Cool Videos: Gritty R-rated Power Rangers short starring James Van Der Beek

February 24th 2015, 10:20am

DREDD and THE GREY producer Adi Shankar has released another one of his "bootleg" fan films. This time it's a badass 14-minute short based on the Power Rangers franchise, directed by Joseph Kahn (DETENTION, TORQUE) and starring James Van Der Beek and Katee Sackhoff. Before checking it out though, you should know Kahn isn't involved with the planned reboot, and you might want to be careful where you watch the video since it's NSFW.

It's morphin' time!

POWER/RANGERS from Joseph Kahn on Vimeo.

So why did Joseph Kahn create this "deboot" (his words) of the Power Rangers? Here's some details on the project and Kahn's thoughts on directing a Power Rangers feature film from his conversation with HitFix.

It started because I was bored, quite frankly. I only make a narrative feature film of any sort like once every five years or something like that. So I was going to make a science-fiction film, and at the same time, I was meeting with Adi Shankar.

Shankar had done some fan films, he called them bootlegs, of 'Punisher' and Venom. And he said, 'If you're going to do this, I'll let you reboot an actual property that people are going to pay attention to.' And honestly, I'm not really into fan films at all. Two of the worst types of filmmaking out there that are not credible to filmmakers… one is porn and the other is fan films. So the minute that he pitched me into doing this, I thought, 'Okay, well, that sounds like fun actually. If it's that… completely without credibility… then that's something I could really get my hands around and see if I could do something new with it.

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.

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.

I don't think we need (or will ever get) a full-length, R-rated Power Rangers flick, but I'm very glad this awesome short exists.