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Released by: Full Moon Entertainment
Released on: January, 2018.
Director: Paul Grau
Cast: Jose Gras, Laura Premica, Andrea Albani, Erik Falk
Year: 1981
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The Movie:
Co-produced by Erwin C. Dietrich (best known for producing a few of the prolific Jess Franco's better known films and lots of sexy Eurotrash), Mad Foxes is a film that truly has not a single redeeming quality to it. Simply trash for trash's sake, it's an absolutely unabashed mixture of sex, violence and naked kickboxing that sadly we're unlikely to ever see again. Luckily, it lives on Blu-ray to make sure that we don't ever have to go without it again.
The hero of the story is Hal (Paul Gras), and when we're first introduced to him we find him out wining and dining his lady friend on the eve of her eighteenth birthday. Hal has taken her to the Big Apple Disco and is trying to get her drunk so that he can get into her pants, so in that respect he's not so much a hero at all. Let's call him a protagonist instead. Actually once you start to think about it, Paul is a pompous dickhead. Anyway, after an evening of boozing it up, he drives her back to his place to ply her with more liquor and hopefully get it on. Unluckily for them, a gang of leather-clad Nazi bikers gets in their way. Hal's girlfriend ends up getting raped and it's up to him to take down these scumbags once and for all, cause Hal's just not having any of that.
Anyway, with a mind full of vengeance and a Corvette Stingray full of gas, Hal heads over to his kickboxing friends' place and talks them into taking justice to the street. They all head over to the bikers' hang out, which is some sort of abandoned coliseum where they booze it up and yell random things at one another. Upon his arrival he greets them by yelling 'Sons of bitches, here I am!' and a poorly choreographed fight scene ensues. Highlighted by a scene in which one of the kick-boxer guys cuts off the lead bikers' member and force feeds it to him, this is just a barrage of bad martial arts and ridiculous outfits set to goofy music. Bliss!
Once this nastiness is out of the way, Hal heads off to his parents' house and picks up a foxy hitchhiker along the way (who is fresh from a romp on the beach with her boyfriend who she leaves at the curb). The two head over to ma and pa's place to relax. Hal schools her in the ways of love, pressing her up against a weird artisanal wall piece that his parents have before wooing her into taking a bath with him by seductively grunting at her 'Sit on me!' But of course, those dastardly bikers turn up again and all hell breaks loose. You can't just cut a Nazi biker's cock off and feed it to him and assume he's not going to come and try to kill your family. They show up while Hal and the lady are horseback riding and screwing in a field. By the time they get back, Hal's folks are dead and he just gets even more pissed off. At this point, the kid gloves come off. Hal puts on his comfiest loafers and dons his best pair of tan colored action slacks and takes it upon himself to eliminate the Nazi biker threat once and for all. Erik Falk will keep taking off his pants and stumble around drunkenly, a Nazi dominatrix will work her magic on a hair guy with a bushy beard and a toothy grin, and Hal will dole out justice in big, bloody chunks.
As this movie plays out, a lot of people die. There's a whole whack of gratuitous sex and nudity (a fair bit of which is male and full frontal - that'd be Erik Falk again, infamous for also doing naked kickboxing in Rolls Royce Baby), and nothing even for an instant really makes a whole lot of sense. Oh, and the theme song is by Krokus and it's called Easy Rocker. Remember Krokus? You probably don't unless you were into 80s metal. I was into 80s metal so I remember Krokus. Anyway, that's beside the point. The point of this is to say that Mad Foxes is nuts. It's out of control. You really just have to see it for yourself, because no matter how many zany, low budget, bad movies you may have under your belt, nothing can prepare you for the sheer ineptitude of this film. At the same time, as inept as it is, the movie actually has decent enough production values and shows a fair bit of technical polish. Like most Dietrich productions made around this time a lot of the same cast members are used and a lot of the same music is recycled over and over again, not just in the same film, but between films. The cinematography is actually pretty nice though, and the locations secured for shooting occasionally make this look like it had much bigger budget than it did.
At roughly eight minutes in length, the movie never drags. When Hal isn't boffing some pretty Euro tart he's driving around looking unusually pleased with himself, offering up dopey lines of smug dialogue, or actually fighting with the bikers. The violence in the film is pretty bloody, and on top of that it's fairly creative in how it shows disposing of the various miscreants he's come up against. Puzzlingly enough, the swastikas on the bikers' armbands disappear any time the action takes them out of doors, but they reappear once things head back inside. There was probably some sort of law in Europe at the time prohibiting the public display of Nazi insignias but either way, you could definitely make a pretty cool drinking game out of this - take a shot every time a swastika appears or disappear! You'd be pretty sloshed pretty quickly, not that we condone such actions on this website.
There's also a strange homoerotic vibe through a lot of the movie. While Hal flaunts his heterosexuality anytime a woman gets near him, the bad guys seem to enjoy spending time together with their dongs hanging out and Hal's kickboxing friends like to pose and strut about looking muy macho indeed. They're also sometimes lit in soft focus, as if to romanticize their handsome good looks and impressive moustaches. The leader of the bikers, despite including rape high up on his list of favorite pastimes, is dubbed in a fairly effeminate voice and has some stereotypically gay mannerisms about him. Whether this was intentional or not on the part of the filmmakers? Who knows. But it's not hard to see it. Maybe it was put in the movie to give the ladies something to enjoy…?
At any rate, Mad Foxes is a seriously trashy delight. One of those rare scenes that seems to outdo itself with every next scene, it's a fast paced eight minute dose of unabashed ridiculousness and one of the most mind bogglingly awesome movies ever made.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Full Moon Entertainment's DVD release of Mad Foxes is a standard definition version of the Blu-ray release that came out in 2013 (reviewed here), which is not a bad thing at all as it looks very good. Obviously the Blu-ray looks better, it's a Blu-ray and this is a DVD, but this is a clean and nicely detailed transfer framed at 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen. It boasts very nice color reproduction, solid black levels and nice depth and texture. Unfortunately, it's interlaced, but other than that this is a very nice standard definition presentation.
Audio options are provided English Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo and 5.1 Surround Sound tracks. The 2.0 track sounds more authentic, but the 5.1 mix spreads out the effects and the score rather well in spots. Both tracks feature properly balanced levels and clean, clear dialogue. There are no alternate language or subtitle options provided.
Extras start off with Scum Of The Earth: The Making Of Mad Foxes, which is a twenty-three-minute long featurette made up of interviews with Erwin C. Dietrich, Helmi Sigg (who played Ronny) and Eric Falk (the world's greatest naked kickboxer). The three men sit in theater seats and talk, with Sigg going first talking about a love of movies that stems back to his childhood, how he got into acting, working with Paul Grau, and getting his break working as a lighting tech on Island Women. From there, Mad Foxes, which he describes as 'our own sandbox.' Falk chimes in and talks about how perfect the cast was, while Dietrich, much calmer and more reserved than the other two, offers his thoughts on the two actors and their work on a few of the exploitation films they made for him. Sigg notes that he would have only ever had sex with Brigitte Lahie in the movies, his thoughts on softcore films, why the swastikas appear and disappear in the film (it was illegal to show them outside) and how good Eric Falk is at playing a giant ape! Falk talks about how Mad Foxes saved his life, but we won't spoil how and why here. At any rate, it's an interesting piece and it's pretty great to get the chance to hear these three look back on the film the way that they do here.
Falk shows up in a separate nine-minute interview called Stiletto's Song where he speaks about how he sees the film as a very bloody comedy, how he used to have to fight big guys when working as a bouncer at a night club, how and why he decided to learn karate, dealing with The Hell's Angels, interacting with star Paul Grau and what he was like as a director, his thoughts on the costumes in the film, how he had slave girls of his own back in the day, and loads more. Falk is a character, and quite possibly completely insane.
Aside from that we get a trailer for the feature, trailers for a few other Full Moon releases, menus and chapter selection.
The Final Word:
Mad Foxes is an undisputable trash classic, a relentlessly entertaining barrage of sex, violence and sleaze and one of the most insanely entertaining movies to ever unfold before your leering eyes. Amazing stuff, really. Full Moon's DVD release looks and sounds quite good and it has a few nice extras too. Consider this film ESSENTIAL.
