Dangerous Men | Review

Man Trouble: Rad Enters Race for Worst Film Ever Made

A unique oddity even amongst contemporary counterparts competing for notoriety as one of the worst films ever made, John S. Rad’s Dangerous Men is, without a doubt, a terribly made film. What is perhaps most fascinating is the laborious production of the film. Rad, an Iranian immigrant, began making his labor of love in the 1980s, and would continue to film sequences over the next two decades. In that time, cast members and characters seem to have disappeared, explaining a jumbled narrative and a myriad of unexplainable events. The film does perhaps usurp Tommy Wisseau’s strange perseverance to complete his 2003 opus The Room, another director seemingly clueless about all aspects of the filmmaking process yet still determined to complete his compromised vision.

But as far as film criticism goes, it’s difficult to correctly ascertain the value of an item such as this. While it does provide a handful of unintentional laughs, even at eighty minutes of running time, the film is so ludicrous it can only possibly sustain interest if an audience is feeding off each other’s delirious shared enjoyment, which is exactly what makes this film a prime target for cult attenuation, and hence distributor Drafthouse’s rationale for re-releasing the film ten years after an initial vanity theatrical run.

The woebegone story goes something like this. Mina (Melody Wiggins) gets engaged to Dan (Kelay Miller), and they go do far as to consult her father for permission. Shortly after, they take a romantic stroll on a windswept beach and are accosted by two bikers. One of the bikers gets killed, but so does Dan. Seeing an opportunity for vengeance, Mina immediately pretends she is relieved to be free of her lover and convinces the biker to take her to a hotel where they can have sex. But during their interlude, Mina reaches for a creatively hidden weapon and kills the other biker, vowing to go off on a rampage and kill similar ‘trash.’ And so begins a short odyssey of interactions with lascivious men Mina sees fit to annihilate. Now, somewhere in the middle of all this, Dan’s brother David (Michael Gradilone), a cop, is searching for Mina to find out what happened. But as he exists somewhere in Mina’s ether of growing corpses, a series of unrelated sequences assist Rad in jumping the track and focusing on a whole set of other characters.

Of course, what makes certain elements of Dangerous Men so delicious is Rad’s obliviousness to anything remotely resembling ‘production value,’ clearly aping grindhouse efforts of the era. His insistence on completing the project (he serves as director, producer editor, and as the credits indicate the ‘screenplay writer’), presumably indicates he had a decent idea as to just how terrible the film is as no pains were taken to retain cohesiveness despite his limitations and extensive timeframe in production. In Frank Oz’s superb 1999 comedy Bowfinger, a desperate director played by Steve Martin films a secret project around a crazy Hollywood diva played by Eddie Murphy. The final result of Bowfinger’s DIY troubles is what Dangerous Men resembles.

But it’s initial set-up does show promising jolts of entertainment, mostly from a great camp performance from Melody Wiggins as the angel of vengeance, a woman who seems a lot like the central character in Abel Ferrara’s 1981 classic Ms. 45, which also saw a recent re-release from Drafthouse. In the short time the film devotes almost entirely to her, such as when she runs down a beach crying hysterically or picks up an emotional prostitute to learn the sleazy low down, Dangerous Men is a bona fide camp gem.

Audiences will surely cherry pick the dozen or so delectable lines of dialogue for future repetition, and there are moments of unintentional glory equaling Wisseau’s ineptitude. But Dangerous Men is still laborious to sit through, even if viewed as a palette cleanser during the achingly extensive period of Oscar prestige films dominating the last two months of the calendar year.

★/☆☆☆☆☆