I’m no fan of professional wrestling as sport, entertainment or otherwise — I’ve always had an aversion to it, and always will — but I was intrigued by Saturday Night Live scribe Barry Blaustein’s documentary Beyond the Mat, which tells the stories of the wrestlers outside of the ring, from the perspective of a fan who nonetheless doesn’t shy away from showing the pitfalls of the game.

While pro wrestling is all staged and all show, the violence can be real. But the ring footage is boring compared to the remarkably candid peeks in the thick-necked personalities’ lives. See “living legend” Terry Funk put off retirement, although he needs new knees. See Jake “The Snake” Roberts go on a crack-induced rant-’n’-rave. See WWF head honcho Vince McMahon come off as more repellent and slimy than ever before. See the audition of the new recruit Puke — so named because of his ability to barf on cue (and, as the end credits reveal, now paralyzed following a fight).

Best of all, see family man Mick “Mankind” Foley’s young kids watch in tears and sheer terror as their father gets beaten up by The Rock. It happens.

The doc is alternately interesting, funny, uncomfortable and touching. It has more spandex and mullets than should be allowed in a feature film, but that goes with the territory, right? —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

As if Mark Hartley’s 2008 documentary, Not Quite Hollywood, weren’t deliriously entertaining enough, the director follows it up with the equally outrageous Machete Maidens Unleashed! Whereas Quite cast its probing eye on Australia’s deep history in exploitation film, Unleashed examines the Filipino revolution in moviemaking, even if much of that wave was due to American invaders — namely one Roger Corman.

While the Philippines was home to many a native production, it wasn’t until director Eddie Romero dipped his toes into horror with the likes of Terror Is a Man and the Blood Island trilogy that local audiences gave a damn, not to mention dollars. When Corman launched New World Pictures, he found he could make his cheap women-in-prison opuses even cheaper by shooting there, bringing an authentic bungled-jungle look to his Hollywood product.

Chock full of interviews with the movement’s filmmakers and performers who remain alive (plus John Landis), the excellent Unleashed also considers the careers of Cirio H. Santiago (Savage!, TNT Jackson), Bobby Suarez (Bionic Boy, One-Armed Executioner) and pint-sized actor Weng Weng (For Your Height Only, The Impossible Kid), all of whom helped keep the industry busy. So active was the Asian republic that Corman eventually parodied his productions there with Hollywood Boulevard, and Francis Ford Coppola turned it into a war zone with Apocalypse Now.

With intriguing sidebars on the safety measures not taken by Filipino stuntmen and the film fandom of shoe addict Imelda Marcos, Unleashed showcases so many movies of questionable quality — Twilight People, Beyond Atlantis, Vampire Hookers (“Blood isn’t all they suck!”) — that you’re advised to keep a notebook handy. Your “must-see” list will grow by the dozens. —Rod Lott

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A number of names are bandied about in this documentary: heels, babyfaces, bullies. If a guy was an asshole, he’s called an asshole, and that no-holds-barred, candid nature is what makes Memphis Heat: The True Story of Memphis Wrasslin’ so watchable, even for those of us who don’t give a squat about the sport.

For the newbies among us, the Memphis style of wrestling, we’re told, is all about “fire and action,” thereby turning the goings-on within the ring into a meld of athleticism and circus acts (and sometimes a freak show). As the decades progress and the gimmicks are introduced, we see how a two-bit, traveling circuit eventually birthed a billion-dollar business, once Vince McMahon noticed the light bulb hovering above his noggin.

It’s a colorful history of pioneers like Gorgeous George, Sputnik Monroe (“He was the only person I know who could get run over by a Greyhound bus and not get hurt”), karate-chopping Tojo, black masked wrestler Sweet Ebony Diamond, arrogant Jackie Fargo (“I was meaner than a damn rattlesnake and tougher than a two-dollar steak”), the infamous Jerry Lawler and celebrity opponent Andy Kaufman, not to mention matches against bears and with midgets (“You could put midgets on your card, and your house would double. … I liked a lot of those midgets”).

These fine fellows are interviewed on camera by debuting director Chad Schaffler, and they mostly seem to pine for the days when they annually averaged 100,000 miles on the road and outdrew the World Series on local TV, and yet barely made a buck (with exceptions, of course). Because they’re not bitter and because they’re chock full of hysterical soundbites, Memphis Heat emerges as a winner, with very little bruising. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Memphis Heat.

Back in 1981, filmmaker Penelope Spheeris released a searing, exciting and sometimes frightening documentary about L.A’s then-burgeoning punk-rock movement. The Decline of Western Civilization told the tales of the bands responsible for that music’s rise to infamy, most memorably including a pre-Henry Rollins Black Flag and The Germs.

Seven years later, a new kind of music dominated L.A’s scene, inspiring Spheeris to once again pick up her camera, but what she found resulted in a completely different kind of film. If the first Decline was a dramatic look at a movement filled with disaffected youth producing the sonic equivalent of their own dissatisfaction and inner torment, Part II: The Metal Years turned out to be a comedy about a bunch of shiftless douchebags who liked to wear makeup and get laid.

Its subtitle is somewhat misleading, since the bulk of the acts under view here are of the glam variety, leaving just Megadeth for those who take their metal seriously. A few legends pop in and out during the interviews (including Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Lemmy, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons), but for the most part, we’re left with clueless wannabes (like the members of Odin, who insist they’ll only be satisfied until they’re as big as Led Zeppelin or The Beatles. I wonder how that worked out for them?), along with a few almost-weres (London, Faster Pussycat) and Poison (who almost inexplicably come of as sweet, self-aware dudes).

At some point, Spheeris clearly grasped the absurdity of the culture she was documenting and went with it. She films her interview with Stanley with him in bed with three centerfolds, while Simmons’ is conducted in a lingerie shop filled with browsing Playmates. She interviews Ozzy while he makes breakfast (!) and even if he comes off far more coherent and cogent than you’d expect, she still gets away with inserting a fake shot of him spilling orange juice to depict his obvious brain damage.

It’s all very entertaining, but — just like the culture being documented — it’s essentially pointless: what happens when a filmmaker shines a spotlight and finds out that there’s truly nothing there. But then again, The Metal Years was directly responsible for Spheeris being hired to make Wayne’s World, so it at least has one good reason to exist. —Allan Mott

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Oh, I assume World Trade Organization execs may hate it, but I find it difficult to believe that most people who can think for themselves would fail to get — at the very least — a chuckle out of The Yes Men, a documentary about a pair of political pranksters. Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno comprise the titular twosome, who use a grant from musician Herb Alpert to help them travel the globe to speak about anti-globalization in the most outlandish ways.

It all begins when visitors to their WTO parody website don’t even read the print — fine or otherwise — and extend invitations to lectures at international conferences as WTO reps. The Yes Men are all too eager to accept, and the film follows them hatching their (mostly) harmless plots and executing them in public.

This includes demonstrating a prototype of the “future leisure suit,” which contains an inflatable, phallic appendage containing a screen on which corporate heads can monitor their workforce remotely. This outfit and accompanying suggestion that slavery was a good thing aren’t questioned by anyone. At least a classroom of collegians is sharp enough to turn on a supposed WTO/McDonald’s partnership presentation in which Americans’ feces would be piped to Third World countries and recycled into “reBurgers.”

My only complaint about The Yes Men is that 83 minutes just wasn’t enough to satisfy me. I laughed out loud too many times to allow the culture-jamming fun to end so soon. It’s directed by the geniuses behind American Movie, perhaps the greatest documentary ever made, so you know you’re in good hands with this one. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.