Chiens de paille

This remake has no reason to exist. It is shallow and poorly acted and lacks most of the tense emotions and moral questions raised by the original. Hollywood at its worst, cellophane-wrapped, uninspired, made-for-TV quality, cookie cutter remake. Of course, it is padded with clichés, cheap effects and mass-appeal frosting to bring out brain-dead teen movie goers. Why did a great actor like James Wood let himself get suckered into this disaster? This could have been an so-so B-action movie but trying to cash in on the status of Sam Peckinpah's cult classic is a really cheap move. It also forces me to give it a 1-star rating rather than a 4 to 5 rating it could have earned if it didn't ask to be compared with the former.

If you consider watching this movie, please rent the original instead. It is still as intense as it was in 1971 and actually raises a lot of disturbing questions. A true classic.

While there are probably people out there who could pull off a remake of the classic Straw Dogs, this isn't the group.

I tried real hard to like this film since I'm a huge fan of Walton Goggins, but this should have been left on the shelf.

The actress playing the wife did a rather good job, though, in a role that is not easy to pull off and achieve a believable balance.

Overall I wouldn't give this more than about 4 or 5 points.

Next time someone tries this I really hope they can give us something worth watching. This is a truly worthwhile script that can be done better, perhaps even better than the original. I'd like to see that.

I expected this movie to be yet another terrible remake and turn it off after 15 minutes. But know know what? This was actually a good remake.

While the movie is very similar to the original, they did make some small changes here and there, mainly in the characters background and their motivation - which might help explain some things that seemed a bit odd in the original (for example, why would a beautiful blonde marry a geek). Others may claim the writer ruined some ideas.

It's hard and unfair to compare the actors' performance to Dustin Hoffman and David Warner in the original, but I have to say that all the cast actually did a decent job. James Woods was excellent as a southern redneck and Kate Bosworth was surprisingly good too. I'm not familiar with any of the other actors, who were all decent in their roles.

The ending had some small changes too - again, made in order for the characters to have a better motivation. Still, I prefer the ending of the original, which I recall was more intense and more "surreal", made to show a man protecting his "castle".

All in all, this remake is much better than many of the recent remakes I've seen (or chose to skip). Was this remake necessary? Probably not.

5/10 Worth watching

After reading the reviews of this film and seeing the original, I wasn't really looking forward to watching this movie but glad I did

I suggest to ignore all previous bad reviews & not to compare with the original 1971 film I thought this was a well made movie, with a good cast. The story line is similar to the original but in my opinion better but just bought in to the 21st century.

Acting was very good, very surprised & quite annoyed at some of the comments

I enjoy watching many movies & have to say this has been one of the better movies I have watched recently.

Watch it with an open mind Enjoy as I did. Very good movie

"Straw Dogs" is a Drama - Thriller movie in which we watch a man with his wife going to her hometown but soon they will have to face some tensions and conflicts with the locals after the occurrence of some events.

I liked this movie because it was intense, it had plenty of suspense and action. There was a mystery during the whole duration of the movie, something that made it very interesting and the expectation of action made it even more terrifying and scary. The interpretations of both James Marsden who played as David Sumner and Kate Bosworth who played as Amy Sumner were very good and they worked very well together, something that was obvious throughout the duration of the movie. Finally, I have to say that "Straw Dogs" is a nice, intense movie and I highly recommend it to any thriller movie fan because I am sure you will enjoy it very much.