Straw Dogs, 1971

What Jaws did for sharks and Deliverance did for inbred southerners, Straw Dogs did for Englishmen. It's quite probably Sam Peckinpah's most disturbing film, and that's saying something for a director who always had a perverse obsession with depicting grisly violence in his work. I've never really appreciated his films. Peckinpah clearly wanted to disgust his audience over the idea of violence and yet insisted on wallowing in it to the point of glorification. "Violence porn" I believe is the term for it. His moral in this film seems to be that violence is sometimes the only option for a man willing to defend his principles to truly become a man. This is especially true if, deep-down, that man is kind of an abusive jerk whose immature tart of a wife provokes all the sick, limey lechers in town into raping her - an act which she clearly half-enjoys. That's right, somehow this film manages to be both misogynistic and misandristic. Nobody comes away looking good in this film, least of all the English. It's the kind of movie that makes you despise humanity in general, which isn't exactly a favorite sub-genre of mine. Only Hoffman's impressive performance makes it bearable to watch.

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