10 Bizarre Wrestling Movies You Must Watch

Before you dust off all your best "Verne Gagne was old and out of touch" material, you should know that the plot of this movie is "A deceptively spry Verne Gagne proves his detractors wrong via dropkicks". Gagne plays aging champion Mike Bullard, who is under pressure from promoters to drop his title to a younger wrestler.

This movie is SO 1970's, though. The big non-wrestling star is Ed Asner, fresh from the set of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and the cinematography calls to mind nothing so much as an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. The real highlight for wrestling fans is the seemingly endless string of cameos from real AWA stars of the day, including Dusty Rhodes, Wahoo McDaniel and The Crusher (a personal favorite). 

There's even a sequence where real wrestling promoters show up, trying to convince Asner's character to participate in a cross-promotional "SuperBowl of Wrestling" with them, even offering him scout footage of Bruno Sammartino and Terry Funk. 

Fascinatingly enough, the real Gagne must have liked the idea: when the AWA was in dire straits in the late 1980's, he did indeed spearhead the ambitious, doomed-to-fail Superclash along with the NWA and WCCW.

Immortal Dialogue: "We are now going to discuss the most popular philosophy of wrestling in America today. It is the philosophy of wrestling known as professional wrestling."