It’s been a while since I’ve tortured myself with a card that is widely recognized as being outright bad. And tis the season so why not travel back to the last time the WWE tried to start a third brand, 2006’s December to Dismember. ECW had returned over the summer and as we got towards the end of the year, the shine was clearly off the apple. Enough has been said about SyFy and the ECW Zombie. But the brand was given it’s own PPV to try to build themselves some momentum back. They were also given a main event of an Elimination Chamber match to try to get things going.
Our opening contest is between four men that aren’t on the ECW brand. MNM takes on the reuniting Hardy Boyz and Joey Styles and Tazz are going out of their way to make it clear that the Boyz are going back to singles careers as soon as this here match is done. Hell, Jeff is the reigning Intercontinental champion at the time. Matt and Mercury open us up with some great chain wrestling before Jeff and Nitro give it a go themselves. It’s also ridiculous that John Morrison looks nearly the same in 2023 that he does in 2006. We got all their aerial manuevers, a ton of tight tag work, a nice build of action, a couple of hot tags, really everything you could want in an opening match to build up the crowd for the night. Let’s hope the energy stays in the building. The Hardys win by the way after Jeff hits a swanton on both members of MNM, stacked up like cordwood.
Matt Striker comes out to get our next matchup started, but grabs a mic to tell us that his match with Balls Mahoney will be conducted under Striker’s Rules which will see an extreme enforcement of the rules. The most important one being no foul language. It’s a gimmick that works only in a place like ECW, the old anti-hardcore guy. Thing is Balls always could go in the ring, he just made more money swinging chairs. Striker does the heel thing, breaking all of the rules he highlighted while working over Balls’ arm. Except maybe the language one. I cannot confirm that he broke that one. Balls wins after a sudden sitout spinebuster in a fine TV match that I dunno belonged on pay-per-view.
We go to the back to find one of our main eventers dead. Sabu has apparently been attacked and as a result is taking a deep nap. The crowd can be heard chanting bullshit as soon as we go back to the arena. That’s not a good sign.
Neither is it a good sign that there is absolutely no reaction for Elijah Burke and Sylvester Terkay’s entrance. I can’t tell what Augusta, Georgia thinks of the FBI because of the awful theme dub. Trinity is over though and you can guess why. Terkay is still pretty green here. Guido and Burke are solid workers and Mamaluke is fine but he never got a change to show off what he’s good at. It’s alright for a match. Burke wins via The Stroke, I mean Elijah Experience and in the most match beatdown, Terkay uncorks a muscle buster, which I definitely don’t remember seeing in 2006 WWE.
Daivari is out next with the Great Khali, cutting a promo in Farsi on the way to the ring. Daivaris opponent, Tommy Dreamer, gets a nice welcome from the guy nearest the crowd mic. He even gets an EC-Dub chant. He started out kinda hot but then took a rough looking fall to the outside after Khali pulled down the top rope on him. Khali was ejected from ringside by the ref and the rest of the way through was…there. We did get the vintage Dreamer dropkick into Daivari in the tree of woe before he almost immediately succumb to the most devastating move in sports entertainment: the roll-up. There was no heat in the match, so poor Tommy had to take a choke bomb from Khali on the steel stage and it sounded like that bump sucked. That’s a perfectly fine seven minute TV match, but this is on pay-per-view.
Our semi-main is a mixed tag match where no one gives a damn about the men involved. It’s Kevin Thorn and Ariel against Mike Knox and Kelly Kelly. The vampires take on the jealous/violent boyfriend dynamic, it’s…it’s a thing. Look, let’s just all be honest with each other. The match itself is nothing. It lives on because of Ariel, her constant screaming on the apron and yes, her thong. Kelly is beyond green here. Once she gets tagged in, Knox refuses the hot tag and leaves her to get destroyed. The storyline was garbage to begin with and hopefully it ended after this match. I don’t care enough to go follow up. Sandman shows up to make the save because they needed something to rescue the segment and to pad out the show because we’re to the main event and we haven’t reached the 90 minute mark. Sandman at least got a big pop.
Down comes the chamber and it’s very clear where we’re going here. The deck is being stacked against Bobby Lashley in his quest to unseat the Big Show as ECW Champion. The fan sentiment at the time though was that it should be CM Punk’s time. Paul Heyman thought it was CM Punk’s time. Oh, and Sabu was carted out and replaced by Hardcore Holly. I think I read somewhere his removal from this match was punishment for something, but I cannot remember. Holly and Van Dam start the match out and hit the steel outside in like a minute, which is pretty much how these matches go. Crowd favorite CM Punk is the first to be released from a pod and his steel chair immediately goes flying at RVD, but the Whole F’n Show has more experience throwing chairs and Phil gets it right back in the mush. There is a stark reminder that the WWE doesn’t do this level of violence anymore as RVD is busted open and as soon as Test enters the match, he drives the claw of his crowbar into Van Dam’s wound. The crowd is here to see Punk win the title but, swerve, five-star frog splash and he is the first one out. You can hear the crowd get real excited that RVD hit the splash and then once they realize their guy is going to be to first one gone they get real upset. Test and Hardcore Holly end up botching the next elimination and an otherwise solid match is quickly going off the rails. Van Dam isn’t in the match much longer either thanks to Test and were into the second phase of this match. Paul Heyman’s security try to keep Lashley locked in his pod but Lashley breaks through the roof using the table he was locked in with. Test watches him do this and then climb up and out of the pod before doing anything. Lashley then puts Test through the Plexiglas that was recently keeping him locked in. He’s eliminated a few minutes later after a crowbar to the gut and a spear from Lashley, who then has a minute and fifteen seconds to kill before they let out Big Show. He emerges with a WWE ball bat wrapped in barbed wire, which they keep showing a close up of and you can clearly see every barb bent in and there are no sharp protruding edges. Again, if you’re not gonna do it, don’t do it. Big Show ends up bleeding but within 5 minutes he’s speared and an ex-champ. Some of Augusta were happy about this one, but there was an equal number of people not happy, such as the guy seen on camera giving the celebrating Lashley the double bird. And that’s it. 2 hours and 14 minutes on the network and in the era when you were paying $30, $40, $50 for shows like this, that’s unacceptable.
FINAL GRADE: D-
I know everyone craps on this show and I’d like to be unique, but there is a reason this one gets so much derision. As I mentioned, in the era of 12-16 PPVs a year, you cannot put on a two-hour show and expect people to be happy about it. You cannot put on a show designed to be a one-match card filled out with at best TV matches and expect people to be happy about it. Sure, the Hardys vs. MNM was a good tag team match. But when you fill the rest of the undercard with matches with meh heat, take a fan favorite out of the main event in the middle of the show and then force the main event into a formulaic outcome that the majority of the audience was not hoping for, you can’t be surprised by the negative response. Plans for a repeat event in 2007 were immediately cancelled and Paul Heyman was sent home after the final bell. That move was probably scapegoating, and Paul has said he fought for Punk winning the title in the Chamber. The biggest knock on this show should be that this is the final PPV legacy for ECW. They never got another brand dedicated event and there’s next to no chance that ECW will see another resurrection so this is it. I have a bunch of original ECW events on my list of reviews to do, so I hope to be able to wash this bad taste out of my mouth soon.
Speaking of, I suppose I should reveal what’s on the docket for the review next week. Well after spinning the random number generator, the event that has come up is…
Interesting. The wheel will send us to the actual Land of the Extreme, taking us back to February 25, 1995 at the ECW Arena in south Philly for Return of the Funker!
The Finisher 