No Holds Barred is a 1989 American movie starring professional wrestler Hulk Hogan. It was launched as an attempt to boost Hulk Hogan's acting career after his appearance in Rocky III.

Plot

Rip (Hulk Hogan) is a very popular professional wrestler. Even if he looks and acts like a brute, he is actually a golden-hearted guy! He has a younger brother whose only presence in the audience motivates him enough to win his fights (which are of course never staged).

Rip appears on a special channel which screens all his matches and is highly popular thanks to him. But an evil money-hungry chairman of a rival TV channel, Brell (Kurt Fuller ), wants to employ Rip in exchange for a lot of money. Rip having learned faithfulness and honesty from his training in the past, refuses, as he considers that wrestling is a noble art that is not meant for show.

Brell decides then to crush Hogan's channel's popularity by creating a new kind of wrestling matches: brutal, merciless, violent and very low fights! Brell gets high watching rates. His leading fighter is a brainless and hefty Black wrestler called Zeus (Tom "Tiny" Lister Jr ), who sports a "Z" tattoo on his skull and who is using a lot of doping products.

Meanwhile, Rip goes crime-fighting and stops armed gangsters bare-handed. Some henchmen from Brell also try to destroy Rip, but our wrestler is too strong for them. He beats them all up and scares the last one so much that he literally loses control of his bodily functions.

A beautiful female spy (Joan Severance ) is sent by evil Brell to seduce Rip and look over him for her boss. As she realizes Rip's good nature, she tells the truth to the wrestler and turns to his side; Rip now totally trusts her and hits on her.

Brell challenges Rip to fight Zeus in an ultimate violent battle lively on his channel. Rip rejecting the offer (it is a question of honour), Zeus goes harming his young brother who ends in a critical condition in hospital. Instead of simply calling the police and filing a lawsuit against the fiend, Rip accepts the challenge in order to face the two villains.

But when the match is going on, Brell abducts Rip's friends and threatens to kill them if our hero doesn't lose deliberately. What shall Rip do?

Critics

The movie is panelled as an excellent movie of the sports genre by some, but others consider it a turkey at worst or camp at best, for the following reasons:

• the storyline is very simplistic and manichean with very cliché characters, which is on the level of a bad cartoon episode
• Hulk Hogan is a lousy actor: when he isn't fighting, he is very unexpressive
• even though the movie seems childish in its plainness, it displays immature and vulgar dialogues and jokes
• people with show experience see the movie as an obnoxious attempt to display kayfabe

External links

• IMDB Page