Straw Dogs (1971)

Brief Primer

David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), an American mathematician, and his wife Amy (Susan George) move to Amy's childhood village in England so that David can work on his equations or something. Things get weird between the David and Amy, and weirder between the couple and the village's native creepers (one of whom used to be Amy's lover, and all of whom could be cast in an English remake of Deliverance), until numerous terrible things happen.

Yeesh. Synopses and reviews of Straw Dogs all call it a "drama" or a "psychological thriller," and while those descriptors aren't inaccurate, I'm willing to flat out label it a God Damn Horror Story. In an effort to avoid spoilers (unlike Netflix or the back of the DVD's case or my parents), I won't go into details about what happens in the movie. There are two Main Events, and they're both Something Terrible. Watching it from the beginning with a decent working knowledge of the path the movie would take was taxing, partly because I was Completely In a Mood, and partly because - like all decent horror movies - Straw Dogs takes its time, so I watched every scene waiting for one shoe or another to drop. Like Haneke's Cache or Miike's Audition - other more recent movies that have left me climbing the walls - Straw Dogs spends a good forty minutes lulling and boring the viewer into a false sense of security. Hints are dropped, sure, and we get to learn about how unlikeable everyone in the movie is (this is the first time I think I've ever really disliked a character Hoffman plays), but in general it's just the story of a prickish nerd and his pretty young wife in a creepy boring English town.

And then things get so awful. There's a reason this movie made everyone flip out back when it was released. It's got violence, it's got sexual violence, it's got English people, it's got More and More Violence. This came out the same year as A Clockwork Orange, and while some people (me) think that movie sucks and also isn't particularly disturbing (sorry), Straw Dogs had me gritting my teeth and shifting around uncomfortably about halfway through, and left me stunned and vaguely ill when it ended. It's the third Peckinpah movie I've seen (I thought Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia was interesting and The Wild Bunch was engaging, though not spectacular), and if there's one common thread that runs through all three of these movies it's that they are acutely mean-spirited and vicious as hell. Of the three, Dogs is definitely the most like an assault, and I'm both glad and distressed that I watched it alone - on the one hand I didn't have to put anyone else through it, but on the other hand there was no one there to stare blank-faced at afterwards. It's definitely not for the squeamish or the faint of heart, but it is undeniably effective and marvelously directed. I'm still not sure how I feel about Peckinpah, but if he can shake me up as well as he did, he must have been good on at least some level.

8 out of 10 (beause it really fucking got to me).

Rambo III (1988)

Brief Primer:

There is a movie after Rambo: First Blood Part II. Rambo's only friend/father figure/CO Trautman (Richard Crenna, reprising his role from the previous 2 films) is captured (for some reason?) by Soviets in Afghanistan. Rambo has to go rescue him, with the help of some Mujahideen.


Alright, let's talk about the franchise first: Some people are under the misguided impression that the first Rambo movie (First Blood) is anything less than fantastic. Others are on the right track, and like it like people should. The follow up (part II) is not as good, and I don't want to talk about it. Rambo III falls somewhere in between. Part of what made the first Rambo so awesome was its simplicity: a sad guy shows up in town, gets messed with, flips out, and burns everything to the ground. You don't have to have PTSD to relate to that - everyone wants to revenge on stuff. The second movie got caught up in some bullshit about the U.S. Government not wanting to rescue POW's still in Vietnam or something, paired Rambo up with some woman who falls in love with him before getting blown away (spoiler alert, whatever, don't see Rambo 2), and was an all-around disappointment.

Conversely, Rambo 3 is awesome in the exact way that LBJ wasn't: it 1) doesn't spend much time in Vietnam, 2) gets Rambo out of Vietnam, and 3) shuts the hell up about Vietnam immediately afterwards. Instead, we're treated to Rambo dropping into sunny and jungle-less Afghanistan to help out the freedom-fighting, Soviet-disliking Afghan people we as a country would, 13 years after the movie's release, spend a lot of time Rambo-ing. Rambo 3 is not as tense and emotional as the first, and it's not as lame and awful as the second one. It is, however, way more violent than either of the preceding movies (if memory serves, and maybe it doesn't). There are some Awesome Kills (key elements: glow sticks, exploding arrows, grenades-on-ropes), a great scene of self-cauterization-by-gunpowder (something that a Scarier Man perfected years before), and a climax that pits a tank against a helicopter in order to answer civilization's age-old question: "what would happen if a tank and a helicopter got into a fight? Like, I mean, really threw down." I don't know what else to tell you. I've told you everything you need to know.

6 out of 10.