Rabid Dogs

A bank robbery is in full swing. The driver of the getaway car is waiting on the street with the engine running. Suddenly an explosion is heard - and events take a turn for the worse. The masked men with the bags of money drive off with screeching tires, but the police are hot on their heels. A serious escape accident - the gangster boss dies. When the criminals switch cars and take three innocent hostages, the problems really begin: The car owner's drugged-up daughter (Lambert Wilson), who was on her way to a life-saving operation, is asleep in the back seat. Together with an uninvolved young woman as the third hostage (Virginie Ledoyen), a road trip to the border begins, in which it is not certain who will survive. This remake of the 1974 Mario Bava Giallo thriller "Cani arrabbiati" guarantees high tension and pure action. Bava's film was not due to see the light of day until 1997 due to the bankruptcy of his production company. Almost 20 years later, director Éric Hannezo lets the wild dogs off the leash in a similarly uncompromising manner: The result is a magnificent action spectacle whose ending leaves you speechless. "Things are never what they seem," says the child's apparent father in "Rabid Dogs", the French-Canadian remake of Bava's giallo thriller, in which the talented director Éric Hannezo packs the grimly cynical subject of the original into breathtakingly elegant images. He cleverly omits seemingly nonsensical subplots, extends a dramatic interlude in a bizarre redneck settlement into which the fugitives slip, and allows plenty of time for atmospheric interactions between the antagonists Guillaume Gouix, the boss of the bank robbers, and Lambert Wilson as the father. The film, which is only slightly toned down in the finale, offers a brilliant, suitably refreshed reinterpretation of the maltreated Bava original." (Jörg Gerle, on: www.filmdienst.de)