Dangerous Men

Imagine if you will,: you've created an AI with the intelligence quotient of a sea cucumber. You make it read an aileen wuornos biography 10 times, you make it watch tarantino films for hours, and then you reprogram it to be even dumber than a sea cucumber. Next, you ask it to create a film based on its informational diet. That film is Dangerous Men. Its bad in every way possible. The story is ultra bad. The writing and acting is quite awful. The fight choreography is almost as hard to watch as the attempted SA scenes. The music will give you whiplash. It doesn't get much worse than this in terms of ineptitude, and i feel bad that someone put 20+ years of their life into this mess.

I, like most people I assume, wandered into a screening of this film because it fit the time slot and was totally obscure. I went with four other buddies and I must say we were blow away by how unbelievably terrible it was and how much fun we had at the same time. Saw it again on Saturday at the Lamelle Sunset and it was even better the second time. We spoke with John S. Rad, he's taking Dangerous Men on tour and putting out a DVD, Dangerous Men even has a myspace address, everyone should look it up, he also has a dozen more movies and some music and poetry. If anyone you know has seen this movie you will have the keen ability of telling inside jokes at the expense of Dangerous Men for a life time, which is worth it's weight in gold. To sum up, this movie is terrible and obviously John Rad had a tough time figuring out what he really wanted to do, but I feel that future projects, hopefully, can only be better and Dangerous Men is a great time at the theatre even if it's an atrociously awful film.

What is there to say about Dangerous Men that hasn't already been said about Afghanistan? The filmmaker, John S. Rad, clearly set out to make the worst movie of all time, but it ended up entertaining me more than most films I've seen. When watching it, I felt I was the butt of some sort of Emperor's-New-Clothes joke, but I couldn't help but laugh. The acting and cinematography are reminiscent of the worst After School Special ever made.

If you are willing to put aside the horrible cuts, dubbing, acting, and film-making technique in general, you might enjoy this surreal and absurd piece of work. I found myself forgetting the finished product and instead wondered how Rad convinced these people (especially the women) to take part in such ludicrous and graphic sex scenes, considering there is no chance that anyone ever dreamed that this movie could make any money.

I am glad to see that it is now on IMDb, after a direct challenge from LA Weekly. Even though the attempt to make it so was contrived, it deserves to be a cult classic shown at midnight on screens across the country.

I didn't know about this movie until I came across a negative review of it on rogerebert.com. I read the review and became curious. Well, I've now seen the movie twice. "Dangerous Men" is one of those movies that's so bad it's good, like "The Room" (2003) and "Troll 2". It's a movie that you watch with your friends and talk. Maybe get some snacks, some booze, and some weed.

The movie was made by Jahangir Salehi, but I guess he preferred to use the pseudonym John Rad. Yes, Rad. John Rad is almost the only name in the opening credits and it amusingly appears multiple times along with music that might get stuck in your head. What's the movie about? Good question. It's partly about a woman who's fiancé is murdered by a biker on a beach. She goes with the biker to a motel to have sex, I guess, but she literally pulls a knife out of her ass and kills him. I am not kidding. While in a desert, she hitchhikes with a man who happens to have a gun in his vehicle. He drives off-road and attempts to rape her, but she ends up stealing his vehicle and leaving him in the desert naked. Now, for some reason, the movie keeps following him and, for some reason, he talks to his penis and, for some reason, he sings and dances. Again, I am not kidding. The woman becomes a serial killer who kills men. I guess these men are dangerous, but I'm not entirely sure.

The movie's quite a mess. It jumps around a lot and it's not well edited. There are moments when the movie will just cut to something else, but the editing can be funny. There's a scene with a man talking on the phone and the movie just cuts to him making out with a woman who I think he was talking to on the phone. It's just so odd and surprising that you might as well laugh. There are jump cuts during a sex scene with a man named Black Pepper that I just don't understand. Why is the scene edited this way? It's not stylish. It's amateurish. Well, the whole movie is amateurish. The acting is pretty bad. The fight scenes are incredibly unconvincing. "Miami Connection" has better fighting. Someone in "Dangerous Men" says that Black Pepper has killed more people than the Vietnam War. Um, what? He's killed more people than the people who died in the Vietnam War? Apparently, over a million people died in that war. It would be incredible (and horrible) if someone single-handedly killed over a million people. You might be thinking that the guy who said that is exaggerating, but with this movie, I'm not so sure. When I first saw the movie, the ending confused me. The movie ends abruptly on a rather awkward freeze frame. Not a good way to end your movie.

"Dangerous Men" is entertaining trash. I enjoyed it when I saw it on my own and I enjoyed it more when I saw it with a couple of friends. It's quite amusing. The fighting's amusing, the music's amusing, the naked man in the desert's amusing, etc. I wanna see it again and again.

This isn't one of those fun bad movies, it's just bad. BUT, it's bad in a way that you can't look away from. Almost no internal logic, time shifting, nonsensical editing changes and a plot that shifts completely 2/3's of the way through. It's like an alien tried to make a movie and failed miserably. See it, but only with people of like minds.