by Brendan Foley
David Lynch has been making movies for over thirty years and nothing he has ever made is a pimple on the ass of the cinematic bugfuckery that is John Rad’s Dangerous Men, newly available on VOD thanks to Drafthouse Films and FilmBuff. A waking dream of an exploitation thriller, Dangerous Men is inept, offensive, illogical, perverted, nonsensical, and may in fact be the most fun you will have with a movie this year.
This is, easily, the most insane thing that I’ve seen from Drafthouse Films, and these motherfuckers put out a movie where a man sicced an army of real lions on his real children and wife, filmed it, and tried to release the resulting footage as a fun family film. It’s safe to say that Tim League and his team have a special nose for the most galvanizing items of eccentric cinema, and their mission to spread these gospels of celluloid insanity to the mass public has resulted in genuine works of trash art being given audiences the makers never could have conceived of.
What is Dangerous Men? On paper, it’s little more than a paint-by-numbers lady-revenge picture. Our heroine is Mina, who is living an idyllic life with her fiancée when they are suddenly accosted by a couple of intimidating freaks. The fiancée is killed, and Mina ends up going on the warpath against all scummy men (which, in the universe of this film, means pretty much all men since apparently this woman cannot walk down the street without at least five rape attempts).
Simple enough, right? Except the film follows a logic that feels legitimately dream-like, often abandoning narrative to tell bizarre vignettes about side characters, with no explanation, no context, and no follow-up. And after a certain point, even the central narrative becomes hazy. As the film progresses, Mina all-but completely vanishes, replaced as protagonist by a grizzled cop with a vendetta against a biker gang and their boss, Black Pepper. And by the end of the film, even this new protagonist has faded away, leaving the conclusion between a trio of characters that could not be further removed from what the film started with.
When you factor in the cheapness and ineptitude (terrible sound, a bizarre and endlessly repeating score, horrific acting, ludicrous lines, fight scenes that look like someone rubbing deformed marionettes together, the same handful of bare bones sets being reused over and over with only the most half-hearted attempts at disguising the recycling) the film takes on an almost hallucinatory power. It often feels like you’ve walked into someone else’s dream, with all the bizarre sex, violence, and seemingly random digressions to match.
None of this was intentional, of course. According to the film’s website, John Rad was an Iranian businessman with a dream of making a movie. In 1979 he came to America to begin working on his pet project (the opening credits list one name over and over: his) and continued working on the film for the better part of two decades. So film stocks change, actors drop out, and the 80 minutes that comprise Dangerous Men become an almost stream-of-conscious experience.
I didn’t see this film at Fantastic Fest when it premiered, but I remember hearing the stories about it and describing the history of it to my brother. When he heard about how long Rad worked on the thing, my brother asked how it was possible someone could invest so much time and energy into something that everyone, on some level, must have realized at a certain point was just throwing good money after bad.
But that’s what’s so fascinating about movies like this (for all that there are movies like this). When phrases like “so bad it’s good” get tossed around it’s almost always in reference to corporatized soulless drek like Sharknado or bullshit like that, empty product intended to monetize snark and disinterest. Dangerous Men, though, is the work of real, honest passion and drive, and that it’s a disaster in no way undercuts that achievement.
Dangerous Men is a work of art, and I don’t mean that in any kind of condescending way. This is John Rad giving audiences a window into his soul, into the way his views on the world were shaped and reflected by movies. That soul, it turns out, is scuzzy and gross and more than a little confused about things ranging from proper police procedure to the clenching ability of the female buttocks (it makes sense in context [well, kind of]). But how often do you get the chance to see someone lay themselves bare like that, and how fascinating is it that these revelations come via the medium of film, perhaps the most collaborative of mediums? It’s one thing for a lunatic to make a lunatic painting, but to marshal the participants and resources needed to make a film, and to have the end result be so singular and so unique? That’s impressive, no matter how you cut it. If art is creating an external representation of internal processes, then Dangerous Men has to be considered a success.
So if gonzo outsider art is your thing, get a bunch of friends together and revel in Dangerous Men. Beyond the comedy of ineptitude and incompetence, it’s a fascinating artifact of ego and drive overcoming all odds to create… something. Something we may not even have a name for. This film is a baffling mutant of a thing, and we are blessed to have it.