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Title: After 40 years, I *still* hate this film!
Review: I guess it's so beloved for the very reason I've loathed it: the gratuitous cruelty and violence. Sam Peckinpah must have been inspired by the early work of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, on the ennui of existence. But Bunuel and Dali were surrealists. In this mishmash of mindless mayhem, Peckinpah indulges in "brutal realism," if I must coin a phrase. From the opening shot of the children giggling over a tortured insect (it's a scorpion, a symbolic "bad guy", so it's "OK") to breaking a baby bird's wing, to Bo Hopkins gloating and giggling over helpless people he's slaughtered, I find this film seriously disturbed and must wonder at the moral sanity of those who rave over it. Presumably they were 1960s adolescents in love with effing things up for its own sake. Time to grow up.
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