Straw Dogs
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Movie Reviews of Straw Dogs
Movie Review: Acceptable and happy
Summary: 4 Stars
Cost low, postage high?? Maybe outside of vendor's control - maybe for off-shore sales you US guys (and amazon) need to sort or fix the postage/shipping rates?? The DVD cost $5 and the postage cost $15??Movie Review: neither do i
Summary: 4 Stars
It is too often wrongly assumed that Peckinpah endorsed the acts of his "heroes." This film is most completely approached knowing that Peckinpah believed the Hoffman character to be despicable.Movie Review: Slow Start Bang Up Finish
Summary: 4 Stars
It's set in Ireland and kind of goes slow, but really turns it up in the last 40-50 minutes. With a bang up ending.Movie Review: a classic
Summary: 4 Stars
Sam Peckenpah was many years ahead of the pack and Dustin Hoffman was brilliant in this movie.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.