WWE has been hyping up a “House of Horrors” showdown between Randy Orton and Bray Wyatt for Sunday’s Payback pay-per-view. Coming into the show, no one really knew what to expect from the match. Would they have to fight through an actual house, forcing the live audience to awkwardly sit through a bunch of pre-tape before they magically appeared in the ring? Would they wrestle with Halloween props in Sin Cara’s old strip club lighting, but spookier? Turns out it was … well, it was something.
The match already starts off with two pretty ridiculous opponents. One is a third-generation professional wrestler who experiences unchecked auditory hallucinations and thinks he’s a viper despite having baby teeth instead of fangs, and charges up his viper powers by slamming his fists into the mat. Snakes don’t even have arms; why is no one concerned about his mental health after all these years?
The other is a demon who inhabited the shell of Husky Harris after the first punted him in the head, made him buy a house in the country, start a cult full of dudes who eschew personal hygiene, and then pair his trilby with white guy dreads. I dunno, I feel like if I had demon powers I’d probably try to use them for a little more than turning myself into a meninist forum mod, but I digress. Here are the silliest, strangest, most noteworthy highlights of Final Deletion 2: Back Country Boogaloo.
Orton decided to take a limo to Bray’s house because he’s precisely the kind of person who would, and he had to work during Fyre Fest I guess. You know this is serious because he wore pants, when previously he only did that to look cool in front of Ric Flair and hide his chub around prospective divas.
He arrives at Bray’s California retreat, only to be greeted by a ghost tractor. Oh, sorry, let me rephrase that to the way I’ve been referring to it: A GHOST TRACTOR.
Okay, so the house itself maybe isn’t super spooky. Well, it might be to other people, but I spent a year and a half living with an alcoholic hoarder obsessed with tea cups, secretly stealing my money, and not changing the litter box for her two cats. A room full of dolls and the sounds of a child’s cries? Psh. If only I were so lucky.
Also familiar to anyone who has had nightmare roommates is walking into a kitchen with a dirty fridge and a sink full of dishes. While she didn’t write FOLLOW THE BUZZARDS in dirt, she did often make me want to hit her with a frying pan. Here we thought WWE was ripping off the Hardys, but I guess they’re just stealing my life now.
Bray gets the upper hand by pushing a refrigerator onto Orton, which is important as it becomes the focal point for the commentary team to speculate that a major household appliance was his ultimate undoing. You can’t see it, but the top of the fridge says WASH ME with a cartoon dick drawn in the dirt.
So Wyatt rolls into the arena in his stolen limo and stumbles out to the ring, because the rules state that the match can only end in the ring by pinfall, submission, or forfeiture. Which … is a little weird for an offsite match, but sure, wrestling is real so whatever. Wyatt makes his way to the ring and somehow finds his lantern backstage, but oh no! Orton appears behind him in the ring because … uhhh … wrestling is real?
Because WWE is running two concurrent storylines, Orton is attacked in the ring by the Singh Brothers, née the Bollywood Boys, because GHOST TRACTOR wasn’t a weird enough thing to say out loud. Number one contender Jinder Mahal stole Orton’s championship, and Wyatt used the opportunity to catch Orton in a Sister Abigail resolving absolutely nothing, and rendering the house portion of the horrors completely useless.
So … yeah. House of Horrors sure is a thing that happened. It may not have kept its momentum and ended in a confusing and non-title finish, but listen — we’ll always have GHOST TRACTOR.
