It's a good idea to relocate Sam Peckinpah's British horror in the American Deep South. It doesn't necessarily make it better but it does render its story more feasible.
James Marsden plays a bespectacled Hollywood writer who takes his young wife (Kate Bosworth) back to her home town in Mississipi and soon wishes he hadn't. When he hires local builders he begins to suspect that one of them (Alexander Skarsgård) has had an affair with his wife, and slowly but surely shows himself hopelessly weak in the face of Southern macho. The action ends in a bloodbath which, even if you've never seen Peckinpah's film, seems certain from the start.
Writer-director Rod Lurie commands good performances, and if he lacks Peckinpah's intensity, he does create a convincing atmosphere of Deep South melodrama.
Straw Dogs
Cert: 18
