THE BLACK BEYOND TRILOGY
dir. Steven Toriano Berry, 1992
73 mins. United States.
In English.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 14 - 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 23 - 5 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 29 - 7:30 PM
"What really lies beyond this world? A vast void of nothingness? Or a place where the justice and retribution not realized in this life becomes a governing force? Who really knows? When your turn comes, who will be waiting for you?"
Our original plan this Spectober was to invite S. Toriano Berry - a renown independent filmmaker and longtime scholar of African-American cinema - for a special 25th anniversary presentation of his hood classic THE EMBALMER (1996), a surprisingly earnest (and disgusting!) slasher thriller shot on a shoestring budget in Washington, D.C. Bureaucratic matters hindered the screening - for now - But Berry had an irresistible ace up his sleeve: a new digitization of his BLACK BEYOND TRILOGY. Shot on video, THE BLACK BEYOND anthologizes three tales of terror in a style clearly indebted to The Twilight Zone; per Berry's voiceover introduction, the Black Beyond is a place where "darkness is more than nothingness, and justice is not blind..."
The trilogy consists of three episodes. In "Deathly Realities", a serial killer hiding behind a rubber mask receives comeuppance from his victims, beyond the grave; in "The Coming of the Saturnites", a space alien (played by Berry!) struggles to ingratiate himself among humans without blowing his cover; and in "Money'll Eat You Up!!!" a rogue dollar bill (or "dirty green") makes its victims disappear - a brutal riposte to Gordon Gekko's then-popular mantra of "greed is good". Shot in part as Berry was completing his film production studies at UCLA (and, later, teaching film at Howard), THE BLACK BEYOND combines trenchant social commentary on the African-American experience with lovingly lo-fi videographic and prosthetic effects, as terrifying as it is hilarious. Spectacle is thrilled to include this hidden gem of 1980s phantasmagoria in our annual BEST OF SPECTACLE program after an incredible SPECTOBER premiere.