Available for home viewing in the UK for the first time in almost 20 years, Sam Peckinpah's notoriously controversial 1971 classic STRAW DOGS will be released completely uncut on this Special Edition DVD.

Based on Gordon M. Williams's novel The Siege Of Trencher's Farm, and starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George, STRAW DOGS marked Peckinpah's first directorial step outside the Western genre and into a contemporary (and uniquely British) setting. The director had already pushed the movie-making envelope with The Wild Bunch in 1969, provoking furious debate over the prevalence of on-screen violence. Two years later Peckinpah added further fuel to the fire with STRAW DOGS, an unflinching and uncompromising study of primal, barbaric brutality that is generally regarded as one of the strongest statements about violence ever put on screen. Although STRAW DOGS was granted an X certificate in 1971 for its UK cinema release, and was available on video for a brief period during the early 1980s, the disturbing nature of some of the film's imagery resulted in the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) demanding the video be withdrawn under the Video Recordings Act of 1984, pointing out its guidelines were "stricter with scenes of sexual violence on video than film, because of their potential to be played over and over at home". STRAW DOGS was last refused a UK video classification in 1999 because the distributor refused to make the cuts the BBFC required at that time. The film has now been given a certificate in a different version which restores it to its original form.

Quiet American mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) and his British-born wife Amy (Susan George) relocate to Amy's rural English hometown in an attempt to flee the violent social unrest brewing in the US. When David hires some locals, including a former boyfriend of Amy's, to repair his barn, the couple find themselves being subtly harassed and bullied by the workmen. The more the pacifist David ignores the problem, the more the harassment intensifies, leading to terrifying consequences as he ultimately finds himself forced to defend his home and his life, discovering a frighteningly vicious side to himself as events escalate towards a bloody climax.

Boasting outstanding performances from the two leads (particularly Hoffman), a brilliant support cast, and Jerry Fielding's superb Oscar-nominated score, STRAW DOGS, in the thirty-one years since its original release, has lost none of its intense, visceral power to thrill and shock in equal measure. Undisputedly a director ahead of his time, Sam Peckinpah's uncompromising approach often saw him being reviled and vilified in some quarters while being hailed in others. Nonetheless, in STRAW DOGS he displays a cinematic artistry very few filmmakers have touched upon before or since.