Crazy Town

Holy f---, people – I so cannot believe how friggin’ brilliant the non-ending of Rod Lurie’s Straw Dogs, a violent remake of the violent 1971 revenge thriller of the same name, was, y’all (I didn’t see the original, so if you wanna know what’s different I will suggest you GTS).

The wha?

The non-end....

Oh, just allow me to explain.

No, please, let me.

I saw the movie – starring James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, and that oh-so-hottest dish from Sweden, Alexander Skarsgård – last night, and just as it was about to end, it...did. Only it didn’t. There was a technical malfunction that cut the movie short in the most abrupt, most brilliant fashion.

The whole theater erupted in disbelief.

Could Lurie had written the thing in such a wonderfully bold way? I eventually found that, no, that wasn’t the ending, that we missed a couple more minutes, and that the resolution is a bit more, say, conventional. I was assured of as much, at least.

But, man, would Straw Dogs been really, really som’in’ had the cutaway I saw been it, y’ know. Because it certainly had me all kinds of bothered for all the wrong reasons, and by that I mean how good Skarsgård is at being bad. Dayum, is he ever.

His Charlie is a former football quarterback who now work construction with a motley crew of washouts in their hometown of Blackwater, Miss. He’s a big-deal redneck who does some pretty despicable things to the Sumners (Marsden and Bosworth), a couple from Hollywood that’s returned to the rural, deep-South town to take care of her daddy’s place, get it ready for sale. The True Blood hunk has an intensity that it so stoopid-effortless, and he is just so good to look at, that I found myself thinking things I shouldn’t have.

But I digress.

So, yeah, Bosworth’s Amy is a local...a beautiful girl who got out and lost her accent for work. She’s an actress who once starred on an NBC show that, had the ratings been measured only in Blackwater, probably would still be on. David, her husband, is a screenwriter, and Marsden plays him a chumpness that I never would attribute to him, which only makes his awakening in the final act all the more riveting.

Ah, yes, I circle back to that ending.

By the time we inch closer to the credits, you know Straw Dogs is going to, can only end one of two ways. Charlie and his gang have taken to imposing themselves on the Sumners (did I mention that he and Amy were sweethearts in high school?), quite subtly at first, and rather overtly for the most part of the movie: Hired to fix the roof on the property’s barn, they show up super-early for work and wake David and Amy up, leave whenever they like to go hunting of because it’s too hot, question David’s everything (his job, his taste in music...his manhood, in essence), and leer at Amy. In one of the movie’s most upsetting sequences, they trick him into a hunt, and two of them rape her, one more savagely than the other.

It all escalates quickly and it drives a wedge between the couple, who, to make matters worse, is drawn into a secondary drama that brings a vicious attack on the Sumners, who must fight back should they want to survive to die another day.

It’s all pretty gruesome, alright, and like many movies of its kind that came before it, you will not be able to look away from this one. Not when there’s a hot Swede walking around all sweaty and shirtless and s---, and definitely not when the villains’ comeuppance is so well served. Who says you can’t go home, huh.

My Rating ***

Photo: Screen Gems.