9. Straw Dogs (1971)
Sam Peckinpah is the only director to be distinguished with two films which are the most controversially violent in cinema history. Straw Dogs stars Dustin Hoffman and Susan George as David and Amy - a young married couple who have moved to Cornwall so David can further his career as a mathematician and escape the college riots in America. Amy is a bit of a sex bomb and attracts a lot of attention from local yokels who resent her husband being literate. The thugs begin to torment the couple culminating in a highly controversial scene where Amy gets gang raped but appears to start enjoying it mid way through. The final home invasion scenes where the locals try to get at David are controversially violent as David becomes a one man killing machine. He pours boiling oil over fists that have penetrated his defences, he does away with a yokel in a huge mantrap, he beats a man to death with a fire poker and does a bit of shooting until all the locals are dead. Controversy struck over Peckinpah glamourising rape and sadistic misogyny. The women in the film are not really proper characters but just characters for male sexual fantasies to be projected onto. There was also considerable controversy over the violence at the end which seemed to be an endorsement for vigilantism. Peckinpah stated that it was an exploration, not endorsal of violence but whatever he was hoping to achieve with Straw Dogs will surely still divide audiences for years to come.