(Drafthouse Films)
The holiday season brings plenty of crowd-pleasers like Creed to the multiplex; but it also brings its share of turkeys. This year, Drafthouse Films gives you a cinematic turkey the likes of which you haven’t seen before.
I was personally told the movie would be “a life-changing experience.” This is a tall order from the distributors of such forgotten cult faves as Miami Connection and Roar. I’m here to report that my life is essentially the same.
Dangerous Men is a disjointed mess that may not change your life, but its clumsy determination is endearing and sometimes wildly entertaining. And it will make you wonder about whether this would be émigré auteur’s curious fetish for knees.
Using the aptly Americanized name John S. Rad, Iranian emigre Jahangir Salehi Yeganehrad began shooting an action movie in 1979. He finished it in 2005. Rad’s megalomaniacal incompetence rivals Tommy Wiseau for the title of world’s most determined bad director. But while The Room is a miracle of inadvertent genius that can never be repeated, Dangerous Men doesn’t reach the heights of its lows. Still, Rad occasionally hits on images that are so wrong they’re right.
The movie opens with a charming detail, a stained-glass production company logo that suggests a homegrown attention to craft that is otherwise completely absent. An awkwardly funky soundtrack (note to Drafthouse: please release this on vinyl) plays as the film’s opening credits appear, all of them belonging to one man: John S. Rad, who wrote, directed, created, produced, and composed.
To this same funky soundtrack, a sharply dressed man approaches the entrance of a mansion and continues to its bedroom, which looks suspiciously like a cheap hotel room. A woman in lingerie lies seemingly passed out in a daze. The man draws near and lightly touches her knee—introducing a knee fetish that runs throughout the film. This is no masher; the man is the woman’s husband and this is their role-playing anniversary date.
Cut to an incongruous scene of another couple in a different hotel room, a busy metropolis sprawled before the picture window between them. The couple exchanges vows of “I love you” in badly recorded dialogue that sounds as if an editor had simply muted background noise between lines, all that noise roaring back whenever the couple has anything to say to each other.
It almost reads like a metaphor about the difficulty of human communication, the noise that drowns us out when we try to tell each other of love. But this is just the beginning of a 79-minute exercise in bad continuity, bad acting, bizarre sex, and violence—and occasional inspiration.
A plot summary can only begin to convey the insanity of this film, but an incomprehensible sub-plot may suffice. Mira (Melody Wiggins, who like most of the cast never made a movie before or after this one) turns vigilante after her fiancée is murdered by a biker. She seeks out men who take advantage of young women, and lets herself get picked up by a middle-aged creep whose behavior seems inspired by John Cleese. The creep drives a sleeping Mira (who dreams of crawling on all fours and meowing for her father, but that’s another story) to a remote desert road, where he threatens to rape her. Instead, she takes the gun from her would-be molester and orders him to strip, driving away and leaving him naked in the desert.
In any other B-move, that would be the last we see of this thwarted assailant. Dangerous Men follows him on a strange journey of his own as he finds branches to mask his Edenic vulnerability and walks down the desert road cursing the genitalia that led him to this fate. His story doesn’t even end there; suddenly resigned to his lot, he continues down the road, freeing himself from his branches and performing a naked silly dance.
The film’s production timeline is unclear, but so is the plot, with major threads completely dropped in the movie’s last act, which gets tedious. But this movie will give you images that you are not likely to forget, however much you may want to. I would only recommend this movie to a select company of masochistic cinephiles. You know who you are. You will enjoy Dangerous Men, and return to your lives as before.
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Dangerous Men
Written and directed by John S. Rad
With Anneli Aeristos, Paul Arnold, Mark Besharaty
Not rated; contains sex and violence.
79 minutes
Tonight, November 25 at 7:30 p.m. (with special guest Patton Oswalt – note, this screening is SOLD OUT) and Saturday, November 28 at 10:05 p.m.at Alamo Drafthouse Loudon.
