Clips from Rod Lurie's incoming Straw Dogs remake have been surfacing here and there for the last few days, but Collider has helpfully collated them all into one place (along with some behind the scenes footage).
Two of them riff on Sam Peckinpah's notorious original, whilst one is a new addition. In the first, James Marsden's preppy David Sumner is the victim of the same road-based practical joke that befell Dustin Hoffman, and in the third we get a replay of the scene between Hoffman and Susan George (her role is played by Kate Bosworth this time) in which Amy Sumner accuses her husband of cowardice.
The middle scene is new, however, as Alexander Skarsgard's apparently devout Charlie menaces Marsden outside a church service. Some talk between the two regarding coveting thy neghbour's wife looks to be a lead in to the business that constituted the original's most infamous sequence...
Why remake Straw Dogs? It's a moot point, but director Rod Lurie told Empire recently it had much to do with some advice from Hoffman: "Forget Peckinpah; it's just a goddamn story, and a good one. Don't repeat what Sam did. Put your own spin on it and then you'll really have something."
That spin includes casting the athletic Marsden as the anti-Hoffman; making Sumner a writer instead of a mathematician (returning him to the career he has in Gordon Williams' source novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm); transposing the action from Cornwall to the American Deep South; and stripping out some of Peckinpah's bleaker philosophies. "I'm not in any way against the original Straw Dogs," Lurie told us. "It's an amazing work with real artistic value. It's just that I personally reject Peckinpah's view of mankind!"
Alongside Marsden, Bosworth and Skarsgard (who was cast because he so impressed the producers in Generation Kill), Straw Dogs features the welcome return to the screen of James Woods, in Peter Vaughn's role as the pathological paterfamilias Tom. It's out in the UK on November 4.
For more from Rod Lurie, check out the current issue of **Empire. He used to write for us, you know. And now he's a big-shot Hollywood director and we're all... grrr.