Into the Black (1983) User Reviews

The Beginning of Jim Van Bebber

[Fuad_Ramses_IV · 7/10 · 8 April 2012]

If you've seen "Deadbeat at Dawn" or "The Manson Family" and wish to seek out more Jim Van Bebber, this short film is available on the Jim Van Bebber "Visions of Hell" boxset.

It's a no-budget home movie that's really just a showcase of how awesome JVB is, as it's mainly just action-oriented fight scenes. The fights are all clearly choreographed as if he wanted people to see he knew martial arts, but that doesn't hamper your enjoyment of it any, and there are still a few stand-out bits.

It's nothing groundbreaking at all due to the obvious lack of budget, costumes, visual effects, editing equipment, etc, but it's still a very fun, very innovative video that shows JVB has a lot of raw talent that would emerge later in his career.

Silent and violent

[Stevieboy666 · 7/10 · 20 August 2023]

I recently acquired the excellent Arrow blu-ray of the cult classic "Deadbeat by Dawn", directed, written by and starring Jim Van Bebber. Amongst the extras are to be found four of his short films, "Into the Black" being the oldest and at 34 minutes in length the longest. In terms of story line there is very little - two young men escape from what is a very fake looking "prison", they find themselves fighting very dubious looking prison staff and gang members, plus rescuing a girl that gets kidnapped. Van Bebber plays the lead role (as he would do so in other films) and this really is a showcase for him to strip off his shirt, flex his muscles and demonstrate his impressive martial arts skills. Bizarrely the action is occasionally interrupted by him and his friend playing electric guitars! This is a silent film with only a few written words of dialogue shown, the soundtrack is good but obviously added later. Non stop action with plenty of violence and cheap but very gory effects. Good stuff!

One of the best low budget/no budget films of all time!

[chanvat · 10/10 · 8 August 2013]

This is pretty much Jim Van Bebber's first foray into film on a large scale, and you can see how it influenced his later work, especially Deadbeat After Dawn. Oddly enough, the film has no voice or sound capturing, but an AWESOME soundtrack was overlayed, which gave the feel of an old silent movie with musical accompanyment, except this was Heavy Metal awesome. JVB should totally sell the soundtrack to this. I also would be curious to see how much was actually put into this film, as it seems like he used whatever funds he had to the utmost, especially since this film was made when he was only 19 years old. It is really too bad he never got the opportunity to work with a large Hollywood budget on an action film.