The STRAW DOGS remake to take place in Mississippi? This hacks me off. by COOP

Just when I think my home state was finally getting some decent movies portraying the state in a positive light (like The Blind Side which releases on Thanksgiving), the goons who thought it was a good idea to remake Straw Dogs decided it should take place in Mississippi instead of England this time.

Cue the inbred, violent, Southern redneck stereotypes.

You know they are going to do it.  They portrayed rural Englishmen like the hillbillies from Deliverance in the original Straw Dogs.  Why not Arkansas, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Central Florida, Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia or West Virginia?  How about Illinois?  I know they’ve got hillbillies up there (check out the movie Next of Kinif you don’t believe me).  There are violent hicks EVERYWHERE.  Why for the love of Mike do you haveto make the movie take place in Mississippi?  To perpetuate a negativestereotype?  To the people that live here, it’s like beating a dead horse and it’s getting old. Apparently the “remakers” didn’t read my article on how Hollywood is finally starting to show the state some respect.

For those of you who don’t remember, Straw Dogsis an ultra-violent Sam Peckinpah classic in which a bookish math professor (Dustin Hoffman) and his fickle bimbo wife (Melissa George) vacation in her hometown to while he’s on sabbatical writing a book.  When she gets bored and starts tarting it up for the local rapists in the town pub.  The locals don’t take too kindly to the “Yank” Hoffman and constantly pick on him, but he backs down from fights.  Eventually the wife gets raped.  She hides it from her husband, but this seems to emboldenthe hicks even more against him.  When a local, dimwitted pedophile (David Warner) accidentally kills a girl that’s teasing him – and trust me it is an accident – he runs to Hoffman’s house, panicky and confused.  The hicks learn of this and lay siege to Hoffman’s house, demanding he give them the pedophile so they can kill him.  Hoffman finally decides to stand up to the hicks and defend his wife, the pedophile and his house in the most violent way possible.

It’s always been my least favorite Peckinpah film.  There’s no coolness to it like there was in The Getaway or The Wild Bunch or Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.  It’s just a bunch of unlikable characters going out of their way to be cruel to each other then exploding in a final, 10 minute violent outburst. Apparently, it’s some sort of statement about the Vietnam war, but… whatever.

The remake stars the much less talented James Marsden (Cyclops from X-Men), Kate Bosworth (Lois Lane in Superman Returns) and some dude name Alexander Skarsgaard (True Blood) who is sure to be one of the redneck villains.

Now James Woods has jumped on board (as the pedophile or the main villain?).  Can he even do a Southern (much less a regional Mississippi) accent? I bet they are going to shoot it like the remake of Last House on the Left and make it pretty much a full-on redneck horror movie. 

And now it’s going to have to take place in Mississippi.  Sigh.

They won’t even film it in Mississippi to give the state to help its flagging economy, they’re going to shoot it in Shreveport, Louisiana instead.  That’s insult to injury. 

I may have to boycott this one.  We will see how the project develops. 

Here’s the trailer for the original Straw Dogs…

-C

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