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World Wrestling Entertainment has long been the biggest thing in wrestling. Even when World Championship Wrestling was on top for a few years during the late-1990’s, the then-wwf was still regarded as the promised land for a lot of wrestlers. This is something which has become evident through comments from many during shoot interviews over the years.

For Scott Levy, being creative was always far more important than simply holding down a job with the juggernaut promotion. It’s been said that Levy, as Raven, was set for a bumper feud against The Undertaker at the beginning of 2002. It’s also been rumoured that Vince McMahon was the one who nixed those plans, feeling Raven was too small to realistically battle Undertaker.

Both McMahon and Raven feature in one of the facts presented here. Alongside that one, 9 other facts that even the most hardcore of pro wrestling...

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A lot of successful WWE performers can trace their lineage through Paul Heyman’s Extreme Championship Wrestling. Rob Van Dam became WWE Champion (and Ecw Champion) in 2006. Tazz parlayed his wrestling character into a successful announcing career starting in 2002. The homicidal, genocidal, maniac that was Sabu played an important role in the re-launch of the Ecw brand beginning with 2006′s One Night Stand PPV (facing Rey Mysterio for his World Championship). To varying degrees, the Ecw experience helped shape the careers of many former WWE World Champions such as Chris Jericho, Chris Benoit, Mick Foley, Eddie Guerrero and Steve Austin.

However, there’s the other group. Those are the many Ecw performers whose experience in the WWE was far less thrilling. While these wrestlers have mostly been relegated more to footnotes of WWE history we’ll take a moment to recall their time as superstars in the world’s biggest pro-wrestling company.

*full disclosure: a DVD screener of this film was provided by Gravitas Ventures. Tagline: "He's on the loose and kills by night." Director/writer: Dru Brown. Sleeper is an indie horror film from relative newcomer Dru Brown. The film stars, notably, Raven aka Scott Levy. Many may recognize Levy from his years of wrestling on amateur and pro wrestling circuits. He often appeared as a nihilistic sychophant in his many television appearances. In Sleeper, he does not have to change much. Raven appears as Resnick; he is a man with knowledge of murder. Many of the characters find out about his abilities the hard way. And while the film focuses on Raven and some university students, at the film's heart is a story of manipulation and betrayal. Maybe Resnick's victims deserved their bloody ends. This reviewer enjoyed watching this film as the villain, Resnick, is often foreboding. His legend grows...

Director Ken Russell, best known for his movies featuring sex-starved nuns, nude male wrestling, "offensive" religious symbolism, and kaleidoscopic musical numbers, died Sunday, Nov. 27, in the United Kingdom. Russell had suffered a series of strokes. He was 84. Now hardly as remembered or admired as, say, '70s Hollywood icons Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, or Martin Scorsese, Russell not only was — more than — their equal in terms of vision and talent, but he was also infinitely more daring both thematically and esthetically. In fact, Russell was so innovatively controversial that he was referred to as the enfant terrible of British cinema while already in his 40s and 50s. But if middle age brings out complacency and apathy in most people, its effect on Russell (born July 3, 1927, in Southampton) seems to have been the opposite. Following years of work on British television, Russell's 1969 film adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love...

Documentaries made by the Post Office in the 1930s to highlight social issues heralded a new style of film-making

Pioneering documentary films made by the Post Office in the 1930s may look stilted and wooden now but they were actually the prototypes of a new type of film-making, a study co-authored by a Cambridge academic claims.

The short films, shown in cinemas before the main feature from the early 1930s onwards, were self-conscious advertising by the Gpo. But their makers, led by the great documentary director John Grierson, also sought to show contemporary British life and believed that they should have a "socially useful purpose", inspired by Soviet film-makers such as Sergei Eisenstein.

The unit's best-known film is Night Mail, made in 1936, showing the overnight express carrying the post from London to Edinburgh. It is part-scripted by Wh Auden with the famous refrain: "This is the night mail crossing the...