Leaving behind the exquisite expanses of the West, Peckinpah drops us into the solemn moors of Cornwall for his first non-oater. Straw Dogs is a rough-and-tumble tale of primordial violence that had early-seventies critics baying in dismay. Even the esteemed Pauline Kael called Peckinpah's siege soaper “the first American film that is a fascist work of art.” As though reinventing Benjamin from The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman plays a skittish mathematician who has fled the upheaval of the United States for the simplicity of the Celtic countryside, where he hopes to work through his problems both mathematic and marital. For her part, his tartish wife Amy (played by Susan George in full pout) is frontally frustrated by her hubby's reclusive calculations. When the local louts catch sight of her, it's as if they were enveloped by a fog of pheromone. The ensuing clash devolves from unleashed libido to blood-drenched territoriality. Straw Dogs has got a bite to match its bark.