Movie Review: 'Lucha VaVoom Inside America's Most Outrageous Show'

Lucha VaVoom is a wild and crazy show filled with wild action and wilder women. This strange and wonderful combination of pro wrestling and burlesque is like a wacky milkshake of a carnival crossed with old school Vaudeville. If they allowed animals at Lucha VaVoom, you could travel back to Mexico in the 1920s or perhaps the Moulin Rouge crossed with the WWE.

Lucha VaVoom is a show that takes place a few times per year in Los Angeles, run in part and co-founded by Rita D'Albert, a burlesque performer. Her friend Liz Fairbairn used her connections in Mexico to import Lucha Libre masked wrestling to Los Angeles where they decided to combine with Rita's burlesque show to create one of the most unique shows imaginable.

That was in 2002 and for 16 years performers have come and gone but this remarkably unique show goes on. The crew adds comedy to the show with the addition of cult comic Blaine Capatch and his coterie of rotating comic friends like Drew Carey, Patton Oswalt, Greg Proops and Jeff Davis. The comedic crew provides comic calls of the wrestling matches and warm up the burlesque crowds.

The characters are as wild as you would imagine. First there is the Lucha VaVoom wrestling champion, Cassandro, the first openly gay luchadore. Cassandro has been wrestling flamboyantly and out of the closet since 1992, well before the WWE would debut faux gay gimmick Golddust. Cassandro has been wrestling with Lucha VaVoom since its inception.

Cassandro's many opponents and partners include Joey Ryan, another wild character, a sleezy, cheesy ladies man, the chicken brothers, who literally wrestle in chicken costumes and peck and cluck their way to victory. And then there is Dirty Sanchez, the less said about Dirty Sanchez the better as he is seriously gross.

On the burlesque side of things, Rita leads the way with her classic style burlesque of boobs, dance, and flamboyance. Through more than 20 years of burlesque, she still looks as great today as she did when she began Lucha VaVoom with a pair of friends. Rita is remarkable but her eye for other people's talents may be an even greater talent than any dancing or burlesque.

Rita has discovered a group of remarkable talents led by Marawa The Amazing, a burlesque performer with a background in the so-called circus arts. No joke, she claims to have a degree in circus arts. Marawa's main talents are her remarkable roller skating, on high skates no less, and her legitimate world record talent for hula hoops.

Then there is the glorious trans-gender talents of Karis, a shocker who strips topless and shocks first timers in the audience completely convinced that she was a gorgeous 6 foot tall goddess woman. It's a bold and taunting show that woos the audiences and wins them over with remarkable talent and audacity.

Perhaps the strangest part of the show is a character named Heino. Heino is a German weirdo who handles backstage interviews, like a modern age Mean Gene Okerlund from the 80s WWF, only German, Blonde and bizarre. Heino is awkward and hilarious and while he doesn't have the talent of the burlesque or Luchadore folks, he somehow fits the bizarre vibe of the show perfectly.

Lucha VaVoom Inside America's Most Outrageous Show is the first feature length documentary from Ben Churchill, a dedicated fan of Lucha VaVoom. His style is not complex but he tells a tight, compact story that is not unlike a great, if lengthy, wrestling match, with wit and up and downs, speed and rest holds, comedy and triumph.

The end of the doc coincides with the seeming end of the wrestling career of Cassandro who appears to go out on the most amazing note imaginable if you're a fan of pro wrestling, leaping from the highest height of the Mayan Theater. It's a remarkable moment rendered beautifully, brilliantly carny when suddenly Cassandro's career isn't over anymore.

Lucha VaVoom Inside America's Most Outrageous Show is not the most artful documentary but it is damn entertaining. It's the best possible commercial for Lucha VaVoom the show which belongs on Netflix as its own show for the masses. Burlesque and wrestling are so perfectly, wonderfully entwined in Lucha Vavoom it's shocking that it hasn't made it to its own wider pop culture space, outside of just Los Angeles.