Mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) moves to an isolated Cornish farmhouse with his young wife Amy (Susan George) to work on a book. But there are strange tensions afoot in the nearby village: both an antipathy and suspicion towards the American, and the slender tolerance of village idiot Henry Niles (David Warner). For Amy it's a return home, back to where she grew up, but the sadistic rape it engenders and the eventual hounding of Niles after he accidentally kills a girl bring things to a brutal conclusion.

"I believed in the Greek theory of catharsis," said the director in 1983, "that by experiencing grief, pity and fear in a theatrical context we could purge this poison from our systems...I was wrong." His film was released within weeks of A Clockwork Orange, and comparisons from one of the most contentious periods of British cinema are invited but frustrated by the twenty-plus years Kubrick's dated, over-regarded opus has been out of UK circulation.

A liberal, George Melly asserted: "Sex and violence are consistently equated in this film. The gun and the cock are interchangeable." Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard called the passing of Peckinpah's British western "tantamount to a dereliction of duty" on the part of the censors. Certainly if this adaptation of Gordon M. Williams' novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm were suggested today it's doubtful any major filmmaker would be prepared to put their name to it.

The difficulties are twofold: firstly, the extended and detailed rape scene; and the final half-hour siege of the farm by the riled yokels. In the former case it would be hard for anyone to leap to the film's defence. Intercut with Hoffman on a (sham) hunting trip (Melly was on the money) it's difficult now to see what purpose the scene serves. Even leaving aside George's gradual submission - even pleasure - in the first of the two assaults visited upon her, Hoffman's eventual rage is not spurred by the attack on his wife but, while sheltering an injured David Warner, the attack on his house: "This is my house...I will not allow violence against my house!" If the sense was there that Peckinpah meant this is an irony - the American's right to bear arms in protection of his property but not of his family - it might be defensible if not condonable. But instead it feels like little more than simple justification for George's taking up arms herself.

The siege itself, however, is less problematic. Extraordinarily violent - a man dies with his head in a man-trap; Peter Vaughan's foot is blown apart in loving close-up; hot oil in the face - it belongs essentially to the same school that birthed Peckinpah's masterpiece The Wild Bunch two years before. The main interest comes from what David Weddle in Sight & Sound called the shift of Hoffman's inner conflict from "a worn-out liberal struggling to overcome a sense of moral impotency to that of an apolitical intellectual who struggles to repress his passions." Hoffman delights in the chance to turn primitive, to use hands and brain, as much to avenge a bad marriage as revenge any invasion of privacy. In that way, David Sumner is the antithesis of Charles Bronson in Death Wish: we are not presumed to sympathise.

Technically, most of the film's interest is in the elaborate editing. (Peckinpah reportedly had three teams - including noted director Roger Spottiswoode - working simultaneously.) Whatever it's morals, the rape uses a sophisticated, almost subliminal cinematic language, and the subsequent scene where George is silently confronted by her attackers at the church social is the film's most impressive and surprisingly disturbing sequence. The performances by a host of familiar British faces - Vaughan, Warner, T.P. McKenna, Colin Welland - are fine, but the principals are nothing special - Susan George is, as ever, adequate, while a pre-star Hoffman, shambling about in his anorak, too often seems to be auditioning for that Rain Man Oscar. Only in his turning on everyone - Warner and George included - in the siege does his work make any real sense. Certainly Jerry Fielding's music now seems unduly obtrusive.

A cinema reissue of Straw Dogs is valuable if only because of its outlawing on video (it was made briefly available in the uncertificated 80s). Atmospherically the film scores highly, with its borrowings from both the Western and horror movie (Warner in particular seems to be taking cues from Karloff in Frankenstein) and the last half-hour or so maintains a grim and grisly fascination. But the rich vein of misogyny that runs throughout the film sits even more uneasily today than it did twenty years ago. What it does for reassessing the career of the reputedly pacifist East Coast liberal Peckinpah is anyone's guess.