Review of Cage Rage 12: The Real Deal

Introduction

Cage Rage 12 - "The Real" Deal" is the latest DVD release from the UK`s best-known mixed martial arts promoters. This event, held as always in the Wembley Conference centre, took place on 2nd July 2005, and was headlined by a match for the vacant British middleweight title between Mark "The Wizard" Weir and Sol "Zero Tolerance" Gilbert.

Video

Although still far from digital television quality, Cage Rage 12 is a slight improvement on the previous event, "Face Off". The difficulty is in the poor recording of the live event, and not the transfer, which is standard 4:3 full-screen PAL. Replays are still proving a problem, however; they have improved over previous releases, but still look like they were conceived with technology that 1980s "World of Sport" fans would have been used to.

Audio

Audio is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0 and again suffers from the poor source material. The commentators` voices seem somewhat muffled as they call the action, although they are always intelligible. This is not the high-quality production of the UFC or PRIDE, and fans who are used to DVDs from those promotions will find themselves disappointed in the comparison.

Features

Extras are limited to interviews with the fighters, conducted by "Fight Professor" Stephen Quadros. Several of the fighters look like deer stuck in headlights as Quadros poses each question; whilst most of the fighters make a decent response, the all-important "star power" charisma is sorely lacking.

Conclusion

Despite this disc`s production flaws, the undeniable truth is that there was a lot of fast-paced, entertaining action at Cage Rage 12 to keep any fan of mixed martial arts happy. Fittingly, the best matches were at the top of the card, the fabulously brutal bout between Mark Weir and Sol Gilbert taking the match-of-the-night plaudits.

In my opinion - and I will continue to say this about Cage Rage - the company is making progress with every event that it holds, and is starting to attract ex-UFC (Vitor Belfort) & PRIDE (Akira Shoji) fighters to these shores. This can only benefit the sport, bringing UK mixed martial arts slowly up to the standard of its international counterparts.

Overall, this was a very enjoyable event, with not-so-enjoyable production values. If Cage Rage can improve upon that - their current television deals with Sky Sports and Men & Motors can only help - then the UK will have serious competition for the Americans and the Japanese.