Man, I really liked WolfCop, which was also directed and written by Lowell Dean, but this movie did not work for me at all.

The indy group SAW is running shows in small towns in Canada, but to performers like Miss Behave (Ayisha Issa) and Kate the Great (Sara Canning), it’s the big time. Joe Lean (Steven Ogg) is fooling around with Miss Behave and may want more; they all have to deal with a show in the middle of nowhere for a cult that’s run by The Prophet (Chris Jericho), a wrestler that Lean had to retire as well as Kate’s father.

All of the wrestlers are forced into matches that reflect earth, air, fire and water to raise Satan from Hell. By all rights, as someone who spent most of his life in indy wrestling and loves horror movies, I should be into this. I liked the masked wrestler Enigma Jones (Mo Adan) and the needledrop music, but this felt like it was knocking at the door of being an interesting movie but never kicked it in and took it by the throat as it should have.

There are so many plotholes — is SAW the biggest thing in wrestling or an indy that’s barely holding on? — and an ending that is so relentlessly dumb that it almost changed this review into a rave that I can barely recommend this and that makes me kind of sad.

Jericho is fine in this, even if the whole time you just think, “Oh, that’s Chris Jericho.” Think Green Room with devil worship and you get the idea. It’s technically OK, but there could have been a version of this that went wild with its ideas and pushed everyone to be over the top, going from just being there to a grindhouse-style epic that mixes horror and pro wrestling the way — read the Mat Monsters articles I’ve written for better executions — they deserve to be. As it is, 2 stars out of 5, but Dave Meltzer would probably give it 7 stars.