A Film Directed by Fred Olen Ray

There’s nothing quite like a great professional Wrestling documentary, and I was lucky enough to recently find a good one that I had never seen before called Southern Discomfort – Wrestling on the Indie Circuit. Clocking in at just over an hour, it’s a perfect way to relax after work, which is exactly how I enjoyed it. I truthfully wasn’t really ever in the nineties tape trading scene so stuff like this, that I’m sure is very well known and popular, passed me by when I was younger. It’s only with the advent of the internet that I stumbled across this after work and was immediately hooked.

I’ve gathered from the internet that the VHS rip I watched is long out of print, and the film has been re-released under many names such as “Alabama Outlaws Wrestling on the Indie Circuit” and “Iron Sheik in the Maim Event”, which is a terrible title, I prefer the old one. I guess some of the re-releases have extra matches and more backstage footage, including one with Abdullah the Butcher. After I watched this, I actually found out that “Alabama Outlaws” was on Amazon Prime, so perhaps that’s the version I’d seek out. While the extra runtime is nothing insane, it does flesh it out more. Considering this was shot on film, it looks amazing despite the age.

This film was directed by Fred Olen Ray, a director best known for directing a slew of schlocky zero-budget horror and exploitation films through the years. Here, he is working as “Freddie Valentine”, a greasy wrestling manager, and likely decided to capitalize on his work in the ring by making a film about a sizzling summer day in rural Alabama, where fans all came together to enjoy the excitement of a local wrestling show. It is stated that it is 105 degrees outside and 115 in the venue, which sounds unbearable. Almost everyone in the show is drenched in sweat the entire time, which is one more reason living in the south is not high on my list of things I plan to do.

“Welcome to the Alabama independent wrestling circuit. It’s the middle of the summer -temperature 110 degrees. At the high school gym, to the sounds of hoots and screams from a very vocal and emotional audience, aging wrestling legends such as the Iron Sheik and Bullet Bob Armstrong battle with and against local professional competition. Behind the scenes you will meet these people and get the inside story on what and who make up this often-unseen side of professional wrestling.”

Southern Discomfort is an amazing little slice of life in the early to mid-nineties independent wrestling scene. The footage appears to have been filmed in 1995 in Anniston, Alabama at the Saks High School Gym. The company appears to have been Dixie Championship Wrestling, which is sadly not on Cagematch, but we do have the card visible via a close-up of the event poster. We see the main promoters pretty early on, including Colonel David F. Friedman, an older man always chawing on a cigar like a comical caricature of an oil tycoon in the ’80s, and Rick Montana, a “retired” local legend that you just know is going to get back in there. Coincidentally, Rick Montana is also advertised to have performed a country music show at the event, which was a hell of a deal for everyone there, I’m sure.

The movie opens with a blurb talking about how the world of independent wrestling was seen as “Outlaw Wrestling” at the time. Since I was always under the impression that “Outlaw” was just a blanket term for anything not affiliated with the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) back when that was more of a thing, I need to do more research on the trends back then. I’m sure pretty much anything that wasn’t a big TV brand was likely to appear somewhat grungy and well within the underbelly of the industry, but the company here was definitely pretty wholesome and seemed family friendly. Perhaps the director wanted to add an edge to his film that was largely nothing of the sort?

Here’s what we can gather about the matches from the film:

• Peggy Lee Leather VS Bambi
• The Iron Sheik VS The Power Raider
• The Flame VS “Bullet” Bob Armstrong
• Shane Anderson VS Big Boss Hoss (a Big Boss Man ripoff)
• Shanghai Pierce* VS “Nasty” Steve Lane
• A Battle Royale that a “Mystery Man” won, this turned out to be none other than Rick Montana yet again!

*(Henry O. Godwinn had this gimmick, not sure if it’s him though)

My favorite parts in this film include some of the heel crowd work a few of the guys end up doing. There is nothing better than watching a guy getting paid to piss off a crowd and having people absolutely eat out of their hand in doing so. At one point a man named “Nasty” Steve Lane has the audacity to cut a scathing promo about “all the rednecks in the crowd” when he is blatantly wearing a Jim Beam/Hank Williams Jr. T-Shirt and sporting a mullet with a valet in cheetah print on his arm. I have no idea if it was intentional or the early nineties lacked a sense of irony, but I’m there for it either way.

There was also a man named Frank Barnhill, who by day managed some sort of country buffet-type restaurant and seemed like a sweet down-home businessman. Then the film cuts to him as “The Flame”, in a luchador mask, destroying the crowd on the microphone, nearly goading people into physical altercations. He even attacks a man in crutches, which I’m sure was totally not planned. He takes particular pleasure in attacking older women in the front row, a fact that he elaborates on (making fun of SSI or their dentures for example), which is fair. There is no crazier fan than an old lady at a wrestling show!

There are also a few times when the film isn’t sure what it’s doing in terms of kayfabe that are pretty humorous. At one point Bambi, the NWA Women’s Champion in 1995, is selling her injuries backstage after her bout with Peggy Lee Leather. The camera guy won’t leave her alone when she obviously would like to do her own thing after the match. Asking things like “are you okay”, and her talking about having trouble breathing made me worry that he was about to call an ambulance or something. “Bullet” Bob Armstrong comes in to lend some wisdom about being hurt, and she has to pretend to be horrifically injured the whole time. You also get the impression he’s more bragging about how worse his injuries were, but that’s another story there. The film goes on to talk to everyone about times in which they’ve been injured, which was pretty interesting, but how the film got there was a bit rough. That’s sort of the format of the movie, shots of one of the above matches is interlaced with interviewees all discussing a similar topic.

Speaking of “Bullet” Bob Armstrong, I like how he casually laid out an allegation that “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase purposefully caused him to accidentally drop a 200lb dumbbell on his own face, completely severing his nose.

The film was recorded in the era when times were definitely changing between the older styles of almost strictly mat-based wrestling and the advent of the incorporation of Japanese and Mexican wrestling that would dominate from that point on. Keep in mind, this was right before the so-called Monday Night Wars started, and even though things were picking up a bit, wrestling was becoming more and more edgy and started pushing the envelope at this time. “Bullet” Bob Armstrong talks about how he had started seeing far more injuries after people started going for far more high-risk top rope moves and was wondering how far it was going to go.

Considering fans were treated to a promotion in 2023 that featured a spot where a guy jabbed a hypodermic needle into another man’s unmentionable area, I have no doubt that they would never have predicted how crazy stuff would get thirty years on. That’s why I’m glad a lot of the more local scenes are becoming more traditional. In fact, what I see in this film makes me feel happy that the sort of independent wrestling that I love and frequent has never really changed. That’s the great thing about wrestling, there’s something for everyone – you can find a company that’s into crazy stuff if that’s your thing, or one where the local Golden Corral manager yells at old people.

Overall, I feel like Southern Discomfort – Wrestling on the Indie Circuit is an underrated documentary more people should try to see. It’s not packed full of huge stars like something akin to Beyond the Mat, but it has an undeniable heart that makes me wish that some more of this footage existed. The film is a time capsule for a crazy time in professional wrestling history, and goes to show that no matter how much things change, they roughly have stayed the same for a long time. If you were to squint real hard to blur out the dated hairstyles, this movie could easily have been filmed right now in small town America, and that’s what I think of when somebody talks about pro wrestling.

Check it out for yourselves here, this is the original long out of print cut, the one on Amazon has 20 more minutes of footage:

The post REVIEW: Southern Discomfort – Wrestling on the Indie Circuit (2000) appeared first on Arcadia Pod.