Straw Dogs

Rating:
Summary: GOOD FILM...CAN'T SEE WHY BANNED IN UK
Review: I imported this film expecting to be shocked again...and was not that much,but it is still a good old fashioned thriller set on rural Britain which we do not see enough now.The gloomy bleak moorlands seem to add to the sense of foreboding,as the atmosphere of paranoia develops well as Dustin Hoffman and his sexy Wife Susan George are terrorised more and more by nutty locals working on their dream country home.The film is well acted by all,and the rape scary,but it does seem tame compared to some stuff being passed by the BBFC nowadays.The picture and sound are fairly good but do notexpect anything else extra as there are no features at all sadly.Not even a trailer.But it is fairly well priced and a film i would watch again evantually.

Rating:
Summary: That most ugly abstraction
Review: Aside from the notoriety, and aside from the viciousness (the film leaves you most of all with a taste of viciousness in your mouth, a sour, bitter, metallic taste, akin to that feeling you get reading "The Tin Drum", the piece of metal stuck in the back of your throat), what you get from "Straw Dogs" is a manifestation of personal demons (specifically, Sam Peckinpah's personal demons, but also, both more generally and more acutely, masculine demons) and an exploration of a certain type of male sexuality.

To do the film justice, you need to plug your brain in. Which, on the surface, may not appear to be the case, because the story - what it is - is relatively simple. It's an English western.

David, a mathematician (Dustin Hoffman), is on sabbatical from the university where he teaches. He has left the states and returned with his wife Amy, (Susan George) to the tiny English village in which she grew up. From the word go, David has to contend with the fact that Amy has a history in the town. He also has to contend with the fact that she is younger than him, and bored. Her boredom serves as a distraction from the reason behind his sabbatical. Amy on the other hand has to live with a quiet, "odd" American who does not give her the attention she requires.

Within the town, there are various echoes at work: there is a character called Niles, played by David Warner, who has a known history of problems relating with women (to the extent that he has served time for undisclosed offences); there are the locals, who divide their time between procrastinating over work on David and Amy's roof, and leering at Amy (who periodically informs David about the effect she has on them, how they "lick her all over with their eyes"); and there is David himself, spending a little more time than he really should looking at teenager Sally Thomsett.

All of which feeds into the terrible rape scene (a scene of which Peckinpah is quoted as saying - in the excellent biography "If it moves . . . kill 'em" - "I wanted to film the best rape scene ever" - a line ripe with complexity and moral disorder): Amy is raped by Charlie, leader of the leering locals, who may or may not be her childhood sweetheart (two earlier scenes indicate that (a) something went on years earlier and (b) Charlie took it further then than Amy was happy with).

At some point during the awful protracted rape, for whatever reason (and there is something manifest at work in her face, palpably desire but desire for what - who knows?) she stops fighting and starts (ugly this, but true - this is what happens in the film:) - starts to participate. The participation is taken (by some) to be a playing out of a certain retrogressive masculine attitude (that all women - deep down etc etc etc). However you interpret it - and it does require interpretation, importantly - the participation is at the dark heart of "Straw Dogs"' notoriety. The fact that this is followed by the appearance of a second man, and a second rape, only compounds the difficulty - the cloudiness - that will inevitably surround any attempt to precisely articulate what is going on here.

At which point, the echoes become still more manifest: you have Niles, despised because of his weakness for young girls (and as such - in the context of the character's lives - a "bad" man), you have the men who rape Amy (a fact that remains undisclosed within the body of the film), men who later attempt to avenge themselves on Niles (in a vivid reworking of "Of Mice and Men"), and you have David - a man in whom, perhaps, all of these violent urges conflict.

The film culminates in a series of extremely violent (and ridiculous) altercations, veering wildly between extremes (shotguns firing off left, right and centre, characters riding tricycles and playing bagpipe records, mantraps, boiling fat, fire, pokers, broken glass, wire). But the central relationship - the whole dynamic of the film - between David and Amy continues to fight definition, remaining ultimately unresolved and unclear.

In the end, aside of everything else (aside of the fact that this film lingers with you, you do not watch "Straw Dogs" and leave it at that, those "Straw Dogs" take up residence with you, for a while), you have the fact that this film would not get made today - the Dustin Hoffman character is too complex and too unsympathetic, and there are too many (coldly intellectual) questions raised by what goes on.

It is dissatisfying but intentionally so: this is Peckinpah's "Salo": it demonstrates that resolution is the most ugly abstraction, that what gets wrapped up leaves the viewer with no space for thought: that which is left open, is that which remains discussed. At the end, almost a week after last watching the film, I am reminded of what Ian McEwan wrote in his novel "Black Dogs": "...I came face to face with evil. I didn't quite know it at the time, but I sensed it in my fear - these animals were the creations of debased imaginations, of perverted spirits no amount of social theory could account for. And . . .when conditions are right . . . a terrible cruelty, a viciousness against life erupts, and everyone is surprised by the depth of hatred within . . . (But) This is what I know: Human nature, the human heart, the spirit, the soul, the consciousness itself - call it what you like - in the end, it's all we've got to work with. It has to develop and expand, or the sum of our misery will never diminish."

That is - at last - "Straw Dogs"' role: to develop, to expand, to show us what can be, what needn't be, but what is, and hope that something else (not necessarily finer) but something else, prevails.

Rating:
Summary: "The ruthless sage . . ."
Review: I'm paraphrasing, but the movie gets its title from a bit of some old Japanese philosopher's pithy observation that "Heaven and earth is ruthless and treats men like straw dogs; the sage is ruthless and treats men like straw dogs." In other words, the tag-line that producers of *Straw Dogs* came up with entirely misses the point: it's HOFFMAN who treats the Cornish brutes like straw dogs. Hoffman, sage. Cornish brutes, straw dogs. Anyway, as for the movie itself . . . it's not the best Peckinpah. However, one wonders uneasily if this movie, average as it is, actually sums up Peckinpah's "philosophy", if he indeed had one. If so, it reveals an utterly childish mindset, infected with machismo and other Norman-Mailerisms. It reinforces certain idiotic men's belief that women enjoy rape, for instance. That's for starters -- the rest of the film indicates that you're not a man until you become violent, blah blah blah, it's the mentality of a 6th-grade bully. A disappointing insight into the mind of a great film artist. On the plus side, Dustin Hoffman and Susan George have a perverse, edgy chemistry together (perhaps a really good movie could've been made about how these two completely opposites got married in the first place). But this gets subsumed in the leering, violent hijinks that dominate the 2nd half of the film. *Straw Dogs* is undeniably accomplished . . . I'm just not overly impressed with what it accomplishes.

Rating:
Summary: Disturbing, even today
Review: The first contemporary film made by Sam Peckinpah, whose five previous movies were all westerns, STRAW DOGS, in its study of how one seemingly mild-mannered man (in this case Dustin Hoffman) can be driven to defend himself through extreme violence, can, in my belief, be classified as a sociological and psychological horror film.

Released in late 1971, at the same time as Stanley Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, STRAW DOGS caused an enormous amount of debate on both sides of the Atlantic concerning not only its violence, but also the horrific rape scene involving Hoffman's wife (Susan George), which got the film banned in England, where Peckinpah made it. Both Kubrick's and Peckinpah's films differ from each other, in that Kubrick's is a more political allegory and Peckinpah's is philosophical--and yet both films are, in their own ways, masterpieces.

Peckinpah, in a stroke of pure genius, with the exception of the hideous rape scene, holds off on his typical slow-motion violence until the climactic siege, where Hoffman has to protect a mental patient (David Warner) from a band of drunk hooligans. This sequence is still nerve-shattering and violent, brilliantly edited, shot, and acted, with Peter Vaughan making for one of the most frightening heavies ever.

Besides the acting, the other fine points of STRAW DOGS are the ominous cinematography of John Coquillon, who also shot the low-budget 1968 British horror film THE WITCHFINDER GENERAL, and a brilliantly haunting Stravinsky/Herrmann-influenced music score by Peckinpah's favorite composer Jerry Fielding. STRAW DOGS is not an easy movie to watch or to like, but for those so inclined, it is very much worth seeing.

Rating:
Summary: Le Grande Stinkburger
Review: Holy crap. This movie just stole 2 hours of my life. Stupid, misguided, ridiculous crap. I am actually angry at the person person who recommended it and mad that I wasted time on this stupid stupid movie. Starts off good...tension and such but who thought up this stinkburger story? Wife is brutally raped but there's no repercussions for this act, She doesn't tell anyone about it...pedophile murders a girl and ends up in Dustin's house. Drunken Brits after the pedophile/murderer surround Dustin's house (the same ones who raped his wife) with guns. They try to get in, break all Dustin's windows and Dustin shouts, "cut it out, I mean it now...I'm gonna give you one more chance. If you don't cut it out there's gonna be real trouble. I'll press charges!" Just stupid stupid story. Two seperate stories would have probably made two halfway decent movies but this mishmash makes no sense. How about Dustin's wife is raped and they get revenge on the monsters responsible...or, take out Dustin all together, pedophile murders girl and town goes nuts killing him. This stinkburger ends up with everyone dead but Dustin, his wife & the pedophile. Stupid stupid stupid movie. And the end! Dustin rides off in the sunset with the pedophile leaving his wife alone in a house with a bunch of dead people. Don't waste your time. You'd be better off spening the 2 hours having your eyes gouged out and your ears burned closed just so you'd never have to see or hear this awful piece of crap.

Rating:
Summary: Violence without redemption
Review: Call me old fashioned but I believe when violence is used in a movie it should be done with integrity as a vehicle for expressing something greater than itself and not merely for its own sake. Kubrick succeeded brilliantly in doing this in a Clockwork Orange wherein the movies violence is used reflectively as an incisive critique on the ineffectiveness of criminal law control methods. No such redeeming qualities are to be found in Straw Dogs and even the fine performance given here by master duffus Dustin Hoffman is but frugal conpensation for the insipid violent innuedo that is this film. Hoffman plays an American mathmatics prodigy who has recently moved to a small Northern English village to share a house with his nubile young companion. He hires local men to do some restorations on the house, one of whom proclaims to have had previous carnal relations with his employers mistress. Tensions arise, beer is split, guns come out of the closet (and a dead cat too- don't ask), testostorone needs an outlet and by the end all bloody hell breaks loose. We are given next to no information about our protagonists past or reasons for leaving the States and none whatsoever about his girlfriend. Their relationship seems totally arbitrary; he the high brow professor, she a bubble gum munching dilettante they are diametrical opposites with nothing shared in common save the mutal need for sex. It's a gross missreckonig of the filmaker to blithely assume the viewer should be expected to care about such scantily developed characters. Why three stars then? Peckinhams depiction of the repressed English characters "stiff upper lip" demeanour is bang on and worth some merit. Likewise he succeeds brilliantly in exposing the clash between two vastly different cultures. In terms of emotional impact this film will leave the viewer exhausted by it's end.Usually thats tantamount to a having a satisfactory movie going experience here it merely leaves the viewer feeling he's been swindled out of his emotions and asking by the films end "What was the whole point?"

Rating:
Summary: well done
Review: I saw this film when it first came out and i was eager to purchase it...oh no i live in the U.K,what shall i do!!!! I know i will import it.THANK YOU AMAZON. This film is a masterpiece of film making and well worth the money. The picture quality is amazing for a film that is so old. well done to whoever you are. :]

Rating:
Summary: Banned in Britain
Review: The packaging for this DVD shows the futility of banning the film. The slogan 'Banned in the UK' can be used the world over as a means of selling the film. It is assumed that the film will consequently be ultra-violent, but this is a misconception. This film is not banned because of its gruesome conclusion, but solely because of the rape scene. I recently saw an interview with the British censor who explained his reasoning. He argued that the scene is unacceptable because it advocates the 'male myth' that a woman will enjoy rape. The film could have been distributed with some cuts, but the studio, quite rightly, turned down this option. The absurdity of the censor's position is that there are other films freely available which have rape scenes which show a woman apparently enjoying rape, including Doctor Zhivago and High Plains Drifter. Moreover, Susan George's character in Straw Dogs can hardly be said to have enjoyed the experience in the end. She is left distraught and broken. It is a great pity that this film is banned in Britain, for it is a film of great artistic worth. It is not as if this is some cheap little sordid film, rather it one of the key works of a great director. I found the film interesting because it develops its story in a gradual way allowing time for characters to develop. The final dénouement has all the more power because of this build up. It is worth noting that there is some confusion regarding the setting of this film. It is supposed to be Cornwall, in the Southwest of England. This is clear from the accents of the British actors. This DVD has no extras, but at least it shows the film in its complete version. The picture quality is fine and only the sound is a little unclear at times. This DVD is well worth getting, and well worth importing if you live in Britain.

Rating:
Summary: UNBELIEVABLE
Review: This i sa great film. I just wonder why it didnt get the recognition or popularity it deserved. I'm a huge fan of mob movies, and films like clockwork orange and taxi driver. If you like films like these, you will love straw dogs, trust me. Dustin Hoffman in this film could hold his own with Al and Robert anyday. The picture on this dvd is great, alot better than some transfers of other older films, but the surround sound is lacking but its such a great movie it doesnt matter. good character depth, great story, a must have in my opinion.

Rating:
Summary: Review
Review: An intriguing piece of filmmaking with Hoffman has an engaging, although somewhat offbeat choice as a lead. It's really the atmosphere and not the violence that gives this film its strength as it conveys the multiple messages in its brooding and eerie nature. The violence seems almost like a second thought and while telling, doesn't reveal the neanderthal qualites of even the most civilized of men in quite the same manner. It's true Peckinpah is known for his rather poor portrayal of women, but this one really takes the cake. Her characterization is simply another slap in the face to Hoffman's less-than-manly demeanor, but she borders on schizophrenic rather than child- like and immature in her sexuality and need for attention and it destroys much of the credibility of the film as you begin to question Hoffman's judgement for picking such a mentally unstable woman as a wife and beg the locals to do away with him swiftly as punishment for removing her from the sanitarium. I cringe to think they might have procreated. That aside, this film is worthy of examining in the context of its time and the events surrounding its release to which it speaks volumes.