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Dangerous Men
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| Year: |
2005
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Director: |
John S. Rad
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| Stars: |
Michael Hurt, Melody Wiggins, Bryan Jenkins, Mark Besharatay, James Brockman, John Clure, Gorge Derby, Gil Gex, Michael Gradilone, Tripp Law, David Neff, Allen Perada, Hunter Person, Carlos Rivas, Thomas Shelorke, Elle Squadrito, Cita Thompson
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| Genre: |
Action, Thriller, Trash |
| Rating: |
  2 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
A figure in black creeps into a Californian home, advances into the bedroom where a young woman lies sleeping and begins to run his hands over her body... but it's OK, he is her fiancé and they start canoodling with gusto. He is a police detective, Daniel (Michael Hurt), and his brother is as well, and he has a fiancée too whose father he has met tonight to get his blessing. Though the father doesn't say very much, Daniel is satisfied that all it well, and the next day he and his girl, Mira (Melody Wiggins), visit the beach for a break. However what they hadn't counted on was a couple of bikers who show up and catch sight of the couple, then start to harass them, leading to a life-changing event for both...
Increasingly in the twenty-first century there was a movement to uncover the next Edward D. Wood Jr, the new king (or queen) of so bad it’s good filmmaking, and for many they had found him in Tommy Wiseau, the director of The Room. Unfortunately for that cult, no matter how unintentionally awful the film was, we still had Wiseau and his shameless, oblivious self-publicity to deal with, which was harder to take when he was positing himself as in on a joke that wasn't a joke in the first place. On the other hand, history might be kinder to John S. Rad, who created Dangerous Men, a low budget thriller so inept that not only prompted gales of laughter, but had the advantage of its creator being dead.
Obviously this wasn't much of an advantage to Mr Rad, but it did mean we could appreciate his work without the snag of him wondering hey, what's so funny about this? According to reports, he was very serious about his efforts and failed to understand what he had crafted, a midnight movie funnier than many comedies, and as he had taken over twenty years to finish it, never mind actually release it, it was a labour of love for one of the least talented people to pick up a camera. Check out the opening titles, where he doesn't credit any of the cast but does credit himself with various tasks, meaning his name comes up about six or seven times in a row during the first couple of minutes: if that innocent hubris doesn't start you giggling, then this isn't the movie for you.
On the other hand, if you are starting to grin, you will not be disappointed with the manner in which Dangerous Men went about the business of delivering Rad's own concept of a thriller. Bringing new meaning to the phrase "Going off at a tangent", this easily distracted narrative would start off with one set of characters then seemingly on a whim would take a right turn to follow someone else, with only the dubbed dialogue to indicate what had happened to those other folks we were ostensibly intended to be interested in. When Mira witnesses her cop boyfriend murdered by one of the bikers, after he murders the other one, she abruptly tells the killer that she wanted rid of that loser and will now go off to a motel with him. Evidently playing a long game, they also go for dinner before settling in the motel room where she leaves him panting while she goes for a shower.
On emerging, she starts to seduce him by coaxing him to lick her belly button while tickling her knees, then pulls a dagger from her arse crack and stabs him to death with it. You're getting the idea, this was far from sensible, and it continued in that unselfconsciously idiotic manner throughout as Mira becomes a serial killer to make her Aileen Wournos-style way through life, seemingly meeting every potential rapist in California including a middle aged man with a fake English accent who we follow for an interminable amount of time as he wanders naked through the desert and brush. For no good reason! Nothing in this happened for a good reason, including the swift dropping of the Mira plotline so we could follow Daniel as he tracked down a crime boss known as Black Pepper who had to be seen to be believed, pausing twice along the way to get the same biker in a headlock as Rad's absurdly repetitive synth rock score burbled away on the soundtrack. Climaxing in one of the most perfunctory endings of all time, it was probably best not to find out too much about Dangerous Men before seeing it, it was something that had to be witnessed fresh.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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