During a recent live movie riff event in Chicago, “Mystery Science Theater 3000”’s Frank “TV’s Frank” Conniff described famed b-movie director Ed Wood as a man who had “the soul of an artist,” while lacking all of the other qualities necessary to make an artist successful. His comments highlight a sometimes overlooked facet of transcendently awful movies. It’s not enough for a movie simply to fail at being good (or to “be bad on purpose”); the people responsible for making the movie also have to believe with all their hearts that they’re making a work of great import. In that regard, films like Glen or Glenda, Troll 2 and Caligula are (in their own way) every bit as remarkable as your Citizen Kanes and Apocalypse Nows, and perhaps even rarer.
Writer/director/producer John S. Rad’s Dangerous Men is a film that deserves a place among that Olympian company of films so stultifyingly bad that, by all rights, they should not exist. And like other masterpieces of bad taste, the story of how the film made it to the big screen is almost as remarkable as the film itself. Begun by Rad, an Iranian immigrant, in 1979, the project would be 26 years in the making, not to be seen by audiences until a limited L.A. theatrical release in 2005. It achieved some local notoriety on the midnight circuit for a while, but seemed destined to fade into obscurity after Rad’s sudden death in 2007. Praise be to the Alamo Drafthouse who, in addition to distributing some of the finest films to come out of the last half-decade, also do the Lord’s work in rescuing cult cinema gems like this one from the dustbin of history.
The film’s lengthy development likely accounts for its bifurcated structure. We are introduced early on to Mira (Melody Wiggins), a young woman who, after the murder of her fiancé, Daniel (Kelay Miller), disguises herself as a prostitute in order to hunt down and kill predatory men like the ones who destroyed her life. Past the film’s midpoint, however, the focus begins to shift towards Daniel’s police detective brother David (uncredited), who goes rogue from the force, nominally with the intention of tracking down the missing Mira, whom police suspect is behind the recent rash of murders. In practice, however, David winds up pursuing the incongruously named “Black Pepper” (Bryan Jenkins), a vicious bike-gang leader and David Lee Roth-looking motherfucker whose only connection to Mira’s case is that he happens to be the son of the guy who killed Mira’s fiancé and who, in turn, became her first victim.
Makes total sense, right? The centrality of sexual abuse to the film’s plot is a tad alarming. Attempted rapes occur with the frequency of lens flares in a J.J. Abrams film, and there’s a leering quality to the camera work. During one extended sequence, a minor character changes out of her shorts and into a pair of mom jeans on the side of the road, sensuously undulating her way into pants with a near armpit-high waist in a reverse strip tease, purely for the audience’s benefit. Even the most minor characters have their own sub-Skinemax sex scenes that are wholly unrelated to the plot. Perhaps Mira’s righteous crusade is meant to serve as a feminist counterbalance to the film’s blatant exploitation, but for the most part, the prurient content only comes across as insanely misguided. Keep in mind that Mira is posing as a prostitute, soliciting men for sex, and then stabbing them to death. We’re basically witnessing the birth of a serial killer here.
In fact, it’s only the utter incompetence of its execution that prevents Dangerous Men from being a total downer. Rad manages to tick off every box on the bad movie checklist. Choppy editing that borders on incoherence? You got it. Dialogue overdubbed with no attempt to match room tone? You got that, too. Actors delivering lines as though reading them for the first time off a cue card? You damn well better believe you’ve got that. It’s also worth noting that there is never a moment of silence in this movie. The maddeningly chintzy score (composed, of course, by Rad himself) lurks under every scene, to the point where you begin to believe that, were the music ever to cease, the film would dissolve into a cloud of vapor like some magnificent dream.
All that’s fine and good, but what about the real meat of a midnight movie classic? Where are the pants-shittingly insane moments that show such a righteous disconnect from any understanding of normal human behavior or psychology that you could scarcely believe they were conceived by a person who has lived among other people? Well, kids, John S. Rad has you covered there, too. Dangerous Men abounds with moments that are profoundly off. This is a world where seemingly ordinary citizens produce handguns from out of nowhere; where a woman and her fiancé can ask permission to marry from a man who is clearly no more than five years his daughters’ senior; where a woman lures her fiancé’s murderer into a death trap by asking him to rub her knees and lick her navel while she retrieves a knife from between her nude, clenched butt cheeks. In short, this is a funhouse mirror reflection of reality so divorced from actual lived experience that you could be looking out on an alien world.
For people who like to throw footballs at the screen during late-night showings of The Room, Dangerous Men will come as a godsend. Indeed, like Tommy Wiseau, Rad was a filmmaker who possessed a svengali-like charisma and confidence in his own work that seemed impervious to the criticism it received. It’s a shame that he’s not around any longer to see his masterpiece make its way out to an even larger audience. All shit-talking aside, John S. Rad spent over a third of his life bringing this thing to life, and no one who lays eyes on it will ever forget having done so. How many filmmakers—even critically acclaimed ones—can say that?
