Straw Dogs

Straw Dogs
by Sam Peckinpah

Straw Dogs
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DVD Cover Information

Actor: Del Henney, Dustin Hoffman, Peter Vaughan, Susan George, T.P. McKenna
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Cinematographer: John Coquillon
Editor: Paul Davies
Editor: Tony Lawson
Editor: Roger Spottiswoode
Writer: Gordon Williams
Writer: David Zelag Goodman
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 118 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-10-19
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Anchor Bay Entertainment

Movie Reviews of Straw Dogs

Movie Review: What a bunch of English wankers.
Summary: 3 Stars


Straw Dogs is a good film, but one that causes me to look down on limeys. Usually, Englishmen are respectable enough. However, I find myself losing respect for them after watching this film. Perhaps Sam Peckinpah was somehow inaccurate in his portrayal of limeys as depraved animals. Even in British director Peter Greenaway's films, notably The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the characters aren't usually all bad. In Straw Dogs, all the Englishmen are depraved.

Take the Hedden family, for instance. Headed by the old, filthy drunk Tom (Peter Vaughan), they are a bunch of neer-do-wells who spent most of their time crawling about the local pub and screwing their own sister. The daughter in this case is Janice (Sally Thomsett), who is treated as a sex object both by her father and her teenaged brother, Bobby (Len Jones). Hell, even Bobby seems to be portrayed as a scumbag with all his incestuous yearnings and misogynistic attitude toward his own sister.

Then there's the trio of workers hired by David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), to make repairs on his home. One guy, Cawsey (Jim Norton) steals a pair of Amy's (Susan George) knickers for his own amusement. The other two men, Venner (Del Henney) and Scutt (Ken Hutchison), invite David on a hunting trip, only to sneak back to his cottage and rape Amy in a most brutal scene. The first rapist, Venner, isn't entirely without feelings but is still an animalistic scumbag. Scutt is an utter degenerate.

Speaking of perverts, there's also child molester and one-time pedarast Henry Niles (David Warner), who, despite warnings from his older brother John (Peter Arne), continues to go about his perverted ways with Janice. Her eventual fate causes all hell to break lose. The only other main English characters in the film, including Major Scott (T.P. Mckenna) and Reverend Hood (Colin Welland) aren't given much to do besides drink and ogle Amy.

Most of these parties eventually meet to culminate in a half-hour siege on the Sumners' home, where David kills all his attackers in an orgy of bloodletting. Thus, ending a quite decadent movie full of animals and sexual perverts.

Sure, Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch featured its share of loathsome degenerates, but Straw Dogs isn't set in America. That's the difference. I feel Straw Dogs would've worked better if Peckinpah did some research on Cornish rednecks in general and not portray them as such monsters in the film.

Summary of Straw Dogs

One of Sam Peckinpah's most controversial efforts, this film came out at a critical moment in the early 1970s, released in the same month as both Dirty Harry and A Clockwork Orange, causing a furor over film violence. Based on a little-known British novel, the film casts Dustin Hoffman as a bookish American mathematician on sabbatical in rural England, in the town where his young bride (Susan George) grew up. He finds himself forced to defend his home against an assault by local toughs, and discovers a frighteningly feral and vicious side to himself. Though Straw Dogs has a reputation for graphic violence, it actually looks tame by contemporary standards. Instead, the violence is psychological, and the suspense and shocks are induced by the editing--you're more terrified by what you think you see than by what you are actually shown. --Marshall Fine
Brace yourself for the extended version of this daring and provocative drama from the director of The Wild Bunch. Starring Dustin Hoffman in a 'superbly realized (Time) performance, this brilliant (Cue), disturbing film charts one man's brutally violent journey from cowardice to courage and delivers one helluva jolt (Playboy)!

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