DEADBEAT AT DAWN (1988) ULTRAVIOLENT INDIE FILM

DEADBEAT AT DAWN (1988) – Four years in the making, Deadbeat at Dawn is rightfully called America’s Street Fighter – as in the 1974 Sonny Chiba movie, NOT the later video game. Writer and director Jim Van Bebber also starred in this 81-minute film as street gang leader Goose. 

That antihero wields a self-taught bone-crushing, blood-spurting, throat-ripping mongrelized form of martial arts that makes Sonny Chiba’s beatdowns in Street Fighter look almost gentle by comparison.

Audiences not only wince at the violence in Deadbeat at Dawn, they thrill to the stunts that Van Bebber and his collaborators were able to pull off without the benefit of professional stuntmen or fight choreographers.

The risks taken by our auteur and his cast embody the ballsy guerilla filmmaking spirit as surely as Jorg Buttgereit’s efforts on both sides of the Berlin Wall in the early 1980s. The makeup and special effects for the butcher’s shop of injuries and dismemberments suffered by various characters are more like horror films than action flicks.

All that being said, let me make it clear that the storyline in Deadbeat at Dawn is far from original, it’s just that the execution elevates Van Bebber’s indie production far above its cliched plot. As mentioned above, Jim – who is like a much more badass Adam Driver – plays the main character Goose, leader of an Ohio street gang called the Ravens.

Goose’s force of nature personality and mastery of his own brand of street fighting make him an underground legend. His gang’s only true rivals are an equally violent bunch called the Spiders.

NOTE: Some critics belittle the fact that this movie’s setting is Dayton and vicinity rather than New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, but I find the location crucial since it accounts for the comparatively few black and Hispanic cast members.

At any rate, Goose’s girlfriend Kristy (Megan Murphy) pressures him to leave the gang life behind him. Kristy is heavily into mysticism, adding some elements anticipating the later graphic novel The Crow.

Goose has chosen to quit the Ravens and put his lieutenant Keith (Ric Walker) in charge just when the Spiders approach the Ravens with plans for a joint armed robbery for a six-figure haul. The enterprising Van Bebber is instead running a drug deal which will net him enough money for a new life for himself and Kristy.

Crabs in a bucket style, the Spiders and some of the Ravens resent Goose leaving them behind and also spoiling the joint caper that’s in the works. Some members of the Spiders figure that eliminating Kristy will eliminate Goose’s motivation for upward mobility and get him to add his considerable skills to the Ravens-Spiders alliance instead.

The marathon assault and murder of Kristy is carried out with golf clubs, and exceeds the blood and gore levels from many splatter flicks. Goose abandons his planned drug deal and drinks himself half-blind for days to deal with his grief. His ice-cold “funeral” for Kristy was to drop her wrapped-up body in a grinder to keep the cops away and protect her corpse from desecration by the Spiders.

Our main character eventually crawls back out of the bottle, abandons his plan to eat a bullet, and, figuring who killed Kristy, pretends to be going along with the cooperative heist being carried out by the Ravens and the Spiders. In truth, he plans to double-cross the Spiders, but they beat him to the punch by betraying him AND the Ravens, slaughtering them and planning to keep all the cash for themselves.

Goose’s suspicions kept him alive and let him flee the scene, carrying the money with him and pursued by the Spiders. He arranges to meet Kristy’s younger sister so he can give her the stolen loot so she can pursue a better life. For himself, he goes out in a blaze of glory against his foes in a prolonged, bloody, limb-slicing fight scene that secured the legend of Deadbeat at Dawn.   

Other standout elements of the movie are a dream sequence where the wrapped and bloody Kristy visits Goose in a graveyard, plus the psychotic performance of Marc Pitman as Spiders member Bone Crusher, who is to Deadbeat at Dawn as Toecutter was to the original Mad Max. 

Sadly, though Jim Van Bebber’s film slowly earned a cult following in the years ahead, a bad distribution deal prevented him from seeing a dime in profit. Subsequent releases in 1999, 2008 and 2018 finally brought Van Bebber some of the money and acclaim he had always deserved.

In the meantime, the indefatigable auteur kept hustling and dealing to put together his next film projects, dealing with the real-life Heavy Metal/ Satanism murder-suicide by Ricky Kasso (My Sweet Satan – 1994) and Charles Manson (The Manson Family – 1997). His work Roadkill has been called “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre of the 90s.”

He also directed music videos for Death Metal bands like Necrophagia, industrial rock groups like Skinny Puppy and the Heavy Metal band Pantera.

If only Jim Van Bebber had gotten a better distribution deal back in 1988 he might very well have followed in the career path of Sam Raimi or Robert Rodriguez and others. He’d probably have a filmography at least twice as long by now, too.   

FOR MY REVIEW OF RIKI-OH: THE STORY OF RICKY (1991) CLICK HERE.