In Your House: Revenge of the ‘Taker Review

WWF Tag Team Championship Match:
Owen Hart and the British Bulldog(c) vs. The Legion of Doom

I really didn’t like the match at all. LOD just didn’t look very good. They were well liked by the crowd, Owen and Bulldog were playing good heels, but they just didn’t do anything interesting. When Animal is locking in headlocks in the opening minutes you know there is something wrong with the face team. The pacing was constantly slow because of that. LOD won at first but the match was restarted because they apparently pinned the wrong guy. I’m not sure if that’s actually true though but regardless the match was restarted and then Bret Hart ran in to help his family retain the titles. Just a bad match.
* 


Intercontinental Championship Match:
Rocky Maivia(c) vs. Savio Vega w/The Nation of Domination

Horrible. I made it through this match without falling asleep but once it ended I had to take a nap for about a half hour. Savio worked a control segment on the Rock that at one point consisted of him doing some type of claw hold on the Rock’s shoulder. A flat comeback from the Rock followed. And it all concluded in a countout win for the Rock. I’m honestly surprised Vince stuck with the Rock for so long, he had been on the roster for I think 6 months or so at this time and he was still horrible.
½* 


Jesse James vs. Rockabilly w/The Honky Tonk Man

Why? Both guys were playing equally obnoxious characters and they had a very uninteresting match. It wasn’t that bad of a match but I was just annoyed every time Jesse James did his gimmicky stuff. What I find to be the most shocking is that there are 5 matches on this card and this match was somehow one of those 5 matches.
¾*


WWF Championship Match:
The Undertaker(c) vs. Mankind w/Paul Bearer

What a war. The chemistry between these two is just perfect. Undertaker comes out firing and it looks like this time he’s really going to kill Foley. You get some brutal bumps from Foley early on and it gets so brutal that you wonder how he’s going to get in any offense as he was just getting killed by Undertaker who wasn’t showing the slightest bit of mercy. Bearer gets involved and gives Foley his opening and he then starts his highly disturbing control segment. It starts out pretty basic but it just escalates the longer it goes on. Foley shows a total disregard for himself, the rules, and even the title. He has the Undertaker beaten at one point and he attacks a ref as he enters the ring. Normally this would be something that would piss me off but not in this case because Foley spent the entire match showing us that he was just a lunatic. Undertaker eventually makes his comeback and it’s just more insane punishment that Foley takes. Undertaker ends up with the win but there was this amazing nearfall in the match where Undertaker hits Foley with the ring stairs in the head, Foley goes head first into a table, Undertaker then gets him in the ring, and he chokeslams him. Foley kicks out. How the fuck did he kick out? Undertaker quickly ends it with the Tombstone but that kickout just shows how crazy Foley is. You just can’t go wrong with these two.
****½ 


Bret “The Hitman” Hart vs. “Stone Cold” Steve Austin

A step below their previous matches but expecting them to have a third masterpiece doesn’t seem fair. That being said this was still really good. Austin had been jumped before the match and a lot of time was spent talking about how his knee was injured. Bret spent a lot of time working on it and the selling from Austin was really good, good enough that if he sold like it for the Wrestlemania match I would have given that match a full 5 star rating. I also liked that we saw the next level of Bret Hart. At Survivor Series he got more and more aggressive. At Wrestlemania he started aggressive and ended heelish at the end. Here he was in full heel mode and was doing things like using a chair to attack Austin’s knee. You got the impression that hurting Austin was more important than winning, which makes sense because Bret had already beat Austin twice at this point. Austin still using heel tactics in the match was a nice touch and fit with the feud and his character. He’s not playing a “good” guy but you still want him to win. The ending was kind of weak because you really wanted to see Austin get the win against Hart and after 2 classics that he lost it seemed like this would have been the place to do it. Instead we get another DQ ending on this show. Weak ending to a great match.
***¾ 


Well the double main event was amazing. The undercard belongs in a deep pit in wrestling hell. One thing that really bothered me about this show was that there were 5 matches on the PPV and 3 of them ended in countout or DQ. The WWF wasn’t doing very well at this point yet they go and book that kind of shit on a PPV?