Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
Director
Sam Peckinpah
Cast
Dustin Hoffman,
Susan George,
Peter Vaughan,
T. P. McKenna,
Del Henney,
Jim Norton
Genre
Crime,
Drama,
Thriller
David Sumner, a mild-mannered academic from the United States, marries Amy, an Englishwoman. In order to escape a hectic stateside lifestyle, David and his wife relocate to the small town in rural Cornwall where Amy was raised. There, David is ostracized by the brutish men of the village, including Amy's old flame, Charlie. Eventually the taunts escalate, and two of the locals rape Amy. This sexual assault awakes a shockingly violent side of David.
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TV Guide Magazine
Straw Dogs is one of Sam Peckinpah's finest films, a relentless study in violence and machismo that is shocking, not only for its explicit gore, but for the degree to which it manipulates "civilized" audiences. Even the most passive viewer may find himself silently cheering on the carnage at the film's climax--an act that, in retrospect, gives much cause for discomfort.
The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias
Though studio interference and his own personal demons hampered his later work, Straw Dogs shows a master in control of his effects, which made an artist of Peckinpah's sensibility an especially dangerous man.
Slant Magazine by Chuck Bowen
One of the most ambiguous, neurotic, and disturbing of all American films.
Austin Chronicle
If The Wild Bunch was Peckinpah's most violent film, surely Straw Dogs has to be his coarsest and most intense. Peace and love? Forget it.
Chicago Reader by Dave Kehr
Straw Dogs has the heat of personal commitment and the authority of deep (if bitter) contemplation. It is also moviemaking of a very high order.
Slant Magazine by Nick Schager
Sitting through Peckinpah’s controversial classic is not unlike watching a lit fuse make its slow, inexorable way toward its combustible destination—the taut build-up is as shocking and vicious as its fiery conclusion is inevitable.
The New Yorker by Pauline Kael
Despite Peckinpah’s artistry, there’s something basically grim and crude in Straw Dogs. It’s no news that men are capable of violence, but while most of us want to find ways to control that violence, Sam Peckinpah wants us to know that that’s all hypocrisy.
The New York Times by Vincent Canby
It is an intelligent movie, but interesting only in the context of his other works.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
The most offensive thing about the movie is its hypocrisy; it is totally committed to the pornography of violence, but lays on the moral outrage with a shovel.
Variety
Director Sam Peckinpah indulges himself in an orgy of unparalleled violence and nastiness with undertones of sexual repression in this production.
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