Awesome and awesomely bad forgotten films are something of an obsession over at Drafthouse Films, and now the company behind the re-releases of Miami Connection, The Visitor, and Roar are promising another journey into the absurd with Dangerous Men, “the holy grail of holyf**kingsh*t,” (their words) which will hit select theaters November 16 and OnDemand in December.
Here’s the pitch:
In 1979, Iranian filmmaker John Rad [born Jahangir Salehi Yeganehrad, director of 11 Farsi films] 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 fiancee’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.
Despite initially languishing at the box office during its limited theatrical release, and never finding a likeminded audience before Rad’s untimely death in 2007, Dangerous Men developed a devoted following before vanishing as mysteriously as it appeared. Chief among them was Hadrian Belove, of the independent Los Angeles theater The Cinefamily, who saw the film multiple times during its brief theatrical run, and alerted Drafthouse Films and Alamo Drafthouse Cinema programming teams to the existence of the film. Working with the late artist’s family, the team worked tirelessly alongside the American Genre Film Institute to locate and restore the original film. [Drafthouse]
With the auteur dead and his magnum opus on the cusp of cult popularity, would that make Dangerous Men the Confederacy of Dunces of cult film? That would be a fine thing. I myself hope to one day die an untimely death on the eve of my artistic recognition.
From this admittedly very limited bit of footage, Dangerous Men looks a bit like a Persian-spiced Andy Sidaris (of Hard Ticket To Hawaii fame), with of course the logical parallels to Birdemic, The Room, and Miami Connection. What is it about being a new immigrant to the U.S. that gives a person the drive to create and the stamina to see through a batsh*t vanity project? California should have its own Statue of Liberty. “Give us your wired, your eccentric, your independently wealthy masses, yearning to break free of creative oversight.”