So, the Canucks behind some of my favorite indy action-comedies of the last decade (as seen here, here and here) have teamed with who has to be the greatest Canadian luchador ever to make a movie? Sweet Isis's beaver cleavage how I've been looking forward to this one! By the way, +5 charisma and a "Yahtzee!" salute to whomever is first to correctly identify the origin of "beaver cleavage"... without Googling it!

Vampiro (who looks like a Canadian Mickey Rourke these days...) is The Champ. In his younger days, he had a promising career ahead of him as a Mexican wrestler (or "luchadore")... though by the karate gi he was sporting and the kickboxing-ish method of combat, I'd say he was more of a mixed martial arts fighter than anything. Unfortunately, the Champ mistakenly kills one of his opponents in the ring and is banned from wrestling. Unlike fake wrestling though, where our hero would just return to action wearing a mask and calling himself something else for 6 months until he finally unmasks and gets himself re-instated, this is one of those legit bans that sticks to you like freshly stomped brains stick to the bottom of your flip-flops. Through the tried and true movie magic of "newspaper headline exposition", we learn that the Mexican mob had been fixing the matches and Champ's fuck up led to a shitstorm of an investigation into the whole racket. As such, not only is our hero now not allowed anywhere near an event card, but he's also neck deep in mafia shit. That's the worst kind of shit too! Have you seen how little regard they have for their bodies when they eat!? Blegh.

Having pissed off oddly-British mob boss Tlaloc (pronounced "Tuh-lah-blah-blah-blart") with his chicanery, Champ becomes indebted to him as hired muscle for the rest of his life. Hired muscle who's apparently only allowed to wear two different shirts, since that's all we see him in throughout the entire flick. When he's not shaking down local tortilla makers for protection money or gunning down his boss's enemies in the street, our protagonist is doing the underground bare knuckle stuff... by which I mean he's street fighting, not giving out hand jobs in the subway. Occasionally for some extra scratch he would let a guy named Bob Depugh (Martin Kove!) tag along on his wetter jobs. Bob's one of those lunatic film aficionado "evil director" guys who doesn't just kill people, but likes to violently maim them in the process and videotape it for personal viewing later while rattling off some movie trivia bullshit like he was Tarantino. Naturally, being a good guy-in-a-bad place and all, Champ doesn't like having Bob as his tag team partner, so it doesn't take Miss Cleo to see the forthcoming conflict in their little relationship.

After years of beating people up and killing in cold blood, Champ finally gets that one straw that breaks his back when he smuggles a mail truck full of illegals across the US border, only to watch as Depugh and a trio of Minutemen (not to be confused with sweet sweet Minute Maid) gun 'em all down, women and children included. Now, the slaughtering of human lives I understand. It's the kind of psychotic movie villain that Depugh is. What I don't understand is why Tlaloc pays Depugh a percentage of the illegals' money to dispose of them when he could just as easily blow up the mail truck in the middle of the dessert and leave it at that. That's like the Papa Johns guy paying me when he delivers my pizza, or the sanitation department picking up the trash twice a week only to pay the city when they do! Now, if Depugh was giving Tlaloc money because he likes to videotape militant rednecks ventilating minorities, that would at least make some kind of sense from a business standpoint. Otherwise, I'm just completely confused right now all because of one head scratching cash transaction. It's more needlessly complicated than trying to cash a Western Union money order at a Western Union location. Yeah, turns out that if you don't have a bank account, you shouldn't use Western Union money orders, BECAUSE WESTERN UNION WON'T CASH THEIR OWN FUCKING MONEY ORDERS! It's like how none of the stores at Itchy & Scratchy Land accept their own Itchy & Scratchy Money... only this bullshit is happening in REAL LIFE!

Back to the movie, Champ's crossover into Charles Bronson territory is a slow one, with a whole other side story thrown in for pathos (or padding) that fills us in on Champ's past with the boss's wife, and introduces us to the scarred man whose back story mirrors Champ's enough to help our hero put his situation in perspective. When it is finally time to take his bloody revenge, nothing feels quite as satisfying as it should, and his cocaine fueled bloodlust instead gets sidetracked by Tlaloc's new plan to use Champ's status as an infamous legend of the squared circle to help get his new wrestling protégé over with the fans by having Champ lose to the big lug in one last match. As for why Mr. Champ agrees to it, there's a muddled cacophony of movie cliches all kinda tossed into the stew to give everything that whole "seen it all before" flavor that will either give you warm reminders of better movies or rile your bile with its stale, flavorless heights of meh-itude. Either way, it's not a good thing for the movie itself. There's even some weird "religious experience" that sounds like a bad, drawn out pick-up line! We do finally find out what the Champ's real name is though... so I guess there's that. At least we didn't have to wait for a sequel, like that crap with the Bride in Kill Bill. And I still don't understand why the fuck "Beatrix Kiddo" is so Horus damned important to the story that it had to be bleeped through the entirety of the first movie! Assholes.

Wow. That was a major letdown. I guess Odessa should stick to parodies of badly dubbed Mexican super spy horror flicks and not be so eager to "show people what else they can do" with poorly made "Mexican stand off" action-crime-drama mash-ups. I'd rather eat a dozen Slim Jims, two bags of Chili Doritos, and down a bottle of Frank's Red Hot, spending the rest of the night with my ass glued to the toilet while a gallon of Pepto sits just out of reach than watch The Dead Sleep Easy again. Well, that's extreme for extreme's sake (and it's also how I tend to spend my Sunday nights lately anyway), but unless there's a terrorist clown with a Super Soaker full of sulphuric acid pointed at my happy place forcing me to do otherwise, I don't think I'll be watching DSE again if I can help it. Although, as always, I dug Odessa's no-budget music makers and their mix of generic '70s grindhouse funk with spaghetti western whistling. In front of the camera, Vampiro can't act his way out of a wrestling ring (not that he should have to) and Martin Kove just doesn't command the icy cruelty of his John Kreese days. I'm still not 100% on why a Brit was cast for crime boss Titty-Cock-a-Cock either, but I guess you can either chalk that up to being an homage to great UK mobster flicks, or the casting director's inability to dig up a half-way decent Mexican actor to fill the part. Speaking of which, I'd like to take this opportunity to once again express my willingness to fill Rosario Dawson's parts if she has an opening for me.

I tell ya, if I could bottle this kind of wit... well... I'd be out the cost of the bottles.

For a budget-free flick I'm not keeping my fingers crossed for Jeremy Irons or even Jeffrey Combs, but if you're going to go with the cookie-cutter indy crime-drama route, you at least need a capable cast to distract from the lazy writing... or just buckets and buckets of red caro syrup and pig guts from the corner butcher shop. Either one would've been a nice to what we ended up with. Some of the fight choreography is okay, but some of it gives me Project: Kill flashbacks... Okay, maybe not that bad, but pretty bad none-the-less.

It's been said before that actors shouldn't try to be wrestlers and wrestlers shouldn't try to be actors. Both should stick to their respectable realms because crossing over into either is never as easy as either group seems to think. There are exceptions to this rule, as with all, but as far as rules go, I think this one has the least number of recorded exceptions of any. Except maybe the "fat guys can't get hot wives" rule, but lazy sitcom writers have been fudging that one for years. Anyway, Vampiro's starring turn in The Dead Sleep Easy is about as much an exception to the rule as Leon "Van Vader" White's cameo in that abomination of a live-action Fist of the North Star: none what-so-ever. Wrestling fans are better off seeing what Vampiro's like when he's not pretending he's an actor, like in the documentary/shoot interview 101 Reasons Not to be a Wrestler and in Odessa's bio-pic, Vampiro: Angel, Devil, Hero. For those, like myself, that are hoping for a successful return to the Odessa crew's funnier efforts, there's always hope with their upcoming horror flick Smash Cuts. And if you're neither a wrestling fan nor an Odessa fan? Well, welcome to the end of the review. I'd offer you a goody bag or something, but it'd probably just be a turd in a Ziploc. Hope you at least enjoyed reading it. And there's still the screen shots! So... bye!