'Straw Dogs' leaves audiences confused, horrified

One thing any seasoned moviegoer will tell you is never trust a trailer to tell you how a movie is going to unfold. Trailers for movies constantly misrepresent what actually happens in the film. However, even going into the theater to see "Straw Dogs" with this knowledge in the back of my head, I was still rather shocked to discover just how horribly the trailer misled me.

The first trailer would have you believe that, after moving to a town in the deep-south called Blackwater, David Sumner (James Marsden) and his wife Amy (Kate Bosworth) become the victims of disgruntled contractor Charlie (Alexander Skarsgård) as a result of firing him from fixing their barn.

The only thing accurate about that synopsis is the names; the movie itself isn't nearly that exciting. David and Amy are moving to Blackwater as a vacation of sorts. Blackwater is Amy's hometown, and they are staying there for a few weeks so David can finish his screenplay about a battle that took place in Stalingrad in 1943. (Exciting, I know.) Almost immediately after arriving in Blackwater, the Sumners go to a local bar called "Blackies" and David starts to discover just how southern this town is. This is also where David meets Amy's high school boyfriend Charlie, who has apparently also put a bid in to repair the roof of their barn. This is where David begins to turn to Hell.

Another way that the trailer misled me was that I thought "Straw Dogs" would be this exciting thriller with some shocking sequences that would have me constantly jumping in horror from my seat. (Or that it would at least be good…)

There is little to no excitement until about half way through the film, and it's at this point that if Amy would have just told David what happened, he probably would have hulked out much sooner and killed Skarsgård and his band of hillbillies. Instead the movie drags on for another 45 minutes or so before "s**t gets REAL."

If you really want to see the good stuff, you might as well not even go into the theater until the least 20 minutes or so. That's when Marsden finally does man up and – rather irrationally – barricades Amy and himself in their house, refusing to open the door – even when the sheriff shows up to save the day. It's really very strange. For this whole movie, Marsden has been this gigantic pansy who is basically trusting of just about everyone in town and then, all of a sudden, he just goes berserk, becoming this paranoid vigilante who doesn't even trust the sheriff NOT to kill him.

I don't think the acting in this movie was bad at all. Marsden and Bosworth are great actors and they had some good chemistry, which was good since they were playing a married couple. However, that chemistry starts to deteriorate about 10 minutes in. It's like being in this town turns her into a psycho who finds her husband's every word and action outrageously irksome. My only other comment about the actors is that I feel that the casting of Alexander Skarsgård was a strange decision. I love the man, and I know that he can play the bad guy pretty well, but he sticks out like a sore thumb in this movie. Here you have this group of fat, ugly, bearded rednecks who are all taking their cues from a chiseled, smoldering, handsome Skarsgård. It just doesn't fit.

I know that I've been dogging it (See what I did there?) a bit, but "Straw Dogs" was not ALL bad.  There were some really good scenes in there. It was just the film as a whole that was strange and weird for me to watch. For instance, after all of the ruckus is over at their house, the film ends rather abruptly and left me with a few unanswered questions. Like, is David ever going to finish his super-boring screenplay, or is killing hillbillies just…his life now?

In the end, I feel like it was worth seeing just to see the gory deaths in the climax – and a braless Kate Bosworth throughout. However, I would recommend that you steer clear of "Straw Dogs," if only to avoid ending up – like me – with a new phobia of being raped and killed by a bunch of rednecks in some hillbilly shack somewhere.