Straw Dogs: The O.G. Dustin Hoffman Version

Taking a flier on some movies that imdb.com rated very highly and that were $3.00 or so online, I stumbled upon Straw Dogs and wanted to give it a run. I knew the premise: SPOILER ALERT! Hoffman and his wife return to her roots to a small town in Ireland where they are generally harassed and her "past" is used to attract the wrong folks from town. Eventually it leads to crazy, blood stained vengence. Hoffman already had the Graduate, but this certainly was some earlier work for him. Sam Peckinpah also wrote and directed The Wild Bunch, so he's far from adverse to violence. He tried some close-ups and camera tricks with this film that were pretty unsuccessful I felt, but you can see where thrillers/action movies borrow some elements from this. 1971 was a long time ago, so I tried to keep that in mind while watching. It was also hard to smoother my violent and rampent jingoism as well, but I tried. Hoffman is unreal and this certainly helped cement his stardom/leading man quality after his turn as Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy & his role in the Graduate earned two Best Actor Oscar nods that he missed out on. He carries the film and the rest of the cast does enough, though nobody else stands out besides a beautiful Susan George for completely different reasons besides acting. Bottom Line: 7.2 out of 10. I thought it was a good movie and the premise of the story certainly didn't help it progress along for me. It's far from exciting until the last 30 minutes where the lid gets blow off. Worth watching at some point, though I wouldn't recommend this one for a date movie...