Wednesday Wrestling Review: The Piranha Death Match

Last week we took a look at one of the best wrestling matches in recent memory. This week we take a turn to something rather unique.

I'm not sure how we got into the debate on Overtime regarding whether you'd prefer to be bit by a piranha or have a microscopic catfish swim up your urethra, but it was brought up. That led me to remember a random match from Japan that featured a piranha tank, barbed wire, and whatever else.

Beware...it gets a bit graphic when you mix barbed wire and whatever else.

It's the piranha death match between Mitsuhiro Matsunaga and Kendo Nagasaki from Big Japan Pro Wrestling. The match took place on August 19, 1996. The way to win was to beat your opponent down using barbed wire boards and such to a point where you could hold them in the piranha pool for ten seconds.

That's when, naturally, the piranha's would attempt to devour the wrestler and it would be terrible. It kind of turned out that way.

Matsunaga and Nagasaki did a fantastic job of building up the drama of someone going into the piranha tank. It could have been one of those matches where they just danced around for 16 minutes and teased someone going in. Instead Matsunaga and Nagasaki managed to stay away from the tank during the match and built up a decent story and progression for it to take place. They even made it a point to open each other up and get a lot of their blood into the tank to "fire up" the crazy, biting fish.

It's quite the scene to see Matsunaga get placed into the piranha tank. Nagasaki was then even more of a jerk by placing a barbed wire board over the tank trapping Matsunaga in there. It doesn't appear that all the fish go insane after him, but a couple of them got him in the chest area.  The ending shows Matsunaga being carried out on a blue mattress with his head and chest covered in blood.

I'm just analyzing, but it looked like it could have been a lot worse. It also looked like it sucked.

It isn't the best match that you'd see by any stretch of the imagination. BJW does a lot of crazy gimmick death matches and this is one of their most popular. There is a full version of it on YouTube, but I figure for the gist of this a highlight video would do justice.

WrestlingArcade on Twitter also put together a GIF of the ending of the match.

As far as I know this has been the only piranha death match to ever take place. Probably a reason why. It is kind of a cult, death match classic.

Rating: *** (more spectacle than wrestling quality)