There's no better action director than Walter Hill, and this is a perfect exercise to show what the man can do. Setting up an eerie scenario in a swamp with murdering Cajuns and helpless soldiers at their wit's end, this is a riveting action thriller. Trouble starts when the National Guard (who are on a training exercise in the Louisiana swamps) steal some boats to get to the other side of the river. They are only given blanks as ammo, and when the Cajuns see the soldiers in their boats, one of the immature members of the Guard fire his blanks at them. The Cajuns then retaliate, only they don't have blanks-they have real ammo!! What follows is a game of cat-and-mouse, with the soldiers meeting various grisly endings, until there are only two of them left. The final scenes when they are both in the seemingly friendly Cajun village is brilliantly filmed, displaying the men's paranoia perfectly. The film is always compared to 'Deliverance', because of the theme of men being helpless in a hostile environment,which is a fair point, but Southern Comfort still brings its own share of originality to the table. It uses Ry Cooder's haunting, off-beat twanging guitar score to perfect effect,and the film seems to be an allegory of Vietnam(the film was set in 1973). Southern Comfort's best feature is its casting because there are no superstars in this film, just good, solid actors like Keith Carradine and Powers Boothe who get your sympathy as the men-in-peril right to the end. Some of the scenes are a bit over sentimental, but this is an absolute gem of a movie, and one to watch again and again.
Review of Southern Comfort
