No Holds Barred (1989) – A Movie A Day 2021 #30
No Holds Barred (1989) – A Movie A Day 2021 #30
Today’s movie is something that I had to watch. If you don’t already know, I do a podcast about pro wrestling with my best friend Joey. It’s called The Wrestling House Show, and we’ve been covering a lot of retro wrestling events for an ongoing series we’re doing. We’re watching all these shows in order starting back in the early 1980s, and to enhance the experience we’ll sometimes look out for other media from the era to indulge in. We might play a video game that came out around the same time as the shows we’re watching, we might read a pro-wrestling magazine from the time, or in this case we watched a movie that had been heavily promoted during many of the World Wrestling Federation shows we’ve been reviewing. The movie was promoted so hard on WWF’s (now WWE’s) shows that they even took a character straight out of the movie and had him wrestling the champ at the time, Hulk Hogan. That character was Zeus, and that movie is No Holds Barred.
No Holds Barred is not a good movie, but it can be a fun movie at times for fans of pro wrestling and for fans of bad action movies. I like to make the best of things, so I’ll try to look at the positives for this journal entry. I’ll also try to keep this brief because Joey and I did a nearly hour-long review of the movie (plus a couple of related pro-wrestling matches) earlier today, and I’m kind of done talking about No Holds Barred for a while. If you want to check out that review, it will be posted on The Wrestling House Show sometime in the future (though it will probably be a while).
No Holds Barred stars Terry Bollea as Hulk Hogan as Rip, the WWF Champ. It’s a big stretch for Hogan as an actor because in No Holds Barred he’s wearing blue and white ring gear instead of yellow and red. Also, his name is Rip instead of Hulk, so yeah, totally different character. Rip is a kind-hearted, charitable guy who beats people up on TV for a living. The cartoonishly evil head of a rival TV network, Mr. Brell (played by Kurt Fuller), wants Rip to work for him because Rip equals ratings. Brell tries to buy Rip’s loyalty, but Rip won’t break his current contract. Brell gets angry, and that begins a vendetta for Brell to either get Rip to work for him or destroy Rip in the process. Brell ends up coming up with an idea to air no-rules bar fights on live TV, and that draws the interest of an ex-con named Zeus (played by Tiny Lister). Brell orchestrates a plan to pit Zeus and Rip against each other, and yeah, you get the idea.
The movie plays out like like a cartoon with lots of poop jokes and violence. Coming from an era where mainstream pro-wrestling (i.e. WWF) was getting more and more cartoonish, you can see where the over-the-top nature of the movie comes from. Plus, Vince McMahon (the owner of WWE) apparently had a hand in changing the script along with Hulk Hogan, and if you’re a wrestling fan and are familiar with Vince’s sense of humor, you’ll know what to expect from No Holds Barred.
With as not-great as the movie can be, I will say that it has a very good cast. Aside from Hogan who is fine playing himself, Kurt Fuller is great as the main villain Brell. He’s slimy and smarmy, and he has just enough menace to make him feel dangerous. Tiny Lister is also great in everything he does. Like Hogan, this movie wasn’t a big stretch for Lister either, but Zeus does look convincing as he flexes and yells a lot (a lot more convincing than he looks in an actual wrestling ring). Plus, Joan Severance plays Rip’s love interest, Sam. I can’t say I’m very happy with the way the script treats Severance’s character, and in fact, the attacks on Sam are some of my least favorite parts of the movie, but Joan Severance always does great with whatever she’s given.
The plot of the movie is predictable and formulaic, but it works fine for a goofy movie like this. Does it always make sense realistically. No, absolutely not, but does that really matter when it comes to fun? I don’t think so. In general, people who went to see No Holds Barred when it came out were probably fans of pro-wrestling already, so the biggest fun to be had was seeing Hogan/Rip beat people up and to watch out for all of the cameos and references to pro-wrestling scattered throughout the movie. The audience who would enjoy No Holds Barred today is probably the same group, though it definitely skews more towards long-time and/or retro wrestling fans rather than modern fans. That is, unless you just want to watch it to complain and make fun of it which seems to be a popular activity these days.
The movie is an interesting part of pro-wrestling history if nothing else because it literally became part of the show for about half a year. It also helped usher Hogan back into movies which he would do a lot more of going into the 1990s. Hogan still had some memorable feuds in WWF after No Holds Barred came out, but newer stars were starting to rise, and Hogan’s many, many years on top of the WWF felt like they were beginning to wind down. So even though Hogan made his film debut in Rocky III in 1982, No Holds Barred is really what kicked off his movie career, such as it was. So… that’s good? I don’t know. It’s something, that’s for sure.
