Apr 05, 2013 12:13 PM
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Having watched both the new and old versions of “Straw Dogs” in a single day and still fresh from the experience, I found that I identified better with the newer version…for me atleast, the remake was more believable than the original, in terms of acting, character development and location…
Simply put the English thugs in the original did not strike me as terrifying or menacing…to me they were more buffoonish and funny…I did not find them or their behavior to be particularly intimidating…in fact I felt they behaved in a pretty normal manner when confronted by the American and his seemingly strange mannerisms…
If anybody came across as abnormal or psychologically disturbed, it was the main character’s wife, who sends out mixed signals by deliberately displaying her panties and subsequently her bare breasts to the gang of leering men, then whining to her nonplussed husband and still later on treating the same men to beer…and the rape was not really a rape, as she does not put much of a resistance even seemingly enjoying it towards the end…
She came across as a far more seriously disturbed, immature and dangerous character, more disturbing then the supposed antagonists of this movie…when she is being raped again in the climax, notice how she screams for her ex-boyfriend (who is one of the attackers) instead of her husband for help…this proves that the first sex episode in the movie was not entirely without her consent…
The acting too was too exaggerated and cartoonish to be effective…I felt I was watching a parody instead of a serious horror movie…and don’t tell me that was how movies were in the early 70s…I have watched older movies with far more convincing acting…I cracked up when Hoffman tries to stop Norman from assaulting the mentally disturbed guy in his house and Norman says “don’t lay your hands on meeeeee”…the drawing out of the “me” was unintentionally comic…there were plenty of other moments in the movie where the outlandish acting was funny though not intended to be so…
And I absolutely hated the character of the wife, who was silly, clingy, immature and adulterous; hankering unreasonably for her husband’s attention and then ready to desert him when he needs her support the most…I would call her the main antagonist in the movie and her husband was too good for a skanky woman like her…
The remake addressed and eliminated most of these negative points…the wife was much more sympathetic and her behavior more bearable… unlike Dustin Hoffman who seemed to be barely tolerating Susan George, James Marsden and Kate Bosworth acted realistically like a couple in love…the creeps were genuinely creepy, their behavior intimidating at times and their contempt towards the supposed wimpiness of the husband was barely concealed beneath a veneer of politeness…I could easily imagine myself in the shoes of the various characters and identify with them all…
The intimidation and harassment aspect was better brought out in the 2011 version…it starts out subtly by having the workmen gang turning up for work far too early in the morning, blasting loud music, grabbing beer bottles from the refrigerator randomly, requesting for permission to leave work early... steps up relentlessly to the leering catcalls at a jogging Bosworth…and finally the hanging of the cat and the double rape…scenes where Chris asks Mr. Summer which movies he has written scripts for and Charlie warning David over walking out of the church sermon helped to build up tension between the characters...these were not present in the original version.
The only aspects that the original scores over the remake is that Dustin Hoffman is much more of a nerdy and diminutive guy than James Marsden…you could relate to Hoffman as a guy who would have been constantly bullied and pushed around since his school days…but not so much with the muscle-bound, square-jawed Marsden (even if he wears spectacles to look nerdy)…and the final battle in the original movie was more edgy and realistic then the newer version.
