Greetings.
Right up front: I am a catfight fan, like I suspect most of you are. I am not affiliated with any company or any fighters.
I have a fairly large collection of stuff, but I'm always interested in finding more. The easiest way to do this is to tell you about what I like, then let you tell me about similar stuff that's out there. And if my reviews help you find stuff you like, then that's cool, too.
When I review videos, I am not attempting to pass judgment on any company, producer or fighter. These are just my own opinions. You are perfectly entitled to disagree, as we all have different tastes. I'm not here to debate on my own opinions; I'm just interested in what people think are videos similar to these.
(Well, usually, anyway. This batch may be an exception.)
With that disclaimer out of the way, here’s another set of reviews…we'll call this one “You’re Doing It Wrong“.
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I’ve seen quite a few videos in my time as a fan of this genre. There are many styles that cater to specific tastes, and I certainly am not attempting to pass judgment on anyone else’s preferences. Some like technical competitive matches more than obviously worked stuff, others like a good well-worked squash. Some like TribGirls-type sex fights, some people like mixed wrestling, and others like big-breasted women rolling around on top of each other. I’m not here to judge. But sometimes a video is clearly aiming for something and just flat-out does it wrong. I now present a quartet of examples of this.
(Note: I’m bypassing my usual ratings system for this one — just assume them to all be 1 of 5. This is more of a discussion of how matches can be messed up.)
#1: DFT-45: Her Bloody Crotch (Lydia vs. Pam)
This is a domination match, and it’s almost really good. The loser is fairly attractive, even if the big cotton granny panties leave something to be desired, and she’s a very good seller of the beating she takes. (The title of the video probably gives away where most of the punishment is administered.)
That said, this video is completely ruined by the fact that the dominator in this match looks like a cross between someone’s grandma and Swamp Thing who also happens to operate under the delusion that she might be attractive if you cake enough makeup on her. Many domination/squash videos feature a masked wrestler, in part because she may not be as attractive but can still administer convincing offense, but also partly because in most matches like this, the loser is the star of the show, and you want the opponent to be nondescript. And in my experience, that works really well. If the loser is attractive and sells well, you don’t really notice the other person if she’s not trying to stand out. In this case, the other woman was noticeable for all the wrong reasons, and it ruins the video.
Where to find it: This is available on catfight.com if you happen to be into swamp creatures. I won’t judge.
#2: Steel Kittens SK-189: Black Boots and Barefoot (Dominique vs. The Villainess)
This is another example of a squash match gone awry, but in this case, the fail goes both directions, as well as with whoever made the production decisions.
So we’re basically doing a squash match. Dominique comes in clearly overmatched, and gets her ass handed to her, right? Well, no…first she has to come in and completely dominate for a few minutes, then leave. Huh? Then she returns in a new outfit and gets back in the ring, where the domination begins. The purpose of those first few minutes completely eludes me.
The domination part of the match fails on both ends. Dominique’s problem is a complete inability to sell. She elicits a quick grunt whenever she gets hit, but aside from that, she rarely looks anything other than “mildly inconvenienced”. Never grabs a part that gets hit, either. If the loser can’t sell, the match becomes pretty pointless.
However, The Villainess has her own issues. She is capable on offense and has a good, nondescript look, which is a definite improvement over the previous video. But whereas Dominique is too quiet, The Villainess is too noisy. There are plenty of ways a dominator can work: you can have the silent badass, one who grunts and growls occasionally, or you can have one who constantly talks smack, like Aiden from Ladyfist. The Villainess, on the other hand, just constantly babbles to the point of being distracting and annoying. Granted, it would probably be less noticeable if Dominique was making any noise at all, and I think some of the babbling is frustration on The Villainess’s part — she’s likely a seasoned pro, and she seems to know that Dominique is totally worthless at what she’s supposed to be doing. But the endless babbling was irritating.
In short, this was one of those videos where nobody did anything right. Steel Kittens has plenty of good variants of this type of match (SK-305 with Mutiny vs. Brooke which I’ll get to later is a great example), but give this one a pass.
Where to find it:
www.steelkittens.com.
#3: Steel Kittens SK-102: Killer Nineteen (Leigh vs. Cheryl)
I feel bad harping on Steel Kittens, since they do have some good stuff. And the flaw in this video is something of an anachronism, because it was produced back when making a 5-10 minute match and putting it online wasn’t a feasible business model.
The concept of this match was simple: Leigh vs. Cheryl in a best-of-19-falls pro-style match. You can probably guess where this one was bound to go wrong: while both were pros, neither one had anywhere near the necessary offensive repertoire to maintain 60 minutes of action. The end result was basically 19 iterations of the same movesets in different orders, and it got painfully boring as a result.
I’m not blaming the wrestlers on this one; this is simply a production decision. I understand where the need came from: the wrestlers were paid for an hour of action, and they couldn’t do one long match, so they had to break it up to give them rests. It would probably have been wiser to shoot three different matches with them and put them on separate videos combined with other matches, but that was the producer’s decision at the time. When you were producing VHS tapes (which they were when this came out), 20-minute videos weren’t enough. I get that. But there was probably a better way to do it than repeating the same thing 19 times.
Where to find it:
www.steelkittens.com.
#4: Double Trouble DT-496: Eve vs Lisa
Double Trouble is another company that can be hit-or-miss depending on who you get. This video isn’t terrible, but it has one problem that I’ve seen from several other videos in other companies that try to copy this theme.
The pretense of the match is that Eve and Lisa are fighting over a guy, and they each want to assault the other’s crotch. While I enjoy matches with crotch attacks; I personally don’t think that crotch-based matches should appear competitive. While I realize that it is different for women than men, the appeal of the low blow is that we assume it to be very painful; it’s considered “dirty” because it’s too easy a way to cause major pain. If you’re willing to fight dirty, it adds an element of hatred to the match, which is fine. But that gets severely diminished when one girl stomps the other’s crotch two or three times, then the victim immediately gets up — no-selling the attack which is supposed to be devastating — and starts attacking as though nothing happened. It ruins the whole point.
If you want to do a two-sided crotch-based match, you can have one dominate for half the match, then get cocky and strut around not paying attention (letting her opponent recover a bit), only to get low-blowed herself and the tide turns. That works. But going back-and-forth with the crotch attacks doesn’t really make much sense, at least to me.
Where to find it:
www.dtwrestling.com---
This set of reviews isn’t as much about finding other videos like it like my other reviews are; this is just some guidance to producers about how not to do things. Hope it helps.
Thanks for reading.
