Drafthouse Films is about to drop another piece of mad genius into our laps. Over the past few years, the distribution arm of the Alamo Drafthouse has made a name for itself in picking up off center, unique and often crazed film offerings and bringing them to the collective consciousness of the masses. Films such as MIAMI CONNECTION and ROAR. Films that fill a vacant hole in your life that you thought could never be filled by anything, until you discovered these gems and wondered how you could have lived your entire life without them. Their latest find, DANGEROUS MEN, hits theaters this week. Put simply, you MUST see this film.
Writer/Director (and composer, and editor, and production designer, and producer and set decorator) John Rad moved to the U.S. from Iran in 1979 and set about making his dream of becoming a filmmaker a reality. He began shooting what would become an epic project spanning twenty-five years. Rad finally finished DANGEROUS MEN in 2005, and set about a small, self-distributed, self-promoted run, before the film disappeared for a decade. Now, Drafthouse has unearthed it and is bringing it straight to your heart and eyeballs in a brain-melting 80 minutes of “What in the Actual Fuck?”
What is DANGEROUS MEN about, you might ask? Many many things. It’s an action film filled with violence, vengeance, lost love, retribution, cops at desks, cops in the field, old cops, young cops, renegade cops, brothers, hookers, beach fights, house fights, stabbings, shootings, robberies, belly dancers, looping synth scores, cars, bikers, weird sex, one singular punching sound effect, explosions and a big bad crime lord named Black Pepper. It is about as elegant and makes about as much sense as what I just described, and it is awesome.
The film is batshit insanity from start to finish. From the moment when the title card explodes and John Rad’s name appears in the opening credits (again and again and again – as it turns out, there are only so many times you can read “John Rad” in the title sequence before throwing your arms into the air and yelling “Fuck Yeah!”) you know you’re in uncharted waters. This film plays by its own rules, because frankly, it doesn’t give any indication that it had any conceptual notion of what the standard rules were to begin with.
Characters drop in and out of the film, scenes are slapped together with chewing gum and duct tape, the plot meanders around until it finds a scene it likes, stops there for a while to have a beer (and maybe a fight scene) and then proceeds to bumble to the next point of interest (much like one of the characters, who winds up stumbling naked through the desert). The plot is barely coherent, and if you think about it too hard, it all just dissolves from your aching brain like that dream that woke you up last night, but you can’t seem to recall this morning.
It’s impossible not to fall in immediate, demented love with a film like this. It’s vibe is the kind of frenzied chaos that infects you immediately and sticks with you long after it ends, as you and your friends reminisce about its insanity and quote it for days to come. DANGEROUS MEN might not wear its heart on its sleeve the way MIAMI CONNECTION does, but you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be able to see that this was a labor of love (or maybe evil obsession). It has to be, given the fact that Rad hung on for decades to bring this film to completion. And though it might not have gloss (or cohesion), it’s still a massively entertaining experience. Good things don’t always have to come in pristine packages. DANGEROUS MEN promises a ridiculously fun time, and that’s exactly what it delivers.
