Dark Match had its world première at Fantasia 2024
Pro wrestling is a peculiarly paradoxical art. On the one hand it is all showmanship and fakery, its bouts choreographed, its punches held, its outcomes fixed; while on the other hand, its practitioners have the kind of genuine talent and toughness which would give any sensible person pause to engage them in a real fight. This tension between fictive performance and true power lies at the heart of writer/director Lowell Dean’s latest feature Dark Match, an occult action horror set in the world of wrestling.
“Five deaths in the ring, that is the thing,” a male voice says over an impressionistic montage of giallo-lit Satanic imagery, before the title Death Match appears in bright red on the screen, with the bar across the central ’t’ placed lower than usual to suggest an inverted cross – and then there is a cut to Nic, aka ‘Miss Behave’ (Ayisha Issa), putting a cassette in her Walkman and heading out to a wrestling bout with Trooper’s Raise a Little Hell (1978) playing in her ears to block out the jeers and taunts of the audience.
This prologue to Death Match sends out signals that are decidedly mixed, if not quite contradictory. Those first jarring images, and even the title of the song to which Miss Behave listens, portend a diabolical, occult element to the film, while the Walkman indicates that this is the Eighties – “almost the Nineties”, as Miss Behave’s older boyfriend (and veteran wrestler) Mean Joe Lean (Steven Ogg) will later confirm. Even the look of the film, an affected low-res quality that approximates the texture of a VHS recording, betokens the era in which the narrative is set (and VHS digicams will play a significant rôle in the film’s third act). Meanwhile the choice of a Trooper song also cements the film’s status as a proudly Canadian product. Even the name of this pugilistic crew, SAW Wrestling, foreshadows horrific brutality and torments to come.
Miss Behave is something of a hellraiser herself. Strong and determined, she wants nothing more than to win the trophy belt and to get into the big league, but her ambitions are thwarted by her sex and race.“How many women have you ever seen sling the belt over their shoulder?”, SAW’s sleazy manager Rusty Beans (Jonathan Cherry) asks her rhetorically – yet even as ‘Trinidadian trickster’ Miss Behave wants to be (in Rusty Beans’ racially resonant words) ‘Snow White’, he keeps promoting the eternally perky, actually white Kate the Great (Sara Canning) as the amiable victor in the ring, while casting Miss Behave as “the woman you love to hate”. After all, as he tells her, “Somebody’s gotta be the witch”. So, frustrated and sidelined as wicked foil to someone else’s triumphant ascent, Miss Behave occasionally lashes out, off script and in anger, living up to her sobriquet.
Some films have a key colour. Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) comes suffused with deep reds. Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill diptych (2003-4), despite its copious splashings of blood, is dominated by yellows. For Dark Match, the pervasive colour is green, as a visual code for the envy not only of Miss Behave, but of other wrestlers in the film who hold deep-seated resentments against their rivals and their prescribed fates. As the SAW crew – Mean Joe Lean, Kate the Great, Miss Behave, the mute, masked, mysterious Enigma Jones (Mo Jabari), and the tag-team Thick (Jonathan Lepine) and Thin (Justin Lawrick) – are taken out of town by Rusty Beans for some lucrative unofficial bouts, they are heading into a trap. For the locals at this remote backwater belong to a cult whose Leader (Chris Jericho) harbours his own personal grudge against SAW – and now these theatrical grapplers and some of their regular rivals will be fighting not for money or fame, but for their very lives, in Thunderdome-like matches where five must be sacrificed to raise a demon from hell.
As it celebrates the Lupercalia (an ancient festivity no doubt chosen for its lupine associations with Dean’s previous features WolfCop and Another WolfCop), the cult turns out to be organised a little like pro wrestling. For while the Leader is a cynical manipulator, orchestrating narratives for his own profit and revenge, his underlings Spencer (Michael Eklund) and Carol Ann (Stephanie Wolfe) have bought fully into the myth he is selling, and regard the bouts that he has carefully staged as part of a real Satanic ritual. Like any spectator of the sport (or indeed of films), they suspend their disbelief and maintain their faith, finding their truth in the fictions of the ring. Of course, Dark Match gets to have it both ways, being both gladiatorial thriller, and Satanic horror – but viewed through either, or indeed both, of these prisms, Miss Behave is still finally able to become heroine of her own story, fearlessly taking on even the hugest, most formidably evil of challengers. For in facing her demons head-on, Miss Behave is also fighting for a less racist, less sexist future that – maybe – corresponds to our present.
In pitting a wrester protagonist against a vicious cult, Dark Match bears a family resemblance Daniel Turres’ Here for Blood (2022), although it goes in a very different direction. At the same time, like any actual wrestling championship, it is full of larger-than-life characters, grandiose gestures and operatic artifice, all unfolding in their own alternative reality – and it is simultaneously silly, hyperviolent and unabashedly entertaining.