What is it with these damn movies with “Men” in their titles?

Welcome to the 500th review at B-Movie Enema. Holy shit, 500! That’s the number of miles they go at the Indianapolis 500, or half the number of miles I would walk to be the man who falls down at your door! That’s how many dollars it would take to get me to… I dunno… visit Delaware or something. Nah, I’m just messin’ with ya, Delawarians.

Anyway, 500 reviews and it’s time to tackle one of the all-timers when it comes to being batshit insane – 2005’s Dangerous Men. This movie was mostly under the radar for a very, very long time. In fact, it had to because it took 21 years to make it! Production started in 1984 when director-producer John S. Rad (the pseudonym for Jahangir Salehi Yeganehrad) decided to try his hand at making movies. Yeganehrad/Rad was from Iran and worked as an architect on films. He came to the United States during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Five years later, he began to audition actors for his first American film.

Now, I say it took 21 years to make it. That’s not entirely true. Supposedly, he showed a “finished” version of the film in 1985, but opted to spend the next 20 years making tweaks and edits to the film here and there. In 2005, Rad paid for a week-long run across a handful of Los Angeles-area movie theaters. According to an LA Weekly article called “The Passion of Rad,” at least one person saw the movie three times in that one week. Quite frankly, I get it. This movie is insane, and you almost have to watch it as much as possible, especially back then, because it’s such a special unicorn of batshittery that you may never see it, or anything like it, ever again.

Ten years later, the movie was largely forgotten and fell away from any possibility of being released or seeing the light of day. Rad himself had passed away in 2007 at the age of 70. Enter Drafthouse Films. Oh yes, the Alamo Drafthouse. These are the same guys who uncovered such lost gems as Miami Connection, as well as putting new life into great exploitation films like 1971’s Wake in Fright and 1981’s Ms. 45.

Actually… hold up… How have I never done Ms. 45 for this blog? Must rectify that!

Anyway, Alamo Drafthouse had a reputation in the 2000s and 2010s of being a place for people in Austin, Texas, to see bad movies like Troll 2 or exploitation classics on film. They used to host bad movie nights on, if I’m not mistaken, Wednesday nights. After Drafthouse Films was formed in 2010 by co-founder Tim League, he would open up a much more prestigious second distribution company called Neon. Neon just distributed the most recent Best Picture Academy Award winner, Anora.

Okay, so maybe some of the lights have dimmed around Alamo Drafthouse in more recent years. They had some negative press around the workplace environment and some of the people associated with the theater. They’ve since been sold off twice, first to an investment group and then to Sony Pictures Experiences… ugh… EXPERIENCES. That’s such a corpo-bullshit term for a fuckin’ movie theater company, ain’t it? But, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, followed then by Drafthouse Films, is largely recognized for bringing a lot of these kinds of so-good-they’re-bad movies back into the spotlight again for people like me.

Now, sure… You have your Miami Connections or your Troll 2s or your Samurai Cops or your The Rooms. These are your usually accepted top-tier bullfuck movies, right? But, according to the poster and the cover to Drafthouse Films’ release of Dangerous Men, we might have a whopper of a bad movie here. According to them…

I ain’t gonna lie… That’s piqued my interest. It’s also tickled my taint. So, considering this movie stars no one and there’s only so much information I can find about John S. Rad, let’s get dangerous, shall we?

You know you’re in for a good time when the title comes with a little explody effect.

Ah, you gotta love it. Anyway, after the title explodes across our screen, we see a man dressed in a black suit approach the front door of a fairly nice house. All the while, some serious Sega Genesis-style riffs play for the score, and IT JUST KEEPS REPEATING OVER AND OVER.

That is, until the man reaches the bedroom of a woman who is just napping on top of her bed covers. I mean, she’s wearing a slip or something, but she’s not interested in getting under the covers. This is how she naps. She naps warm, okay?

The music changes abruptly to something maybe a little more emotional, more romantic, as this man caresses the woman’s leg as she naps deeply and warmly. She finally wakes with a start and recognizes this man as her lover. After presenting her with an anniversary gift, they make love.

John Rad may be an architect who worked on films in his homeland of Iran. He may have known how to score a movie with all the precision of a ToeJam & Earl game, only to switch gears at JUST the right time into soft, romantic muzak. He may know how to make explody effects when he presents the title of the movie to your eyeballs. What he knows best, though, is sound editing. As Daniel and Mina, two other lovers we are following in these early moments of this movie, express their undying love for each other at the bar during a romantic dinner date, we’re allowed to take in the weight of the moment in complete silence. That is broken by their sincere and sensual words. To show the realism of their vows to love each other forever, as the silence is broken by their cherished words of love, we also hear the hustle and bustle of a noisy, crowded restaurant. Then! After they speak their line of dialogue, we’re returned to the silent dreamscape of love and romance, only for us to be reminded once again that this is a love in the real world when they speak their next line.

Pure magnificence.

But, alas, this is the real world. In the real world, there are bad men… even dangerous men. Daniel’s brother, whose name seems to only be Police Detective, according to Wikipedia, has a smoke outside when he overhears the robbery of a nearby liquor store. He was the man we saw at the beginning of the movie giving his wife an anniversary gift. The girl who works at the liquor store tries to karate kung fu one of the robbers, only for her to get shot by the single-firing Uzi that the second robber is using to hold the place up, killing her pretty much immediately. That’s when we learn that Daniel’s brother is a cop and comes to the scene of the crime to kill the Uzi man and arrest the other guy.

This isn’t just a story of love, my dear readers. It’s a story of danger. It’s a tale of action. It’s a yarn of karate kung fu bitches with no bra on and erect nipples. It’s a 79-minute epic of powerhouse emotions.

Daniel and Mina speak to her father about getting engaged. I guess he agrees because Brother Detective is on the phone with Daniel, congratulating him on getting married. He is at a cop convention, so he won’t be there for a few more days to celebrate. Mina and Daniel wish Brother Detective were there with them on the beach, celebrating with them. Trouble is fast approaching on two wheels of motorcycle danger.

By sort of accident, two bikers named Tiger and Leo follow the two lovers to the beach. The two bikers aren’t exactly looking to make trouble. They were just looking for something to do. It’s like the old proverb: Be wary of two bikers named Tiger and Leo who are simply looking for something to do. They are going to have an everlasting effect on the lives of our two young lovers.

Tiger and Leo begin harassing Daniel and Mina. Mina even tells them to get on their bikes and get lost. When Daniel snaps at them, it looks like our couple is about to get away from the bikers, but they come back. Daniel is stabbed while strangling Leo. As Tiger leaves, Mina calls out to him, begging to be taken with him. As Mina puts it, she’s free now! That jerkass Daniel is dead. She can be with Tiger now.

Tiger takes Mina to a motel for the night. But, John S. Rad knows a thing or two about realism. You don’t take a girl to the motel room right away for a vigorous night of dirty, dirty sex. No! You must first romance her. Also, it doesn’t hurt to get your energy up before the big night, so he first takes Mina to the most romantic place he possibly could for dinner – the motel’s restaurant.

Now, well-dined and well-romanced, it’s time for some raw-ass sex!

Mina tells Tiger she wants him to rub her knees while licking her belly button. She has VERY specific turn-ons. Well, you see, while at the restaurant, she snuck a knife out. When she came out of the bathroom after showering, she hid that knife in her butt crack. This was an elaborate plan to get revenge on the man who killed her fiancé. After killing Tiger and getting dressed again, she tells the man’s corpse that she will do the same for all scum like him.

She makes her way to the highway and flags down a man passing in a truck. As Mina sleeps, she is haunted by dreams of her father and of Daniel. As she sleeps in the man’s truck, he gets an idea… She’s pretty. He’s a henpecked husband. He’s got a gun hiding in the flip-down visor. Why not rape this girl?

Again, John S. Rad certainly understands how to portray realism in film. Bikers are always out to rape and murder. Bikers never pick up on suspicious clues that a woman who they were about to rape, and whose husband they just murdered, might not be as flirty and willing to have sex with them immediately following that murder. When bad things happen, they only ever keep happening, hence the man in the truck who wants to take what he wants from Mina moments after picking her up as a hitchhiker.

After holding the gun to Mina’s face, she realizes that older men are just as clueless and dumb as bikers. She tells him that she has always been attracted to older men. She wants him to take his clothes off and put the gun down. So she pulls the knife on him and threatens to cut his dick off. She grabs the gun and tells the guy to remove his underwear and beat cheeks down the ol’ dirt road. She takes off with the knife, his gun, his clothes, and his truck.

Mina eventually finds her way back home. She tells her father that he must let her leave and let life take her where she needs to go. He gives her the information for her savings account so she has money to… uh… go where life needs her to go…? Yeah, okay. I accept this from Dangerous Men. This will NOT be the weirdest thing to happen in the movie.

Detective Brother and his partner, Black Detective, talk about how Black Detective’s main focus has been to search for Mina, who has disappeared into the wind. Detective Brother, I suppose, is going to be trying to figure out what happened to his brother? Does he know what’s happened to his brother? Is this another example of John S. Rad being a brilliant filmmaker? Could it be that we are now in the grief-ridden mind of Detective Brother and are not singularly focused on Mina’s safety, that we’re unsure if we can believe this is all real life?

Black Detective also has a whole story going on. He’s a cop, right? He’s Black Detective. He’s not Black Construction Worker. His fiancée (there are a lot of fiancés here) calls him and expresses her pain and disappointment that she took a vacation and has not seen him once while she’s not been working. He explains to her that he’s a cop and he can’t dictate what time off he has. She says that’s all a bunch of bullshit to her, and she wants him today, right now.

Smash cut to the two of them fucking.

Meanwhile, Mina has driven into the city. She is now basically on a Death Wish arc. She wants to take revenge on men. She picks up a hooker. She doesn’t want a lesbian escapade. She wants to learn from this woman. She wants to learn how to be a “woman of the night.”

She doesn’t want to know the sexy bits. She wants to know the dark, risky bits. What is she afraid of? Is it cops? Is it drug dealers? Is it her customers? Where are the most dangerous parts of town to walk? What are the risks of being a call girl?

The hooker breaks down. Everyone and everything is dangerous in her job. She could be killed at any moment. She just wants to go home and be normal once again. Mina says, from now on, she’ll be another one of the girls of the night. But she isn’t going to be like the others. She knows what she must do. She will pick men up and kill them.

It’s truly sad to see how one bad 24-hour period in Mina’s life drove her to revenge and away from her true love of making seashell art. (For real, readers. This is a real thing she flashes back to in the movie. She thinks about the time she made a seashell wreath for Daniel. We got to see how excited she was to give it to him. We also saw his unsure expression upon receiving it. It’s brilliantly weird, guys.)

As the number of murdered Johns starts to rise, and the fact that it seems like every time she’s with any man in their car, they attempt to have sex with her, things are starting to catch the attention of the news. When that happens, it’s not long before cops begin to investigate all these deaths.

We learn that Detective Brother’s name is David. That makes a lot of sense, actually… Brothers David and Daniel. Yeah, that lines up. David’s police chief is not happy that he wants to insert himself into Daniel’s murder case. Not only are there very few leads, but Mina is missing. He has to get involved. Black Detective tells David about Tiger’s murder and that it seems plausible, if not 100% true, that Mina was the one who killed him. He warns David to stay away from the bikers and enjoy his time off.

So David follows bikers to a bar to find out more about their possible involvement in his brother’s death and Mina’s disappearance.

Now… you may look at the above picture and the paragraph that preceded it and be a bit confused. Worry not, dear reader. That’s why I’m here. Indeed, the picture above is back at the beach where Mina and Daniel were originally attacked. Yes, it’s another bald biker trying to assault a woman. Yes, I said that David went to a bar to stake out some bikers. All of these things are true.

David did go to that bar. He asked the bartender a bunch of questions. We learn that Wikipedia has led me astray. Tiger’s biker buddy was not named Leo; it was Lou. Whatever, I’m gonna call him Leo. After all, Leos are represented by lions, and the other guy is Tiger. Makes sense!. Anyway, that guy’s son is a bigger son of a bitch than him. He gets into all sorts of unsavory stuff like drug dealing and shit. His name is Black Pepper. He’s the kingpin of this biker gang.

The woman the bald biker above is assaulting on Rape Beach was at the bar playing darts when Baldy decided he’s gonna fuck her. When he was rebuffed, the woman left the bar with Baldy soon to follow her. Apparently, the bar’s front door is right there on the beach because that’s where these two ended up. After learning that Baldy knows Black Pepper and where he can be found, David followed close behind. To save the woman, David knocks Baldy out.

You might think this is a mistake in filmmaking to immediately cut to the beach from inside the bar. I’m here to tell you that it isn’t. John S. Rad is spinning a yarn full of magical realism and themes and concepts as opposed to 100% realism. Realism can lead to gritty and grimy storytelling that packs a punch. Why not elevate this into the metaphysical and otherworldly realms of concepts and themes? Why not play with location and logic to send the viewer on a wild trip of fantasy?

I’m not sure what I mean by any of that. This movie is almost impeccably nonsensical. More on that in just a bit.

David uses the woman he just saved to create a honey pot trap for Baldy. Perched on top of David’s car, the woman lures Baldy to pull over when he and the rest of his gang roll by. Baldy is almost successful in raping the girl this time because David, hiding in the car’s backseat, gets his foot stuck in the front seat. He finally gets out of the car and ties Baldy up to question him about how he can find Black Pepper. As Baldy leads David to Black Pepper’s place, Mina is arrested for the murders she committed. That story has effectively ended, and it was over for quite a bit, if I’m being honest.

What’s going on at Black Pepper’s place is nothing short of What the Fuck? He’s got one girl on his lap serving him liquor. He’s got a second girl doing a belly dance for the two of them. Because John S. Rad paid for this bellydancer, goddammit, we’re gonna see her perform. Seriously, we see the WHOLE performance through an entire song. When it finally ends, Black Pepper takes his girl to the bedroom and kisses her legs and belly. Lots of leg and belly action in this movie.

During the raid at Black Pepper’s house, the chief tells David that Mina has been arrested. So the original story and lead of this movie is now finished. Meanwhile, Black Pepper is on the loose. When David spots Black Pepper, he takes off after him until he finally catches up for an epic fight scene unmatched in cinematic history… That David loses.

So now the 8,000-year-old Chief chases after Black Pepper. Think what Rad is trying to say is that tradition and wiser men of age will always be the ones to defeat the villainous and depraved youth of this country. That sounds good. I am quite concerned for this old man playing the Chief’s health. It looks like quite the task for him to chase after Black Pepper.

Finally, the Chief catches up to Black Pepper as he sneaks into a blind girl’s house while she is sewing a blanket. Just because this girl is blind, don’t think she doesn’t 1) have a gun just under her blanket to ward off intruders, or 2) she’s not ripe for Black Pepper to rape.

And this is where the movie abruptly ends.

Dangerous Men is definitely as bizarre and unbelievable as it’s often described. It’s clear there was some kind of a script. John S. Rad must have had some sort of idea for what he wanted this movie to be. It has a lot of the elements that fans of bad movies recognize, specifically when it comes to 80s action exploitation films.

If you’ve seen a movie like, say, Samurai Cop or Miami Connection, two movies I’ve mentioned already in this article, you know there’s a point to the movie’s existence. In some instances, like with Miami Connection, it’s a vanity project. That movie is up and down, back and forth, inside and out about Y.K. Kim and his taekwondo talents and passion for that particular flavor of martial arts.

Even more recently, I covered the very bad and quite confounding Honorable Men from 2004. That movie felt like a throwback to the old hero cop movies of the 80s. That, too, like the aforementioned Miami Connection, is a vanity project. But that has a familial connection in tone and poor filmmaking to the classic Samurai Cop. These are your ass-kickin’ cop hero vehicles who are always virtuous, even with their darker sides. They are always wanted by women, and they are always action first.

While Dangerous Men has much of the same 80s action/cop thriller/crime drama DNA as Honorable Men and Samurai Cop, these are three distinctively different kinds of bad. Samurai Cop is the best of those three siblings. It’s bad, but incredibly watchable because the badness makes it so fun. It also has the best plot of the three. Honorable Men is, arguably, the worst of the three. What makes it that is the baffling lead “””””hunk””””” of the movie that is pursued and lusted after by two college girls.

Dangerous Men is a whole different animal. It’s a much more advanced level of bad movie. There are plenty of people who claim to enjoy really bad movies. Then they’ll say, “You know, like Halloween 5.” Even if they named Samurai Cop or The Room, this is still a whole other level of bad. This is in the same league as Honorable Men. I maybe had a disadvantage watching this alone for this review. I have a couple of friends who really get into the worst of the worst type of bad movies. I would have loved to have watched it with them to get a full-on bad movie night experience. I suspect we would have had a great time watching this.

That said, this is a hard watch for those who aren’t experienced bad movie watchers.

All those other ones I’ve mentioned as the well-known and accessible bad movies have a coherent plot of some sort. Samurai Cop is trying to stop an Asian gang. The Room is a character study of a man whose life is about to be torn apart by Lisa. Miami Connection is a rock and roll band’s mission to destroy the ninja and stop all the stupid cocaine. These all make sense in terms of a movie. It’s the stuff under the subject matter that turns these movies into fun bad movies. Dangerous Men? I can’t really tell you what the plot of this movie is.

It starts with the sad fate of a young couple who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. A biker gang kills a guy, and that leads the guy’s fiancée on a journey toward becoming a man-killing avenger of the night. But not like a cool superhero. That plot isn’t really strong enough to carry the film because after a long time of following the girl’s story, we then move to the dead guy’s brother, who is also a cop, trying to figure out who killed his brother. Well… His brother’s own fiancée killed the guy who killed your brother, dude. I think he knows that, but then he starts chasing after the biker gang’s leader? As if he ordered the guy’s death? What did he have to do with the other plot?

Yeah… There are two plots, and both of them abruptly end. Mina is arrested for being an avenging killer of men who try to buy hookers. The other story revolving around finding and, ostensibly, killing Black Pepper ends with Black Pepper being arrested by a very old man. There is no shootout. There is no death of Black Pepper or the unfortunate death of Mina, who you would at least accept a heartbreaking end for, because she was driven insane by the death of her fiancé, Daniel. There is no climax to this movie or to either plot.

Not only does the movie not have a satisfying payoff or climax, but neither does the score. The score is mostly that weird Sega Genesis game score that repeats over and over. Sometimes it changes up and gives us some romantic music, but that is just generic muzak. There’s no punch to this movie. I mean, there are scenes involving punching, but they are so poorly shot that you can very obviously see people swinging punches that come nowhere near the target. Plus, each punch uses the exact same sound effect. It’s a really strange movie and not for the faint of heart when it comes to a bad movie night selection.

Regardless, Dangerous Men marks an astonishing 500 reviews here at B-Movie Enema. That doesn’t seem remotely possible, but it’s kind of amazing how fast time flies. From the original six in 2014 to the 496 that followed starting in 2016 and beyond, this has been a fun ride so far. It’s time to kick off another 500 reviews starting next week. What better way to start a new string than to visit with my old friend Norman J. Warren?

So come back around here in seven short days to find out if I can still capture that Loving Feeling for what I do around here.