Mad Foxes - Feuer auf Räder

Mad Foxes (1981)

*** (out of 4)

Hal (Robert O'Neal) is out with his girlfriend when they are violently attacked by a motorcycle gang. The girl is raped but Hal seeks revenge the next night when him and his kickboxing friends attack the gang. He thinks all is over but soon the gang comes back for revenge, which results in Hal seeking revenge yet again but guess what? The motorcycle gang comes back for revenge and then Hal has to go out for revenge again.

That's a lot of revenge for one movie, isn't it? Well, that's pretty much the entire plot to MAD FOXES, which has to be considered one of the most entertaining bad movies ever made. The film has some really awful acting, an awful plot, awful direction, really bad camerawork and pretty much everything else is awful. I mean, if you wanted to play film critic then there's no way this thing would get anything other than a BOMB rating.

With that being said, the movie is so downright bad on so many levels that you really can't help but just kick back and have some fun with it. I mean, take a look at the violence in the movie. There's no question that anything was able to happen including one man getting his penis cut off and forced into his own mouth! There's non-stop violence throughout the film and most of it is downright hilarious including a shooting rampage early on. Just look at some of the actor's attempt at pulling off a death scene. Oh yeah, there's a lot of sex and nudity thrown in as well.

As you can tell, there's really nothing going on in MAD FOXES except for sleaze. The movie has nothing in it that would make you respect the filmmakers but at the same time I think they accomplished what they set out to do. This is basically a wannabe DEATH WISH but of course it's pure trash and on that level it's entertaining.

Mad Foxes is a film I first caught via its pre-cert UK VHS release, which was still a blast despite being a heavily cut version, and lead me to seek out an uncut DVD release a few years ago which contained all the ultra-violence that got trimmed by the nervous British distributor.

If you've never seen it before, Mad Foxes depicts the tit for tat conflict between flash playboy Hal and a shambolic biker gang, the bikers take umbrage at Hal's expensive corvette and spit on his face, he retaliates by running one of them off the road, they retaliate by beating him up and raping his girlfriend, he then calls on his friends at a karate school who beat up the bikers, castrate their leader and stick his dick into his mouth (needless to say that bit got cut from the UK video), the bikers then wipe out the members of the karate school with machine guns and grenades ….and so it goes on, and on, and on. Trashy and badly dubbed dialogue ("you squeal like an old bitch", "don't you have a little knife with you? I'd like to slice your prick", "you'll like my family, though my mother is an invalid, she fell from a horse and became paralytic"), only adds to the fun. It's also distinguished by a wildly over the top performance by an actor called Eric Falk, who judging from the trailers on the DVD, appears to have had quite a career in eurosleaze of the Erwin C. Dietrich stable. There is an air of Gypsy Dave Cooper about Falk's turn in Mad Foxes, and he is a similar mixture of heavy, exhibitionist, and comic relief imbecile "I can't stand it, we're not going to see him anymore" he boo hoos at the funeral of a slain biker buddy. Incredibly the film seems to have been conceived as an unofficial sequel to the 1978 American film 'Stingray' starring Christopher Mitchum , but I seriously doubt the two films have anything in common other than their heroes both owning Corvette Stingrays. In a scene towards the end of the film where Hal shoots up a film studio, you can even see this film's original title 'Stingray 2' written on a clapperboard prop, but it'll always be "Mad Foxes" to me. For all I know director Paul Grey could be a lifelong teetotaller and have grandchildren now, but the unusual amount of male full frontal nudity in the film, not to mention the excessive amount of drinking that goes on (Hal and his dad being rarely without a glass in their hands) does paint a mental picture of its maker as a serious alcoholic and closet case. The film optimistically writes its own epitaph when one of the bikers proclaims "the whole world will admire us".

In Denmark this gory and sick mutant was called "The Bikers And The Disco Kid"!?! It should give you a clue of what kind of trash we're dealing with here. After showing off his flashy fast car the "hero" gets beaten up and his girl is brutally raped by a moronic biker gang. He then contacts his kung fu buddies for help and they beat up the bikers and cut off the leader's penis (!) for revenge. The bikers then come back and gun down the kung fu guys...and so on. The dubbing is properly the worst ever and the film is drenched in blood, swastikas, disco, heavy metal, small bikes, sex and bad acting. The spirit of Herschell Gordon Lewis lives on, so get a copy of this obscure anti-masterpiece! Swiss producer Erwin C. Dietrich also worked with Jess Franco, so you know you're in for a treat!

Warning: Don't watch this freakshow unless you're intoxicated, it can seriously damaged your health!!

I don't remember ever seeing such bad dubbing as in the version I saw of this film. It doesn't even seem like the voice actors were watching the movie! When the actor's face on the screen would seem to denote that he is yelling, the dubbed voice sounds calm. When the actor's face on the screen would seem to denote that he is in pain, the dubbed voice sounds calm. In fact, the dubbed voice ALWAYS sounds calm!!

Not only that, but the actual writing of the English dubbed version leaves a lot ot be desired, to say the least. We are treated to such scintilating, saucy dialogue as:

Man in bathtub, to woman: "Come here." Woman: "Okay."

Even further, we have a biker gang that rides around on dirt bikes (?!?!) and a group of the laziest karate masters ever as their karate kicks don't even rise above their waists!!

I'm a big fan of "bad" movies but this one didn't make me laugh at all. It just made me wince in pain.

While en route to a nightclub, playboy Hal (José Gras) has a violent run-in with a neo-Nazi biker gang which ignites a series of vicious revenge attacks that culminate in murder.

Exploitation film-makers generally take one of two tried and tested routes—gritty realism or exaggerated excess; rarely are the two styles combined. Director Paul Grau, on the other hand, is clearly a true maverick of the genre, a man who likes to truck convention, break all the rules, do his own thing however unpredictable the result might be: for Mad Foxes, Grau recklessly combines genuinely mean-spirited nastiness with seemingly incongruent, over-the-top elements, and abandons technical perfection and logic in favour of a less rigid, more experimental approach to his volatile material. It's a radical stratagem which results in an undeniably unique piece of work—or to put it another way, the film is an inept one-of-a-kind mess, often unintentionally hilarious (or so I presume), occasionally shocking, sometimes completely random, but always totally insane.

To expound on Grau's bizarre combination of the ridiculous with the realistic, I'll describe the villains of the piece in more detail: sporting a range of clichéd motorcycle gang outfits accessorized with matching swastika armbands, the gang's appearance brings to mind the imbecilic Black Widows from Clint Eastwood movie 'Every Which Way but Loose', whose nefarious plans were constantly thwarted by Clint and his orangutan with suitably comical results. Despite their cartoonish countenance, however, Mad Foxes' bikers prove to be far from a laughing matter, raping and killing without mercy (but strangely enough, not putting so much as a scratch on Hal's swanky sports-car).

Another example of how director Grau casually mixes silliness with the surprisingly savage comes when Hal and his martial arts pals seek revenge for the rape of an 18-year-old virgin (whom Hal had hoped to break in himself): the fracas begins with some of the most pathetic karate ever captured on film, but ends with the bikers' leader having his severed penis unceremoniously jammed into his mouth. It's sudden changes in tone like that which have earned this film its reputation as one hell of a strange cult oddity.

Of course, with terrible direction, choppy editing, lousy acting, dire dubbing and poorly choreographed action, Mad Foxes is about as far removed from decent film-making as you can find, but it's hard to ignore any movie in which vicious rape rubs shoulders with rock 'n' roll jive dancing, evisceration and emasculation go hand in hand with full-frontal nudity and steamy sex, a visit to the crapper can result in sudden death (I've heard of suffering from explosive bowel movements, but this is something far worse), and absolutely no-one lives happily ever after.