Very disappointed :(

People are voting emotionally.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Italian director Mario Bava's cult classic 'Cani Arrabbiati' is a study of criminal minds in closed spaces. 'Mad Dogs' was considered to be lost but due to its leading lady Lea Lander's efforts, its glory has been restored enabling fans of horror and exploitation cinema to discover a lost classic. Director Bava shows the wickedness of criminals in closed spaces where they tend to be more vicious as there is no possibility for them to vent their anger through any outlet. As a heist film with utter disregard for human life, highest limits of cruelty are reached in 'Mad Dogs' when two criminals deliberately choose to unleash a fury of sexual violence against the lone woman occupant of a moving car. It is with bawdy jokes and sickening violence that ruthless criminals are able to subdue a weak woman. The film also raises a lot of questions about the inadequacy of police forces in Italy as three hoodlums are shown to have taken the entire city to ransom. Although the film boasts of a solid beginning and a fairly decent middle part, its ending was a huge disappointment as the 'dénouement' didn't match at all with what was being shown to viewers. In 'Rabid Dogs', something is fishy with the way the film progresses can be guessed immediately after the beginning of the film if an observant viewer chooses to watch with attention how the driver seemed to be utterly lost in his own preoccupations. Lastly, one must wait till the end of the film to find how the end as well as the beginning of this film were closely related.

Following a bungled robbery, three violent criminals take a young woman, a middle-aged man, and a child hostage and force them to drive them outside Rome to help them make a clean getaway.According to Bava's son Lamberto, Mario apparently considered the film his most important work, presumably because it showed he could "compete" with the other police thrillers out there. Unfortunately, of course, Mario never lived to see the film succeed or fail. Which is a shame, because this definitely ranks among his better projects.Bava scholar Tim Lucas wrote, "Rabid Dogs is to Bava's career what Detour (1945) is to the filmography of Edgar G. Ulmer, a minimalist noir masterpiece that shows how much drama he was capable of conjuring on screen with little or no means." This is sort of unfair. While comparing those two films is legitimate, I would like to think that Bava's career as a whole had more high points than Ulmer's.

For many years Rabid Dogs was Mario Bava's lost movie. Having seen it, it's criminal that it was never released directly after it was made. It's a very mean and clever crime-thriller that once again showcases Bava's versatility as a film-maker. It's very hard to say how well Rabid Dogs would have done at the box office back in the 70's. It's extremely hard-edged at times, with scenes of sexual humiliation that can be difficult to watch. But in this sense it is no different from a slew of other successful early 70's films such as Deliverance, Straw Dogs or A Clockwork Orange. So its mean-spiritedness was entirely in keeping with the times. Like those other celebrated films I mentioned, Rabid Dogs is a very well made movie, with a tight script, good performances, a nice score and, despite the fact the story almost exclusively takes place in a car, solid cinematography. It also has an extremely satisfying ending.It's about the aftermath of a heist when a gang of violent criminals kidnap a woman then a man and his son. The focus of the film is entirely on these characters.Mario Bava is rightly respected as one of the most significant Italian genre directors. He made his name primarily on the back of his horror films. These movies were imbued with a beautiful and colourful aesthetic that clearly influenced the likes of Dario Argento. Rabid Dogs is atypical of Bava's work. It does not feature the candy-coloured lighting or the fantastical nature of much of his celebrated earlier work. It is, instead, a harsh realistic movie. It's brutality is strong and it's easily Bava's most shocking film alongside his nihilistic proto-slasher Bay of Blood; another film from the latter part of his career. But where that movie is imbued with a black humour and revels in it's gloriously over-the-top carnage, Rabid Dogs has a deadly serious tone and its disturbing nature is derived mainly from sexual-humiliation and psychological terror, and not purely from graphic violence. It's the most disturbing film in Bava's highly impressive repertoire.The film shares the nihilism and cynical view of human nature that is so evident in so many of the directors other films. The atmosphere is one of dread and claustrophobia. The criminal gang is terrifyingly authentic in their nastiness - Don Backy and Luigi Montefiori make for very convincing psychopaths. The acting in general is universally good from all involved and the characters are more three dimensional than is often the case in 70's Italian thrillers. And everything is held together by a plot line that is intelligently constructed and benefits from repeat viewings.A different version of this film was re-edited, re-scored and had additional footage added. The resultant film was entitled Kidnapped. It is definitely the lesser of the two versions, although not without interest. The insertion of the couple of new scenes seemed to work for me; not necessarily an improvement but an interesting alternative. The same cannot be said of Stelvio Cipriani's new score. Where his original soundtrack was sparse and dramatic, the new one seems out of place. We have the odd spectacle of a film from 1974, being released in 1997 with a score that sounds like it is from 1982. Having seen Kidnapped before Rabid Dogs and only once, I can't say definitively how the re-edits compare, but there did appear to be a few unnecessary changes and over-all the movie certainly appeared to move along at a little more sluggish pace. Overall, I would definitely have to recommend the Rabid Dogs version, but if you get the chance check out Kidnapped too as a point of comparison.This is one of Mario Bava's best and least typical films. It shows if proof was needed, that Bava was capable of making sparse, nasty and uncompromising stuff. The year before this he made another unappreciated masterwork, Lisa and the Devil; Rabid Dogs shares that movie's troubled history but it could not be further away in tone. It proves that Bava was truly a master of dark and troubling cinema; that he was as adept with tough muscular narratives as he was with lush Gothic nightmare worlds.

Story revolves around a rag group of robbers who are on the run from the policia. Instead of making a calculated plan to steal their loot they instead go for the guns blazing type of robbery. Yay for us! They do get the cash but they end up losing one of their own, the driver. With their plan unraveling they need a car and need it fast, and that's when they take a driver-by hostage and force him to drive them to their safe-house. All the while they have another hostage in the back who's easy on the eyes. And to make matters worse the car they took hostage also has a sick young child in it. Three violent robbers and three civilians in a tiny car while running from the cops makes one entertaining picture.The film premise is cool but to truly make this film work is the characters. And all do their job very well. Each character is memorable and have their own important parts to the film. The bad guys in Rabid Dogs were extra memorable as they played their parts in an over the top way, with wild eyes, maniacal laughing and mannerisms and just an energy that this film needed to keep the viewer enthralled.Rabid Dogs was a film I've been meaning to see for a while and I'm glad I finally did. I always got it confused with Straw Dogs, which I still need to see as well. But Rabid Dogs was a cool flick that instantly became one of my favorites in the crime/thriller genre.