Straw Dogs

The knock at the door meant the birth of one man and the death of seven others!

Quiet American mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) and his British-born wife Amy (Susan George) relocate to Amy's rural English hometown in an attempt to flee the violent social unrest brewing in the US. When David hires some locals, including a former boyfriend of Amy's, to repair his barn, the couple find themselves being subtly harassed and bullied by the workmen. The more the pacifist David ignores the problem, the more the harassment intensifies, leading to terrifying consequences as he ultimately finds himself forced to defend his home and his life, discovering a frighteningly vicious side to himself as events escalate towards a bloody climax...

Sam Peckinpah's controversial and bloody study of a civilised man being pushed to committing acts of violence remains disturbingly visceral today and is here released uncut. Available on video for a brief period during the early 1980s, the nature of some of the film's imagery resulted in the British Board of Film Classification demanding the video be withdrawn under the Video Recordings Act of 1984.