VICE documentary series “Dark Side of the Ring” casts light on the seedy underbelly of the professional wrestling business, and perhaps no episode will be quite as controversial as the upcoming show chronicling the so-called “Ho Train Ride From Hell” in 1999. 

The episode, which premieres next week, explores an ill-fated rail journey on the Godfather’s private train from Cincinnati to Las Vegas, during which a group of heavily intoxicated professional wrestlers behaved inexcusably toward the Godfather’s business associates. 

Among the tales of debauched idiocy on the episode: 

  • Brock Lesnar and Rikishi get into a fight in the dining car, derailing the car and utterly ruining Linda McMahon’s dessert
  • X-Pac cuts off the mullet of a passed-out Thurman “Sparky” Plug, thus saving his career
  • Randy Orton accidentally defecates in his own carry-on luggage
  • Val Venis invites some “ladies” to meet him “for some fun in the caboose.” Sadly, nobody shows up in the caboose, leaving a dejected Venis with nobody to play Scrabble with. 
  • Curt Hennig plays a hilarious prank by putting cyanide in everyone’s drink
  • Goldust incessantly pulls the cord to make the train’s whistle go choo-choo, even through residential areas late at night. He is later fired for this. 
  • Ric Flair strips naked except for his sequinned robe and struts the length of the entire train, swinging his penis around like an airplane propellor until it gets accidentally stuck in the handle of a drink cart, and then the train abruptly slows down, sending the drink cart zooming down the aisle, dragging Ric Flair by his penis until the cart slams into the far side of the train car, smashing through the door and getting lodged between cars as they speed down the track. Flair’s battered penis is then pelted with gravel and other debris kicked up by the speeding train. By this point, the female train stewards who had put up with Flair’s lecherous behaviour earlier in the train ride are laughing hysterically at Flair. Flair begs them to stop laughing, but they just keep doing it, despite his protests. He is eventually freed by a beleaguered Jim Ross, who later described Flair’s tattered, useless phallus as “broken in half” (citing God as his witness). Flair was not disciplined for the incident. 

In the episode, Tommy Dreamer describes the Ho Train Ride from Hell as “a pretty standard Thursday.” 

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