As soon as he took the reins on this week's remake of Sam Peckinpah's brutal 1971 classic Straw Dogs, writer-director Rod Lurie knew the haters would come in droves. "From the minute we announced it everybody was on my ass in the blogosphere, telling me that I couldn't carry his jockstrap and I'll never be Sam Peckinpah," Lurie told Movieline on the eve of his film's release. But with his updated take on the Peckinpah film, which transplants the violent tale to the American South and re-envisions protagonists David and Amy Sumner (James Marsden and Kate Bosworth) as a Hollywood couple fighting off fire and brimstone-raised good ol' boys, Lurie was never attempting to mimic Peckinpah at all -- in fact, he was doing just the opposite.
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Fans of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, steel yourself: The guy who last put Denzel Washington on top of a runaway train (and made bank at the box office doing so) wants to remake the groundbreaking 1969 Western. Deadline reports that director Tony Scott -- whose most recent film was last year's Unstoppable -- is negotiating to reboot the classic Peckinpah film. He also wants to remake his own Top Gun, so clearly nothing is sacred. Read the news after the jump and weep into your cowboy boots.
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Take a deep breath, folks, and prepare for the nearly three minutes of tense exchanges and brutal violence (five words: boiling oil in the face) that comprise the first trailer for Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs remake. The setting has been moved to the Deep South, but the character relationships and abject horrors look to be faithfully evocative of Sam Peckinpah's original film, which taught audiences why you should never push a mild-mannered husband to the brink of desperation.
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Here's your first look at images from Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs remake, which moves the setting of Sam Peckinpah's 1971 film from England to America, and sets up L.A. couple James Marsden and Kate Bosworth for a really unpleasant vacay in the Deep South. The EW scans also include your first look at True Blood's Alexander Skarsgård in the role of Charlie, a character at the center of the original film's most controversial scenes.
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