#39 – Mad Foxes

MAD FOXES is the demented afterbirth of Swiss and Spanish filmmakers flailing wildly to create the most extreme exploitation film ever made and succeeding the way a drunk tumbles down a flight of stairs only to roll onto his feet and onto a slapstick rake.

It is as vile as it is hilarious, as inept as it is outrageous. It is a film to be both enjoyed and endured. It is the nadir of cinema, but so below the bottom that it paradoxically flirts with the pinnacle of the medium's potential.

After a couple are brutally assaulted for inadvertently causing an accident that claims the life of a biker, what first proceeds as a conventional exploitation film revenge story escalates into an all out war between a karate dojo and a Neo-Nazi motorcycle gang that culminates in castration and self-cannibalism. And that's just the first 15 minutes!

From there, our “protagonist” - a reprehensibly sleazy casanova and target for the biker gang's ire - quite literally attempts to depart his own movie by absconding to the country to make-out with a hitchhiker in a bathtub of piss-stained water. Alas, the MAD FOXES are hot on his heels, as well as the wheels of his bright-white sports car.

What buoys this nigh-picaresque plot is not the cinematography (which is garish), nor the parade of action (which is clumsily executed), but rather its delirious English language dub. Every line of dialogue is a cacophony of improvised mumbles and pithy non-sequiturs, and when coupled with the genuinely shocking violence the film depicts throughout its narrative's rapid ascent into pure lunacy, the cinematic alchemy achieved is truly a wonder to simultaneously adore and abhor.