The Dangerous Men trailer offers a glimpse into an almost-lost feature that has to be seen to be believed
Drafthouse Films today has a true gem for fans of offbeat cinema with the debut of the Dangerous Men teaser trailer. The film itself, a nearly-lost action exploitation thriller, was written, directed, edited, produced and scored by the enigmatic John Rad and was revealed to its biggest audience to date today as a secret Fantastic Fest screening. You can check out the Dangerous Men trailer in the player below and read on for some background about the truly bizarre feature film.
In 1979, Iranian filmmaker John Rad moved to the U.S. to shoot his dream project, a rampaging gutter epic of crime, revenge, cop sex and raw power. Just 26 years later, he completed an American action film masterpiece that the world is still barely ready for today: Dangerous Men.
After Mina witnesses her fiancé’s brutal murder by beach thugs, she sets out on a venomous spree to eradicate all human trash from Los Angeles. Armed with a knife, a gun, and an undying rage, she murders her way through the masculine half of the city’s populace. A renegade cop is hot on her heels, a trail that also leads him to the subhuman criminal overlord known as Black Pepper.
It’s a pulse-pounding, heart-stopping, brain-devouring onslaught of ’80s thunder, ’90s lightning, and pure filmmaking daredevilry from another time and/or dimension. Blades flash, blood flows, bullets fly and synthesizers blare as the morgue overflows with the corpses of Dangerous Men.
In the summer of 2005, with his finished feature in hand, Rad embarked on his single greatest challenge to date: the journey to find an audience. Festival bookings and traditional distribution were a dead end, so Rad brashly chose the route of “four-walling,” an industry term for a theater rental, simply to allow the film an exhibition at any possible public venue. Rad coordinated screening times with a half dozen independent cinema owners, placed miniscule, affordable ads in neighborhood newspapers, and even took to the airwaves on local access television and radio (in both English and Farsi), then waited for the people of Los Angeles to discover his masterwork.
Then a strange thing happened… they did.
Not many, at the outset. Supposedly, box office revenue from the first week totaled $70 despite a glowing review in LA Weekly.
“Not dissimilar to David Lynch’s funicular emotionalism, Buñuel’s epistemological sight gags, Godard’s formalistic intrusions or the conceptual hysteria of something like Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession,” the review read. “It’s as if somehow, miraculously, our own present-day Ed Wood suddenly walked among us.”
But a few enterprising theatergoers had fallen under the magnetic pull of Dangerous Men, including Cinefile Video partner Hadrian Belove. In the week of the film’s release, Belove traveled to a neighborhood fourplex to watch it three separate times. He continued to sing its praise for years, including as he co-founded the Los Angeles theater The Cinefamily, which quickly became one of the country’s most revered destinations for film lovers.
“Seeing ‘Dangerous Men’ on its first, fly-by-night, fractional release I thought maybe it was some insane hoax, a prank played on the tiniest of audiences,” recalls Belove. “From its first explosive title card to catchy-kitsch simple-synth music to John S. Rad’s too-perfect name, it seemed too wild, too weird, too good to be true. Once it disappeared back into the ether, those few of us who’d seen it were stricken with an obsession to see it again, and failing that, it became some kind of campfire legend that we could recount to each other, savoring every perverse and insane detail of its blissful madness.”
Sadly, John Rad passed away in 2007. But by that time, Belove and others had made their appreciation of his work known. Later, Dangerous Men played at The Cinefamily, annihilating the crowd and planting the seed of genuine obsession in everyone who experienced it. Among them were Drafthouse Films, the Alamo Drafthouse programming team and the writers from Bleeding Skull, who themselves became infatuated with Rad’s singular expression of street violence and creative daring. After years of tracking down rights and elements, Rad’s daughter Samira agreed to work with Drafthouse Films to present her father’s incomparable feature to the world again for the first time.
“The Alamo Drafthouse has made many great contributions to the world of cinema,” says Belove, “But saving ‘;Dangerous Men’ may be the single most important thing they ever do.”
“It took us almost three and a half years of continuous begging, pleading and debasement before John Rad’s family agreed to license us the film,” said Drafthouse COO James Emanuel Shapiro. “It was well worth it! We are immensely proud that we’ve carved out our own niche of mind-shredding repertory releases and beyond thrilled to unleash what should very much be considered the Holy Grail of Holy F*cking Sh#t on audiences worldwide!”
Dangerous Men will storm screens nationwide starting Friday, November 13th, and will hit multiple video on demand platforms in December. A home video release on Blu-ray, DVD and VHS is planned for early 2016.
