Shortly after Samira Wenzel graduated from high school, in 1979, her father, an Iranian architect turned filmmaker named Jahangir Salehi Yeganehrad, forbade her from seeing a young man he disapproved of. When she disobeyed him, he took her Datsun B210 away—not just the keys, but the whole car. He told her she would never see it again.

But more than 25 years later, she did—on-screen. The fate of her Datsun was finally revealed in her father’s film Dangerous Men, in which it goes over a cliff, coasts gently down the side of the hill, and then, like the punch line to a Simpsons gag (except it’s not meant to be funny), bursts into flames.

“And I’m going, ‘Now I know where it went,’” Wenzel recently said with a laugh, recalling that 2005 screening. “He punishes me worldwide, publicly!”

Jahangir Salehi Yeganehrad—who made Dangerous Men under the simpler, radder name John S. Rad—was a man of contradictions. He was a loving but stern father who whisked his young family to safety in the United States when the Shah’s regime fell in 1979, then destroyed a car to prove a point to his daughter. The film took him 20 years to finish, yet does not appear to be the work of an exacting perfectionist, if you catch our drift. The story borders on incomprehensible, and the performances are, shall we say, unconvincing—but Rad had filmmaking experience back in Iran. To watch it, you’d assume Dangerous Men was made in a weekend by someone who had never made, or possibly even seen, a movie before.

It’s been a word-of-mouth favorite at underground film festivals and repertory theaters since 2005, when Rad, unable to find a distributor but confident one would turn up if he put the movie out there, paid for a week-long run in five Los Angeles theaters. There, it caught the attention of adventurous filmgoers like Hadrian Belove (now the founder and executive creative director of the nonprofit cinema Cinefamily), who rallied enough like-minded movie buffs to sell out a single screening.

And now, 10 years after the film’s completion and 8 years after its auteur’s death, it’s getting a proper release by Drafthouse Films, the Austin theater turned distributor that champions such cinematic oddities, with a DVD and Blu-ray edition to follow. At last, the world will know John S. Rad.

Mira (Melody Wiggins) is held at gunpoint by John Drake, who plays a truck driver. Courtesy of Drafthouse Films.

“By my standards, I think Dangerous Men is the apex predator of outsider cinema,” Belove said. “Usually, no matter how special and strange and surprising these movies are, there’s a moment where you sort of settle in. Where you go, O.K., I get it. I know you, Birdemic. I get what you are. . . . But Dangerous Men keeps transforming and becoming a different movie. By the time you get to that freeze-frame at the end—they do a freeze-frame for the final credits—and not a single person in that frame was a character in the movie 20 minutes earlier.”

Loosely, it’s the story of a woman named Mira whose boyfriend is killed by bikers, setting her on a path of vengeance. But Rad used non-professional actors and (to put it diplomatically) nonstandard filmmaking techniques to tell a story that is by turns mesmerizing, incoherent, humorous, and baffling; though it is rarely any of those things on purpose.

Characters wander in and out of the narrative, often making it unclear who the protagonist is. Mira encounters an unusual number of would-be rapists, one of whom we follow for several minutes after their thwarted encounter as he walks naked through the desert, cursing himself and his penis (which he addresses directly). In another scene, an actor’s script is clearly visible on the desk in front of him, his lines highlighted in yellow. One character appears long enough to call her boyfriend at work and complain that he’s not home, at which point we cut immediately to the two of them having sex—either as a flashback or because he came home, after all; it’s not clear which—and then she’s never seen again. The film has what you might call a surprise ending, insofar as when it ends, you are surprised, because the story isn’t over yet.