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The Aggression Scale

On DVD & Blu-Ray 03 Sep 2012

When film makers have a modest budget and an audience to strike fear into, they can safely reach for the tried and true Home Invasion plot. Cheap and low cost ingredients include:

  • A decently sized family home that provides enough space for aggressors and victims to scamper about doing horrible things to each other.
  • A nice, average family. OK, someone might hold a dark secret, but in general we need a nice unit who don’t know what’s about to hit them.
  • A group of wicked thugs who don’t just want a place to hide out, to do a hit on someone or rob the place, but take a sadist delight in their work (for the ultimate, brain scrambling take on this… See the 70s Grindhouse atrocity Fight For Your Life).
  • A turning point where the invaded party can take no more. A moment of snapping. A sudden change of atmosphere where the audience suddenly realises that the tables are turning and the hunted are becoming the hunters.
  • A series of improvised traps and weapons that the harassed family can bring to bear upon the invaders. Anything where a spike goes through a dudes foot will do.
  • A coda where the violated family realize they to are now savages and life will never be the same again.

The Aggression Scale is this years most vicious entry in the home invasion genre.

Pulling no punches and taking no prisons, it violently riffs on vanilla family fare like Home Alone, imagining a scenario where genuine threat is present and the bad guys bleed and die when they get assaulted. Merciless criminals, two-faced debtors who keep secrets from their loved ones, pathetic victims, strong willed psycho kids with enough bloodlust vengeance pumping through them to kill an Ox. This is what the genre requires and The Aggression Scale delivers:

“The Aggression Scale is a superior home invasion thriller. It’s a good popcorn flick. It kept me highly entertained the whole time. It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s a fun and enjoyable movie. It’s well worth a rental.” – SHOCK TILL YOU DROP

“I expected very little. Even looking over the cover and synopsis, I assumed I was getting yet another in a long line of torture porn style home-invasion flicks, so, needless to say, it didn’t exactly get my juices flowing. Once the flick started, though, I immediately got an entirely different vibe from it – one that reminded me of those great, uncompromising uber-violent 70s crime flicks, and, from then on, The Aggression Scale completely won me over.”  HORROR VIEW

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SAM PECKINPAH’S MASTERPIECE RESTORED AND REMASTERED FOR BLU-RAY TO COINCIDE WITH 40TH ANNIVERSARY AND THEATRICAL RELEASE OF REMAKE.

Coinciding with its 40th anniversary and with the forthcoming theatrical release (on 4th November 2011) of the remake directed by Rod Lurie and starring James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgard and James Woods, director Sam Peckinpah’s notorious thriller Straw Dogs has been carefully restored and remastered for release on two-disc DVD and for the first time ever as a features-packed Special Edition Blu-ray on 24th October 2011.

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 result is 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.

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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 40 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.

Straw Dogs (cert. 18) will be released on Blu-ray (£17.99) and two-disc DVD (£15.99) by FremantleMedia Enterprises on 24th October 2011.

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