Straw Dogs

This morning I saw Straw Dogs, starring James Marsden and Alexander Skarsgard.

It's a good thing I went into this film with low expectations.

Though I've never seen the 1971 original, I knew the premise and figured it wouldn't be a genius production. Boy was I right.

David (Marsden) needs a quiet place to finish his writing and Hollywood isn't cutting it. So he and his wife Amy (Kate Bosworth) head to her hometown in the south to stay at her parents' seemingly abandoned house.

Of course, time has stood still in this rural town and her apparent high school sweetheart Charlie (Skarsgard) still carries a torch for her. He is part of a 'construction' crew that her husband hires to replace a roof on the property. The other three bumpkins aren't good looking or 'smart' like Charlie, so he calls all the shots.

Amy isn't so smart either. She jogs barefoot and braless along this country path, then gets upset when the filthy men gawk at her. Even her husband sort of tells her she's asking for it.

The fish-out-of-water situations they put David in grow boring quite rapidly, but thankfully the sweaty, dirty shots of Charlie don't.

Really, that's all that kept me watching.

The couple gets tormented by her ex's posse yet they still stick around. James Woods is a nasty old drunk who targets a mentally challenged man, who we see get berated and beaten repeatedly. The whole town goes to church together because they're all the same religion in the Bible Belt. Need I say more?

All of the actors here are above this, which is why it's such a shame they were all in it.

It's perhaps the worst movie I've seen so far this year.