Tom Myers joke.

Macuarro and Mr. Cóndor vs. Lunatik Fly and Venganza (Zona 23, 5/25/25 — via YouTube)

The properly edited version of this show will find its way to IWTV whenever it’s ready. For now, the “Kaustic Lucha Extrema Hardcore” YouTube channel has uploaded a fan cam. The fan cam doesn’t so much capture the match, as it captures the experience of being in the match’s general vicinity. Throughout the video, whoever is filming (Sr. KLEH?) is out of position, facing the wrong direction, or in motion trying to jostle his way to a better view. While frustrating for those of us who want to see the actual match, it feels true to what the experience of being in attendance was probably like, as both teams brawl around the ring with little regard for who can see it outside of a constantly-moving ten-foot radius.

The whole enterprise is setting up for Zona 23’s 12th anniversary show, where Macuarro vs. Mr. Cóndor and Venganza vs. Lunatik Fly are the two spotlight apuestas matches. Macuarro is a babyface in the spirit of Tommy Dreamer; at some point, the crowd decided that he was their guy, and will ride for him no matter what. Mr. Cóndor turning on him was a foregone conclusion. The two were shoving and slapping one another even before the bell rang. What we get from this — what we can SEE of this, in KLEH’s fan cam — is just a tiny taste of the violence to come, and yet even in the teaser, Macuarro bleeds like he’s been shot in the skull. Wrestler of the year.

You — yes, YOU — can join the Death Panel. I’m looking for capsule match/show reviews (100 words minimum, 300 words maximum) of June 2025 deathmatches for the next edition of the column. Contact me on X at @ptotime, on Bluesky at ptotime.bluesky.social, or via the Violent People Discord at @pto if you want to add your voice to the mass of freaks baying for fresh blood.

pat-t


VPR co-host, XPW endorser