John S. Rad And The Dangerous Men

This bizarre slice of outsider cinema is a fascinatingly unique and baffling experience.

The story behind Dangerous Men is like the plot of a film in itself – an outsider filmmaker who may or may not have been a successful director in his native Iran during the pre-revolution days flees the country on the verge of the Shah’s overthrow, ends up in America and then spends something like two and a half decades shooting and editing a mind-bogglingly bizarre action film. Eventually, in 2005 and terminally ill, he completes the film and hires a handful of cinemas in Los Angeles to screen his film to small, unsuspecting audiences – none of whom would ever forget the experience. His masterpiece finally shown to the world, he can die a happy man.

You can definitely imagine that made as a bittersweet comedy about determination overcoming a lack of ability, in the Ed Wood style. And who knows, maybe this story will end up as just such a film. But for now, we must content ourselves with the film that the director in question, Jahangir Salehi Yeganehrad – working under the less cumbersome Americanised pseudonym John S. Rad – actually made, after possibly starting work as far back as 1979 but certainly by 1984. The truth of the film’s production, much like the mysteries of Rad’s life, is lost in time and rumour but the consensus is that he just couldn’t stop tinkering – by all accounts, there was a rough-cut in 1985 but it didn’t reach Rad’s exacting standards and so he kept working on it, perhaps losing track himself of what the film was originally about. The resulting film is delirious, incomprehensible and so far removed from anything that you might think of as ‘normal’ filmmaking that it becomes one of the most mind-bendingly fucked up movies that you are ever likely to see. That’s a recommendation, by the way, though with the proviso that this is not for everyone.

In a sense, Dangerous Men sits alongside other, better-known outsider cinema efforts like Birdemic: Shock and Terror and The Room, two other movies that essentially (and accidentally) reinvent the basics of filmmaking. It also reminded me a little of the Cliff Twemlow vehicle GBH, another attempt to shoot an action/crime film with neither the money nor the seeming awareness of basic filmmaking techniques to pull it off, the resulting film being awful by any conventional standards yet so compellingly unique that it remains memorable in ways that much ‘better’ films never are. In a world of cookie-cutter superhero blockbusters that cost obscene amounts of money and all seem pretty much interchangeable, there is a real joy to see something that has clearly come from the heart and simply throws the rule book out of the window. Twemlow is getting a belated moment in the sun thanks to the new Mancunian Man documentary. Will John S. Rad have similar recognition outside the world of hardened incredibly strange movie enthusiasts? We can only hope.

Dangerous Men is a hard film to summarise. You know something is off right away, as the opening credits hilariously consist almost entirely of just one name: John Rad, writer, director, producer, editor, music composer and more or less everything else. It feels almost like a gag, designed to slowly build up roars of laughter as the ridiculousness of the same name appearing again and again takes hold. But no – it’s entirely sincere. Rad, like the best outsider filmmakers, clearly had a massive ego. What a shame that he couldn’t have played all the lead roles too.

The film almost feels like two different projects spliced together, which it could well be – the protracted production time might account for that, with Rad having to adapt and evolve his project as he went along and actors, crew and locations came and went. The first half is essentially a ‘female vengeance’ film – not exactly rape-revenge, as the main character Mira (Melody Wiggins) isn’t raped – but when a run-in with a pair of bikers results in her fiancé being killed, she takes it on herself to become an angel of vengeance against sleazy men, using her seductive wiles to lure them into a false sense of security. She takes the murderous biker to a motel, strips and then kills him with a knife hidden between her butt cheeks – a moment that is everything that you are currently hoping it to be –  and then is picked up hitchhiking by a British sleazeball, who is left naked in the desert in a ludicrously protracted bit of ill-considered comedy. Mira is a pervert magnet – or perhaps Rad genuinely thinks all Americans are sex-crazed rapists – and so she quickly becomes a wanted serial killer. But then, the film allows her story to fizzle out, as her prospective (and unnamed) brother-in-law (Michael Gradilone) sets out to avenge his brother’s death, which leads him from biker gangs to drug lord Black Pepper (Bryan Jenkins), even though this man had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder. It all becomes increasingly incoherent, as characters who were completely absent for the first hour of the film suddenly become central to the plot. Tellingly, the film ends on a freeze frame featuring Gradlione, Jenkins and a character that was only introduced two minutes earlier, and the film does not attempt to tell us what has happened to any of the other characters involved. It’s oddly reminiscent of early 1970s softcore atrocity Wrong Way, which also switched to a random story late in proceedings for no good reason beyond production incoherence. A quick side recommendation: Ray Williams’ Wrong Way is one of the grubbiest slices of amateur-hour sleaze that you will ever see. Morally and creatively indefensible, it is nevertheless oddly hypnotic as you marvel at the fact that it was ever made, let alone released. It’s a story that we might come back to at some later point.

The fascinating thing about Dangerous Men is just how utterly incompetent it is on almost every level – and yet you get the idea that Rad really did think that he was creating a masterpiece. Films often only become this entirely terrible when the person behind them is driven by an unshakeable and misguided belief in their own genius. The actors are uniformly bad, and the dialogue is the sort you only get when written by someone for whom English is not their native language – much like in Birdemic, the already bad actors are further hamstrung by having to deliver the sort of lines that no one in real life would (or could) say. The plotting and editing are all over the place – characters appear and disappear, cuts make no sense (at one point, a woman is harassed in a bar by a scuzzy biker whose tattoos keep changing. She walks through a door and we immediately cut to her frolicking in a bikini on the beach without a care in the world – only for the bikers to appear as if she had just left the bar) and the sound is disastrous. There’s some unappealing nudity (Rad reveals a curious knee fetish during the film’s sex scenes), sloppy gore and spliced-in stock footage explosions, and throughout, the action – be it violence, sex, or sexual violence – is backed by Rad’s entirely inappropriate and, of course, relentless Casio keyboard score.

The resulting film is unlike anything else out there. It is hard to judge this by conventional movie standards because the film defiantly ignores all those standards and replaces them with its own. This is a John Rad movie and the only worthwhile comparison would be to another John Rad movie. Instead, you just have to surrender to its weirdness and admire the sheer gall on display. At times, it is rather heavy going – there’s less consistent entertainment value than in Birdemic or The Room, thanks to the baffling narrative shifts. It’s not just bad, it’s often disorienting and that makes it a less appealing option for the viewer going in with the idea of simply laughing at the shoddiness of it all. But as an example of a very singular vision – even if it is a completely deranged and eccentric vision – then Dangerous Men is a must-see. It’s genuine cinematic madness, and utterly unique.

DAVID FLINT

BUY IT NOW (UK)

Like what we do? Support us and help us do more!