10 Bizarre Wrestling Movies You Must Watch
Once you start watching, you won't be able to look away.
Forget No Holds Barred, Ready To Rumble and The Wrestler. Pretty much every wrestling fan has seen them, for better or for worse, and they've penetrated mainstream pop culture through cable reruns and award shows.
However, there's a whole world of bizarre, terrible and oddly wonderful wrestling films that once seen, cannot be unseen. There's vanity biopics, Japanese science fiction, and family-friendly dog shenanigans (seriously), but the common thread that stretches between them all is our beloved pseudo-sport.
I've included Immortal Dialogue for all of these cinematic treasures, and I want you to know that I didn't just crib these from an IMDB quotations page. Don't get me wrong, I totally would have, but most of these movies are so obscure that they don't even have quotations on their IMDB pages!
You're welcome.
Proceed at your own risk, friends.
10. Body Slam (1986)
This is it, fans: the Citizen Kane of wrestling films.
Not because it's revolutionary, or genre-defining, or even very good. No, because it's a bastardized retelling of the life of a media titan. Instead of the legendary Orson Welles portraying a newspaper mogul that's suspiciously similar to William Randolph Hearst, we get TV's Dirk Benedict as a fledgling wrestling promoter who hits it huge by combining rock n' wrestling.
There must be someone in wrestling history like that, right?
The filmmakers likely avoided the kinds of lawsuits that Citizen Kane wrought by making their faux-McMahon a decent guy. Dirk's M. Harry Smilac learns to be a better man by watching Wild Samoans matches and ultimately destroys the unjust pro wrestling monopoly of Captain Lou Murano, played by Captain Lou Albano.
And what a cast! Roddy Piper! The Tonga Kid! The Barbarian! Charles Nelson Reilly!Billy Barty! John Astin! The, uh, the one lady from That 70's Show! No, not that one, the other one. Yes, her.
Immortal Dialogue: "What is that, a disease or a stomach disorder?"