If you’re one of those people who are really into The Room, but your dog ate your DVD, you accidentally sat on your Blu-Ray and you got mugged and beaten in the parking lot after the last midnight show and you feel like it’s time to move on, Dangerous Men waits for you in the wings. To find it, just be very quiet and listen for the 80s synthesizers (played in every single scene throughout the film), sniff out the irony and follow the trail. John S. Rad’s crime story opus is every bit as fucked up, freaked out and otherworldly as Tommy Wiseau’s soap opera and it deserves to be just as popular. What might be holding it back though is that it COULD all be a joke.
The first laughs are in the opening credits when pseudonymous Iranian auteur Rad (real name: Jahangir Salehi Yeganehrad) isn’t afraid to flash his name—and his name alone—five or six times for everything from “directed by” to “original music by” to “written by” to “created by”. As the film unfolds though, it seems earnest enough. It’s horribly acted, incompetently directed, edited with a hacksaw, written with desperation and composed overall with a brain-damaged sense of logic and taste—but it is earnest. I think.
At face value, Rad is into sudden violence, gratuitous nudity and the sleazebags of the sun-bleached big city as much as Edward D. Wood Jr. was into mad scientists and UFOs. Furthermore, Rad shot most of this in the 1980s and continued to labor on it into the 90s and the 21st century when he finally finished it and lost half of the story along the way. No one spends that much time on a joke, even if it’s a great one like the craziest parts of this. And it’s hard to imagine a parody artist being this free and insane (the film starts as a Ms. 45-type story of a woman on a gory revenge kick against predatory men before it transforms suddenly and confusingly, making us all feel like we missed something, into the story of a police detective taking down a crime lord named Black Pepper, a blonde hair farm who looks like he turned to acting after getting kicked out of Mr. Big and rejected by the World Wrestling Federation).
I want to buy everything about this. I really do. I have room in my little heart for every true blue nutcase who ever somehow got a film finished.
On the other hand, the story behind it all is a little TOO perfectly gonzo, right down to the director dying in 2007, at age 71, before he got the chance to hit the interview circuit for the film’s 2015 theatrical revival.
I… I… I don’t know what to think.
Usually I laugh at most conspiracy theorists, but this movie has turned me into one. Dangerous Men is dangerous, man.