At one point during Into the Black, a roundhouse kick is intercut with a close-up of someone cracking a can of Stroh’s beer.
It feels so nice to be back in Ohio.
Before Jim Van Bebber opened his third eye with trash-art hurricanes like Deadbeat at Dawn and The Manson Family, he made Into the Black—35 minutes of unfiltered teenage angst set against the dreamlike backdrop of Super 8 film stock. The movie was shot silent with a soundtrack comprised only of alterna-sludge songs that sound like outtakes from King Buzzo of The Melvins’ 1992 solo EP. But it works, because mere words could never compete with the universal language of throwing a Shuriken at someone’s face.
A couple of prison inmates (Van Bebber and co-writer Tom Harris) break free in a flurry of dropkicks, chokeholds, and teeth-bashing. The two ultimate warriors make their way to Harris’s apartment. Once there, Harris’s wife informs them that his son has been kidnapped by the Elder—a ruthless gang leader in a metal mask who looks like a Dollar Tree version of Michele Soavi in Demons. Armed with nunchucks, Shurikens, and four fistfuls of revenge, Van Bebber and Harris set out to destroy the Elder and bring peace to the streets of Dayton.
Into the Black isn’t just a mini-blueprint for the later Deadbeat at Dawn. It’s a blissful microdose of homemade experimentation that stands on its own, as evidenced by sequences that randomly cut between gory eyeball removals and Van Bebber thumping on a Gibson SG bass in his bedroom. The experience is like floating on a cloud of vicodin while playing an obscure arcade beat-em-up like Burning Fight—slow motion dropkicks that frequently connect for real, beautifully crude Super 8 textures, and vague narrative suggestions that mean nothing in the end. All great stuff. But there’s another element that makes me smile.
In the opening scene, Van Bebber and Harris appear as prisoners wearing nothing but chains and purple towels over their junk. It looks like a scene out of Stryker Force, or any number of gay pornos from the 1980s. When they escape, a prison guard mouths a slur before they beat him to a pulp. There’s also a lot of suggestive imagery: guys shoving guns into other guys’s mouths, jockstraps being worn over jeans, shirtless dudes lounging around while fondling weapons. It’s safe to say that 19-year-old Van Bebber didn’t intentionally lace Into the Black with homoerotic imagery and revengeful fantasies against homophobic goons. But I love that this content is peppered in amongst the ultra-masculine iconography of bros guzzling beers and ripping solos on guitars.
You can find Into the Black as an extra on the wonderful Blu-ray release of Deadbeat at Dawn from Arrow Films. The disc might be more expensive than a six-pack of Stroh’s, but the buzz lasts way longer.
