Marsden and Bosworth play a married couple returning to her small town where she of course was the cheerleader who dated the quarterback, Skarsgard. They stay in her parents house to allow for documentary movie writer, Marsden to work on a script he's doing for a World War 2 movie.
Skarsgard and his former football friends have stayed in their small town and have become local handymen and roofers. Marsden refers to them as Straw Dogs, men who never really accomplished anything, they just stay in their home town reliving their glory days. The group is hired by Marsden to work on fixing the old barn outside, he hires them in hopes to earn some respect from his wife's former friends but of course it ends up not being the best decision.
The movie drags on and on, to the point where I really questioned if I was going to keep watching and wait for something good to happen. I had expectations going into this film, previews suggested it to be something along the lines of The Strangers or even Last House on the Left, but it really took way to long turn this from a boring reality show to a thriller.
Watching Marsden try and interact with the locals or be a guy who has the ability to stand up to them got boring after the third time. The fact that each guy in Skarsgards roofing crew was drooling over Bosworth also caused some problems for me as a viewer. While she was beautiful in Superman Returns or Blue Crush I swear they went out of their way to make her less attractive for the movie.
The movie gets really ugly and uncomfortable to watch when an unwanted sex scene takes places between Skarsgard and Bosworth. He's convinced she wants her old boyfriend back but his advances suddenly turn violent and she ends up being raped by him as well as one of the men on her crew. There is no nudity in the scene and the fact that an old record player is blaring the entire time of the rape just makes it more disturbing.
In the end the group comes to the home of Bosworth and Marsden looking for a local man Jeremy whom is a mentally challenged individual and in a very Of Mice and Men situation, he's accused of doing harm to the former football coach's daughter. The casting of Jeremy is beyond strange, Dominic Purcell who played Dracula in Blade and was the star of the show Prison Break plays the local special guy. They never say if he was brain damaged due to football or what, but clearly if you have a guy in town who's mentally challenged and has a problem with staying away from the high school girls maybe you should keep him away from the weight room.
The last half hour of the movie is the attack on their home and Marsden trying to defend his wife and himself from Skarsgard, his crew and James Woods, who plays the groups old football coach that they all of course still call coach. Skarsgard has moments of Eric Northman, his character on True Blood, in this film but for the most part he plays a very reserved and quiet local guy, who also apparently is constantly working out. There's more scenes in this movie of him without a shirt than their are thrilling scenes to classify this a horror film.
If you're going to check out Straw Dogs, have your remote in hand and don't be afraid to fast forward through a lot of the movie, you won't miss anything important.
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