Deadbeat at Dawn is a 1988 action film written and directed by Jim Van Bebber and starring Paul Harper, Megan Murphy, and Marc Pitman.

Goose loves the criminal life, but when his girlfriend Christie (Megan Murphy) threatens to leave him, he quits the Ravens.

When Goose finds her body, he feeds her corpse to a trash compactor and then moves in with his Vietnam Veteran junkie father.

The Ravens organise a hit and coerce Goose into joining them in a plot to steal $100,000 cash from the federal government.

"[4] Van Bebber later spoke on the home video releases of the film in 2018, stating that "We had to learn the hard way by working with people who didn't pan out or would rip us off.

"[3] Lawson concluded that Van Bebber and "specifically photographer Mike King" have "an inherent understanding of how movies work: Deadbeat at Dawn may be crude and silly and even incoherent at times, but it has an undeniable vitality and a snotty sense of style: It is never dull.

"[3] From retrospective reviews, Nick Pinkerton of Sight & Sound described the film as an "incredible no-budget mend-and-make ingenuity" that was as "kinetic, visceral, and palpably dangerous as anything then coming out of Hong Kong.

The review concluded that it was "unclear at times whether the film is aiming to be completely serious and dramatic, or tongue in cheek and over the top, though the answer likely falls somewhere in between.