User Reviews

A bizarre yet excellent paranoia thriller that takes place in a swamp in the Louisana where eight National Guard members who are on a routine reconnaissance excerise, unwillingly and intentionally start an exhausting battle of wills and survival with some Cajuns who know the swamps like if their own backyard.

Director Walter Hill ("48 Hours", "Undisputed") and his screen-writers (David Giler and Michael Kane) have unveiled an expected surprise that surpasses even my expectations of a top-notch thriller. The trio have borrowed the backdrop from one of those not-so-smart slasher movies like "Friday the 13th", then change the location of the story to the Louisana Bayou, and give the viewer characters that we may like.

As for the cast, Keith Carradine and Powers Boothe emerge here to give the best performances. Boothe is good as Hardin, who came to the unit as a transfer from Texas while Carradine is the relatively easy-going Spencer. Fred Ward and Alan Autry also deliver here as two members who are both troublesome in two different ways. Ward is the bully who doesn't need much to provoke a fight with anyone and Autry is the emotionally shell-shocked soldier whose fragile feelings are rocked when the unit's leader, Sargeant Poole (Peter Coyote) is unexpectedly shot and killed.

Some of the locals that the team run into are either harmless or polite instead of being stereotyped. However, the Cajuns that are seeking revenge are about as hard to find as the shark in the first half of "Jaws".

Even a few of the Hill regulars: musician Ry Cooder, photographer Andrew Laszlo, and production designer John Vallone add another key element to the movie. The look, the feel, and especially - the music fit the atmosphere like it should be and I was satisfied with that.

Plus, the movie ads for "Southern Comfort" don't lie here and what happens in the film shows very clearly why.

Southern Comfort captures soldiers in the American army better than any film I've ever seen. I'm not saying the guys that stormed the beach at Normandy or took Pork Chop Hill, but something happened between World War 2 and now that kind of let the air out of American soldiers' sails. I went to Iraq in the army in 1991, and I heard the collective sigh echo through the ranks when we were informed that we were going to war in place of the expected gung-ho cheer. Of course, if you've read Norman Mailer's "the Naked and the Dead", you'd realize that apathy in the American military may have been around for awhile. After all, most people have a survival instinct that takes over in extreme situations that seems pretty self-centered. So start with that instinct and go to war with a bunch of people you're not only unrelated to, but don't even much care for. In the army a lot of beliefs, colors, attitudes etc. collide. That cohesive unit hefting a giant flag and marching up a hill as bombs burst around them looks good in the history books, but in reality it's a little different. Southern Comfort knows that fact well.

The plot centers around a squad of Louisiana national guardsmen who go on a weekend training exercise and become real weekend warriors with ammo-less rifles battling a crafty (even spooky) superior enemy of backwoods Cajuns. They start off with a simple mission of navigational training. Get from point A to B using a compass and a map. Point B is important to the squad, because Keith Carradine's character private Boothe has some hookers waiting at a party for them near point B. This is how these army guardsmen operate and it's pretty realistic.

Somewhere between A and B the route has been flooded and only a couple of canoes tied to a dock offer the soldiers any hope of showing up to their real jobs on Monday. They could walk around, but that would just suck. In the army you have missions. You also have things that arise that suck, and you try to find ways around them. While paddling across the flooded river, Stuckey (the smart ass of the bunch) fires a volley of blanks from his intimidating looking and sounding M60 at some Cajuns on the opposite bank. The Cajuns hit the deck and then blow one of the soldier's brains out. It's as good a "brain blowing out scene" as any I've ever seen, graphic and shocking. The rag tag team of guardsmen flee in panic to the opposite shore and woods. Luckily, Fred Ward brought along some real ammo, enough that each guy gets two whole bullets. The rest is funny, scary and exciting. The acting is great, especially Les Lannom as the dumb sergeant who really means well and Franklyn Seals as the guy who just wants the nightmare to end. The cinematography is great, with many beautiful shots of trees rising out of the bayou and the shadows they make on the water. Ry Cooder's soundtrack is eerie when it needs to be and just plain cool. It's one of his best.

The best part is the script itself. This film is supposedly an allegory to Vietnam, but that is almost immaterial. The writers (Hill included) have fashioned a script with fresh action, great suspense and realistic characterization and dialog. The writers understand that there will be the platoon sergeant that tries to care and follow the mission parameters to the letter, but who will cave if that gets too damned inconvenient. There's the E-5 buck sergeant who ends up in charge and knows he's stupid, even more so than some of the men below him. He also believes strongly that he's the only one who should make decisions because, as he says "I've got the stripes!" There's the private, who may rank at the bottom on the military chain of command, but rises to the leadership position because he actually makes the best leader. The one hardcore corporal who doubles as a football coach in his civilian life and would appear at first glance to be the guy you want next to you when the bullets start whizzing by ends up going plumb loco and being led around on a leash by the others. Thats how things really happen in a war. Everything gets unpredictable and somewhat crazy. Out of the realistic reactions the soldiers display to the war-like situation they get into, Hill finds comedy, drama and thrills. This film should entertain you on every level and I highly recommend it.

A unit of US national guardsmen go out on weekend manurers and whilst there they incur of the wrath of local Cajuns which leads to a battle for survival against an unseen , cunning nd ruthless foe

This is the type of premise that appeals to director Walter Hill . His 1979 controversial thriller THE WARRIORS had a similar type of plot about a New York gang trying to seek sanctuary through a hostile land and 20 year later he made another similar thriller TRESPASS about two protagonists fighting for their lives in a decaying urban landscape against a violent street gang . It should also be remembered that Hill was the co-screenwriter of ALIEN and we all know the story to that one . In short Hill is an auteur who makes movies about individuals trying to survive against a hostile foe in an uncaring environment

Everyone seems to have picked up on the allegory of the Vietnam war which is hardly surprising since it's impossible not to escape the parallels . Even the opening caption of " Louisanna 1973 " ties in with the conflict . Why does the story have to be set in 1973 ? Absolutely no reason whatsoever except this was the year that the last American combat troops left the country leaving behind 58,000 dead compatriots and adds to the subtext of the narrative

I've got to be honest and state that the allegory is in my opinion overdone and while watching it I was left with the distinct impression that someone somewhere in the production team wanted to make a straight forward war thriller set in 'Nam , a sort of American version of THE LOST PATROL but decided that the budget wouldn't stretch to this . This might explain why the inciting incident seems rather weak . Would this misunderstanding lead to the death of somebody and the fall out connected with it exist in real life ? You can understand it if the story was taking place in the jungles of South East Asia but not Cajun territory in the USA

This is the weak point of the film and the lack of conviction spoils it somewhat. I had memories of SOUTHERN COMFORT being a gritty violent compelling thriller but most of the running time I found myself thinkingwhy I thought it was so great after seeing it many years ago . The reason it was so fondly remembered is because it was a truly great ending where the last two surviving guardsmen find themselves in a friendly village only to find their nightmare hasn't finished aftera ll . Walter Hill builds up the tension via the use of editing and music in the last ten minutes in a way rarely seen except from the best American film makers

In summary SOUTHERN COMFORT is a memorable thriller due to it having a very good ending . Elsewhere it's not so good because the audience are being bludgeoned by a very unsubtle subtext and the audience needing to suspend disbelief in order for the film to work which stops it from achieving true greatness

Southern Comfort is, of course, the name of a whiskey-based liqueur, but its use as the title of this film is deeply ironic. "Southern Comfort" may be set in the South, but there is little about it that is comforting. The plot is a common one in war films, that of a group of soldiers stranded in hostile territory. ("Centurion", set in Roman Britain, is a recent example). Director Walter Hill once said "Every film I've done has been a Western," even though only a minority of his films are Westerns in the literal sense. Many of them, however, are male-dominated action films which transfer typical Western plots to some other setting, and it would be easy to re-imagine "Southern Comfort" as a traditional Western about a cavalry patrol cut off in Indian country.

A group of National Guardsmen are on weekend manoeuvres in the bayou country of Louisiana. (Much of the distinctive look of the film derives from the eerie atmosphere of the Bayou's swamps and forests). They get lost, and in order to avoid a long march back to where they should be steal several canoes belonging to local Cajun hunters. When the Cajuns turn up, one of the patrol opens fire on them with a machine gun. This is a stupid prank- the gun is only loaded with blanks- but the Cajuns are not to know this and they return fire with their hunting rifles, killing the sergeant in command of the patrol.

Now at this point the remaining guardsmen should have called off their manoeuvre, made their way back to base and reported the matter to the police. Of course, they do no such thing; the patrol's second-in-command, seemingly believing himself to be in a real war situation, orders his men to continue with their "mission". Not that they need any such orders; most of them are angered by the death of their comrade and determined to wreak revenge on the Cajun community. They arrest a Cajun hunter, regarding him as an "enemy prisoner" to be "interrogated". The Cajuns, however, use their intimate knowledge of the swamps to fight back, stalking the guardsmen and leaving lethal traps for them.

The film came out in 1981, not long after the Vietnam War had ended, and is set in 1973, while that war was still continuing, so it is not surprising that it was widely seen as a Vietnam allegory. The Cajun hunters can be seen as the metaphorical equivalents of the Viet Cong and the National Guardsmen as symbolic of the American troops in Vietnam, fighting in unfamiliar, densely wooded terrain and frustrated by their inability to get to grips with shadowy adversaries who were able to use their superior local knowledge against them. By setting the film in Louisiana, however, the film-makers were able to avoid the political controversy which normally surrounded films ("The Green Berets", "The Deer Hunter", "Apocalypse Now") set during the Vietnam War itself.

Another comparison with Vietnam can be seen in the behaviour of several of the squad, undisciplined and capable of brutality not only towards the Cajun "enemy" but also towards one another. One of the patrol, for example, destroys the captured Cajun's house with explosives, without provocation and without orders from a superior, and another is killed by a colleague in a brawl arising out of the interrogation of the "prisoner". No doubt the great majority of those who fought in Vietnam were honourable men who abided by the laws of war, but there were a number of well-publicised incidents (notably the My Lai massacre) which were seized upon by the anti-war movement and North Vietnamese propagandists to paint American soldiers as violent criminals, and these incidents served to undermine the military's "hearts and minds" strategy to win Vietnamese opinion over to their side.

One of the problems faced by the film-makers was that if they made all the guardsmen too unsympathetic the film would not work as a thriller as there would be nobody with whom the audience could identify. The basic plot has some similarities with John Boorman's "Deliverance" from a few years earlier, but in "Deliverance" the group lost in the wilderness were the victims of unprovoked aggression from local people. Nobody could say that the aggression faced by the guardsmen in "Southern Comfort" was unprovoked.

Hill and his collaborators solved this problem by making all the nine members of the group individuals with sharply differing characters. Two in particular stand out from the others, Corporal Hardin and PFC Spencer. Although these two are in many ways different characters, and often disagree with one another, what they have in common is that both are disgusted with the behaviour and attitudes of the others and both retain a decency and humanity which the others have lost. It is these two who are the last survivors of the patrol, and the tension arises from their efforts to make it back to safety. Even the villainous soldiers, however, are differentiated. For example, Corporal Bowden (the one who blows up the house) is a mentally unstable psychopath, and second-in-command Sergeant Casper is an officious but ineffective stickler for military regulations.

As this was very much an "ensemble" film, I won't single any of the actors out for praise, but I will say that they all combine very effectively. Hill is equally effective in his direction, making this a taut, well-paced thriller. The film, however, is more than just an action thriller- more, indeed, than just a Vietnam allegory. It also serves as an allegory for war in general, as conflict erupts out of a seemingly routine situation and that conflict in turn leads to the darker side of human nature taking over. 7/10

It seemed kind of enjoyable when I first saw it. A Lost Patrol movie par excellence. It must have been difficult shooting. Lousiana has no mountain barrier to protect it from polar outbreaks so lows can reach 12 degrees in the winter. It's not that cold in this movie. The water is a muddy yellow, not iced over, but the oaks have lost their leaves and the place looks like an environment the Wolf Man might find happiness in.

The script, though, turns the locale into one monstrous pit of quicksand. The whole story, a gang of lost weekend soldiers wandering through the woods looking for a highway, is barely passable. But the characterization torpedoes the narrative.

There's an attempt in the screenplay to turn the half dozen or so National Guardsmen into stereotypes of the sort we're familiar with from traditional war movies: the good-natured rube, the religious fanatic, the educated snob, the power hungry corporal. You can hear the joints creak as the writers stretch upwards towards that level of banality before finally giving up.

Any attempt at character consistency or development is dumped in the toilet and the story turns into a jambalaya of elements that someone, somewhere, somehow, figured would keep the audience from walking out.

Example: One character is a football coach in real life. At the beginning he shows common sense and a bit of humanity. Then, given a simple job to do, he goes abruptly quietly crazy, tears open his blouse, paints a red cross on his chest, and explodes a shack full of dynamite and useful small arms. Thereafter he's tied up by his colleagues and, ultimately, hanged, either by his own hand or the evil Cajuns. We don't know. And we don't really care. Neither do the writers.

In fact, the things that the characters feel strongly about in this movie shift from moment to moment and from person to person. Nobody seems especially upset near the beginning when their sergeant gets his head blown off. But from time to time, when a bit of action is called for, somebody will take violent action against "the enemy" because they killed the sergeant. Then the anger disappears again because it's no longer needed as motivation. In fact, as the Guardsmen get nailed one by one, nobody shows any sorrow at their passing. Sometimes their response is one of annoyance -- now we have to carry ANOTHER dead body!

At the end, the story would fall flat on its face if it weren't already there. The two survivors -- Powers Boothe and Keith Carradine -- find themselves at a friendly Cajun rendezvous. Lots of singing and dancing and beer drinking. Everybody's having a wonderful time. These two Guardsmen have just seen all the rest of their number slaughtered, are in danger themselves, and here they are, wandering around, drinking beer, laughing, dancing with the local gals, with Carradine urging Boothe to loosen up a little. There is a good half hour spent in this Cajun potluck party which would come as an anticlimax, except that there hasn't been much tension built up previously. The scene, so excessive in its irrelevance, prompted me to wonder if the writers hadn't inserted it as a deliberate parody, a revelation of the joke that the whole movie has been, a kind of nudge to the skeptical viewer that the writers were in on the gag too.

These guys are REAL DUMB. They are surrounded by hostile Vietnamese -- I mean Cajuns of course -- and they have about three rounds of live ammunition apiece. And yet, if they glimpse, or even think they glimpse, or hear, or even think they hear, something nearby in the swamp they fire blindly, sometimes up in the air, spending those precious cartridges as if there were no tomorrow.

I won't go on about this. It's worth catching once, if only for the location shooting. There's nothing wrong with the acting either, considering the stereotypical roles the performers are stuck with. Oh, one more thing. I wish, since the movie makes so little sense to begin with, that they'd taken a hostile but beautiful Cajun girl captive and dragged her along with them and prevented one of the no-neck brutes from assaulting her and they'd all spied on her while she swam naked in the bayou and -- well, what would have been lost by including such inanities?