This morning Adi Shankar released Power/Rangers, a “bootleg short film” directed by Joseph Kahn (Torque, Detention), co-written by Dutch Southern (Bad Turn Worse) and starring James Van Der Beek (Dawson’s Creek) and Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica). Described as “a twist on the Power Rangers mythos”, the short film is a a well crafted brilliant fx-heavy send-up of dark and gritty fan films while also somehow being a fun addition to the genre. Watch the R-rated Power Rangers short film after the jump.

Joseph Kahn’s Power Rangers Short Film

Kahn, not even a fan of the Power Rangers, told Hitfix that the the concept of making a dark and gritty reboot of a silly property is what drew him to the idea:

“I think the trick that I really wanted to do with this was to make that dark and gritty version that everybody keeps talking about, but really do it. Really see if I could totally accomplish it with essentially a really incredible incredibly silly property.”

But don’t expect Lionsgate to hire Kahn for the big screen film adaptation they are currently developing, he’s not interested:

“The irony here is that I wouldn’t even want to make “Power Rangers: The Movie’ for real. Like if I had to make a ‘Power Rangers’ movie, this is it. It’s 14 minutes long and it’s violent and this is what I have in me. If they offered me the 200 million version, the PG-13 version, I literally wouldn’t do it. It’s just not interesting to me.”

And I agree with Kahn, I’m not sure we need a feature length version of this. Here is a self-indulgent parody introduction video by Adi Shankar explaining “Why Bootleg The Power Rangers?”:

Producer Adi Shankar‘s (The Grey, Dredd, Lone Survivor, The Voices) first Bootleg featured Thomas Jane reprising his role as The Punisher along side Ron Pearlman in The Punisher: Dirty Laundry. The second bootleg film featured Ryan Kwanten as the iconic Spiderman villian Venom in Venom: Truth In Journalism. And the third installment featured Shankar reinterpreting Dredd (a film he executive produced) as a hyperviolent animated webseries in Judge Dredd: Superfiend.