One of the most vile exploitation movies ever made, MAD FOXES is often unduly compared to LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT in its mixture of gory violence and subversive social commentary.
The film details a violent rivalry between Hal Martin, a yuppie playboy who drives a fancy Stingray sports car, and a band of sociopath bikers. At a stop light, Hal kisses his 18-year-old date Babsy as the bikers roll up. Their homosexual leader taunts Hal and spits on him. When the light turns green, Hal forces one of the bikers into a fatal accident.
In an extended party scene, Hal gets Babsy drunk at a club, as a prelude to deflowering her. His plans are interrupted by the bikers, who are waiting for them outside the club. They beat him up and Babsy is brutally raped by Stiletto, the hulking psychopath of the group.
Hal's desire for revenge is answered by a friend who runs a kickboxing school. As the bikers get drunk at a makeshift funeral for their fallen compatriot, a dozen or so angry kick boxers show up. After they beat up the bikers and castrate the leader.
The bikers retaliate, visiting the kickboxing school with machine guns and killing everyone in sight. They storm Hal's apartment building and shoot a parking lot guard. A neighborhood boy warns Hal, who quickly flees the city.
At this point, the film digresses with an overlong sequence of two nude lovers gamboling on an ocean beach. They get dressed and start hitchhiking when along comes Hal in his Stingray. The woman, Lily, gets in the car with Hal and leaves her man stranded on the side of the road.
She and Hal end up at his wealthy parents' country estate. Dad is a wealthy patriarch type and Mom is stuck in a wheelchair. As Hal and Lily exercise their sexual rites in the forest and in a bathtub filled with dirty water, the bikers show up and massacre the rest of the family and servants. This pushes Hal over the edge and, armed with guns and grenades, he finishes off the bikers. The movie's nihilistic coda finds the surviving castrated biker leader holding Hal and Lily at bay with a bomb.
MAD FOXES is constructed as a fable, in which logic is subverted in order to make a statement. If its makers offer any message at all, it's an hysterical overreaction to upper caste fears of street punks and gun-toting anarchists. The coiffed, macho Hal is not portrayed as an action hero, and his methods and motivations are only a little less vicious than the bikers. But he is rich, drives a nice car and can easily seduce vapid women, whereas the bikers are greasy-haired, un-socialized rejects who are given a vaguely gay cast.
In published interviews the film's producer, Swiss sleaze-master Erwin C. Dietrich, has played down his involvement with the film and claims it was too excessive even for him. That says a lot.
