On a Friday night in the bowels of a cinema in London’s east end, a lizard is fighting a cockroach. Before a bloodthirsty audience, the lizard is brash and bolshy, flinging the roach around with ease. Despite the beating, the cockroach can smell the lizard’s fear. As the lizard goads the baying crowd, the cockroach strikes with an unconventional weapon: the 72-storey mixed-use skyscraper, the Shard.
“Shove that up your arse, you kinky lizard!” screams the commentator as howls of reptilian torment echo through the Victorian cinema. Europe’s seventh largest building is being used as an instrument of torture before my eyes, yet the referee does nothing. No one calls the council and the police are nowhere to be seen, even as London’s architectural heritage lies in ruin.
This is Kaiju Big Battel, or KBB. Part pro-wrestling, part monster movie mashup, Kaiju Big Battel is simple. Wrestlers don the costumes of kaiju (“strange beasts” in Japanese), stomp through cardboard replicas of metropolitan centres and powerbomb each other into the shadow realm. Think Godzilla versus King Kong, or a milk carton versus Margaret Thatcher.
Kaiju Big Battel was conceived in the mid 1990s by Rand Boren, an art student in Boston. Boren’s inspiration for monster martial arts emerged from his love of Ultraman, a Japanese superhero-policeman of sorts that defends Earth by chinning supersized monsters and alien invaders. After designing kaiju costumes of his own, Boren began to put on local wrestling events featuring an array of knock-off characters and cardboard dioramas of cities to obliterate.
In the years since, Kaiju Big Battel has grown exponentially with sold out shows across the US, over three dozen monsters on their roster and a dedicated YouTube channel keeping fans abreast of the violence. In 2019, Kaiju Big Battel saw its first European event take place in Alexandra Palace, London. This evening, at Genesis Cinema in Bethnal Green, the city-crushing action returns in the form of a tribute match, sanctioned by the KBB head-honchos back in the US.
“I’m looking forward to using Big Ben as a weapon,” says Selina Nowak, also known as Space Cucaracha, as she talks to me before her match. By day, Nowak is a costume and set designer based in Vienna; by night, she is a no-nonsense professional wrestler from outer space. Facing her this evening is the salacious Kinky Lizard—or Neil Winstanley, a data analyst from London.
Kaiju’s expansion to the old world is a story of obsession. Greg Burridge is how you would imagine a professional wrestler if this camp blend of acrobatics and theatre was an alien concept: broad and burly with long blonde hair and more ink than skin on his frame, Burridge is the head of Emporium Pro Wrestling, the organisers of this evening’s kaiju. More than just a trainer and promoter, Burridge is a dyed-in-the-wool wrestling fanatic.
“When I started to train as a wrestler, we used to get pirated VHS tapes from America,” Burridge tells me. “One of the tapes had this mental match with a guy dressed as a tin of soup fighting a moth. We ended up watching that more than the wrestling!”
Burridge’s desire is to simply put on a great show amid a difficult time for London nightlife. “This area’s really gone downhill, there’s nothing to do and going out is so fucking expensive,” he laments. According to a 2024 study by the Night Time Industries Association, 3,011 pubs, bars and nightclubs have closed throughout London since March 2020, with restrictive regulations introduced post-pandemic and the cost-of-living-crisis contributing to this decline. “We want people to come, forget all the bullshit and watch a kinky lizard fight a cockroach—what else is there to do on a Friday night?”
The appetite for spandex clad collateral damage is undeniable. In 2019, Avengers: Endgame became the second highest grossing film of all time: at its core was the spectacle of goodies and baddies duking it out after half the cosmos had been wiped from existence. Yet even more integral to the film’s appeal was how it tied together the strands of Marvel’s enormous back catalogue into one epic story—opening the door for an infinite string of integrated plotlines, crossover collaborations and further revenue.
Yet as Marvel’s ever-expanding cinematic universe has gone from pioneering to a convoluted mess, a growing sense of disenchantment with this kind of entertainment culture has set in. Audiences no longer want cheap crossovers of the same endlessly recycled intellectual property.
In that sense, KBB offers a welcoming balm. While mainstream crossover media banks on big name characters, like Superman versus Batman, KBB invests in marrying the niche apocalyptic beasts of Japanese cinema with the flamboyant soap operatics of underground American wrestling. While millions are pumped into creating CGI worlds, KBB sends someone round to the off-licence to ask for cardboard. The outcome is a chaotic, joyful play on the language of big franchises but with a concerted pivot towards the independent, the underground and the tangible. It’s no wonder a growing audience is opting to spend their evenings at DIY events like KBB than endure the next bloated instalment of the MCU or the WWE.
In the end, Kinky Lizard raises his hand victoriously and Space Cucaracha is carried from the ring. London lies in a crumpled state. With the dust settled, a postmortem is necessary. St Paul’s Cathedral survived the wrath of the Luftwaffe, but it seems it could not withstand a sexually charged reptile suplexing a cockroach through it. Burridge picks up the mic and announces, solemnly: “There’re no more buildings in London ladies and gentlemen. We’re going to have to move to Essex.”
As the crowd disperses I speak to Rachel, a local architect. “I was born five minutes from here and these buildings are so important.” She takes a sip of lager, “and to see the Shard rammed up a lizard’s arse was… delightful!”
