SummerSlam 94' starts off with the former tag team champions (they dropped the titles at a house show the night before this), The Headshrinkers, taking on Bam Bam Bigelow and Irwin R. Shyster of Ted DiBiase's Million Dollar Corporation. Bigelow is terrific as always and the Headshrinkers were a solid team that could bring serious physicality to a match, but IRS has the magical ability of making pretty much any match he's involved in just a tad duller and more boring than it needs to be. Reviewing matches over the past six years, I'm not sure there's a worker I like less than Rotunda. Now, that's not to say he's an awful wrestler - its just to say that his matches are almost the definition of "filler" no matter where on the card they are. Even this match, which should be a hot opener, comes across like it should be a dark match to check lighting and sound before the real pay-per-view begins. (1.5/5)
Backstage, Leslie Nielsen (as Frank Drebin) is on the search for the Undertaker. This was a tie-in to the popular Naked Gun movies, the third of which had come out and made $51 million at the box office (a tidy profit considering how cheap those films were to make) in March.
Back to the ring we go for Alundra Blayze vs. Bull Nakano. This match is arguably the best WWF Women's Match of the 90s...which is kind of sad because it really just highlights how little Vince saw in women's wrestling, how little Eric Bischoff saw it in aside from a couple matches here and there, and how far ahead Japan was in their understanding of what women's wrestling could be. Anyway, I'm not a huge Blayze/Madusa fan, but Bull Nakano is a terrific monster heel and I like Luna Vachon's involvement too. The Chicago crowd is somewhat surprisingly more into this than I expected they would be, really getting behind Blayze and popping for Nakano's "exotic" offense. I wouldn't consider this "must see," but its an above-average match that should've made Vince actually consider taking women's wrestling seriously instead of basically just running Blayze/Nakano and Blayze/Bertha Faye matches endlessly and calling it a day. (3.5/5)
Backstage, Shawn Michaels and Diesel cut a promo about how great they are, talking about their recent World Tag Team Championship win. If I'm not mistaken, this was around the time The Clique was beginning to cause trouble backstage, getting into Vince's ear and politicking their way to taking every championship they could. Speaking of championships, Diesel's opponent is the Intercontinental Champion, Razor Ramon, who is backed up by Chicago Bear legend Walter Payton. Diesel and Ramon get 15 minutes and despite neither guy being known for their in-ring skills, the crowd is hot for this and both Michaels and Walter Payton have some moments that get major reactions. I think it goes a touch long, but Shawn/Hall/Nash had great chemistry together and they're clearly having fun out there, which comes across more than it does when Ramon was paired up with, say, Mike Rotunda. The finish sees Shawn Michaels inadvertently striking Diesel with a superkick and costing him the title, their split eventually leading to Diesel's first WWE Championship reign and a match against Shawn at WrestleMania XI that I'm not sure I've seen more than once and definitely not in 20+ years. (3/5)
The next match - Lex Luger vs. Tatanka - was based on a storyline that I remember much, much better than it actually was based on my re-watch. As a kid, I definitely believed that Luger might be turning heel, but after seeing a video recap of the events leading up to this match and hearing Tatanka's promo, it is painfully obvious that Tatanka is the one who has joined the Million Dollar Corporation (which makes Luger a super dumb babyface for not seeing Tatanka's heel turn coming). That being said, the match itself is decent enough and I like that Tatanka, from the very beginning, is already working as a heel, basically ignoring the fans and expressing his hatred for Luger through his body language. In hindsight, there probably was somewhere more interesting they could've gone with Tatanka as a heel but, at the same time, he wasn't all that great of an in-ring talent so its not like he was going to be a true main eventer. Ted DiBiase shows up and Tatanka scores the upset victory and then officially turns heel. Luger would go on to do, well, a whole bunch of nothing for the rest of his WWE run aside from tagging with the British Bulldog. Its no wonder he left the company to return to WCW the year after considering how fast they de-pushed him after WrestleMania X. (1.5/5)
Jeff Jarrett takes on Mabel next. Mabel was still a babyface at this point and doing a really cheesy rapper gimmick. Jeff Jarrett had debuted in the WWE at the tail end of 93' and worked many house show matches against Bret Hart and Luger while getting wins in squash matches on WWE TV. Jarrett had not yet won his first Intercontinental Championship but he was still somewhat of a spotlighted heel for the company at this time so its not surprising that he would get the W over Mabel. For what this was, I thought it was good enough. Mabel is a limited worker, Jarrett was an annoying chickenshit heel, what could one expect? (2.5/5)
Bret Hart defends the WWE Championship against Owen Hart in an old school, blue bar cage match in the next bout. This is a hard match to review because its one of the more polarizing matches in WWE history. Some consider to be an all-time classic and arguably one of the best cage matches in company history, often noting that, with the WWE skewing towards a family-friendly project and Bret's own storyline reluctance to actually make this match a gory, blood-soaked cage match like one would typically get, the brilliance of this match is that its wrestled with such heavy emphasis on both guys trying to escape the cage at every turn. Detractors have valid criticisms too, though. For a match that is all about guys just trying to get through a door, it sure does last a long time (30+ minutes). I tend to land in the middle after having seen this a couple times. The first time I watched, probably around 96' or 97', I thought it was an excellent, dramatic battle. Re-watching it now, I was not as impressed by the repetitiveness. In some ways, this felt like Bret and Owen doing a 30+ minute match because they knew they could, not necessarily because they had 30 minutes of really great twists and turns. Take 5 or 6 minutes off this match and I think you'd end up with an all-time classic and maybe even a match in the 4-5 star rating on the Kwang Scale. Instead, this match falls short because it just goes too long and doesn't escalate as much as it just sorta grinds its way to a finish (albeit a visually great one). (3.5/5)
Main event time - The Undertaker vs. The Undertaker. I won't go through the whole storyline leading up to this, but I'm glad that there's a video package recapping it because its worth checking out the highlights. Everything before the bell rings is just fantastic, from the bait-and-switch with Paul Bearer wheeling out a casket only for it to be holding an urn to the Undertaker's eventual arrival to a massive pop. He was super, super over with this crowd. Unfortunately, once the bell rings, the crowd goes silent and doesn't pop for anything until the Undertaker eventually hits the "Underfaker" with three tombstones (which looked seemed like overkill as Dibiase's Undertaker had basically scored absolutely no offense and looked soundly defeated after the first piledriver). Extra credit to the Undertaker for busting out an impressive leapfrog and a solid suplex from the ring apron back into the ring. This was a legit Undertaker carry job and while the match itself wasn't great, it accomplished what it needed to without overstaying its welcome. (2/5)
Despite a middling Kwang Score of just 2.5-out-of-5, SummerSlam 94' will appeal to fans of this particular era and offers some surprisingly solid bouts and interesting twists in Blayze/Nakano, the star-studded Diesel/Ramon match, and even the main event, which is much more watchable than its reputation. What will really make this show a winner or loser to fans who've never seen it rests with the title match, though. To some, its a masterpiece, to others, an abomination. With that in mind, I'm going with a middle-of-the-road rating myself...
FINAL RATING - Watch It...With Remote in Hand
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