Walter Hill is an amazing director he really is,he captures that fear & survival instinct in his movies especially here in the classic Southern Comfort (1981) & his other classic The Warriors (1979) with these two BRILLIANT films it's about that survival instinct & the fear of what do we do now? I absolutely love The Warriors & Southern Comfort they make an awesome double feature!!! Anyway southern comfort is a fantastically made Thriller that's very creepy & full of dread & hopelessness, it's all captured beautifully on screen something Walter Hill does the best!!! The cast is excellent especially keith carradine & powers booth these two guys are both very cool & rugged & very blue collar kinda men & work so well together & both give equally excellent performances & how could anyone forget how intense & suspenseful the third act is? Fantastic. No need to talk about the plot or story as tons of others have so i just wanna say how great this old school Thriller really is & it's BRILLIANT they really don't make movies this good anymore!!! There was always something very raw & gritty about movies made during the 70's & 80's that can't be captured in todays c.g.i infested cinema!!! So yeah if you love a good survival Thriller with action & a great musical score then definitely buy this because you're gonna wanna watch it lots. Another Walter Hill CLASSIC right up there next to The Warriors

Probably the greatest strength of this film is its characters. While they can sometimes be a bit one note, the interaction of the different personalities I would say is the driving force of the film. While a couple of the guys in the main group are a little underwritten, they are at least easy to understand in their motivations and relationships with each other. I think that if this film had put too much focus on what can be considered to be the main character then the weakness of the character writing would have become a much greater issue. It's actually very enjoyable to see the difficult situation presented in the film debated by the different personalities of the main squad. I would say though, that if you find that you don't care much for the way the core cast performs, then there's not much left to really make you like this film.The visual style of this film is very hit or miss. Frankly the first five minutes or so of screen time does not make a strong impression. If anything it's a bit of a turn off. The film actually feels like a bit of a directionless void until the main cast is finally assembled and the mission is underway. After that the visuals improve to a pretty noticeable degree. The way the scenery, composed nearly entirely of swamp, is shot can sometimes give it an otherworldly feel. At a certain point it feels like the characters are drudging through a complete hellscape, driving home the feeling of desperation felt by the main squad. Of course there are still some visual hurdles which are a bit jarring. The presence of a couple of freeze frames and a bizarre faded in double image sort of undercut the tone of the scenes they're in. So in that way the flubs sort of balance out the nicer shots to make a film that's a bit visually muddled.So far as the story is concerned, it's typical military fair. It becomes obvious at a certain point the visual and narrative parallels to Vietnam war films. It's admittedly a clever way to retell a familiar sort of story, though there isn't much else which really elevates the narrative beyond the clichés of its contemporaries. Beyond that there are some logical issues with the way some of the traps, deadly obstructions of the squad, are actually executed. You'll know it when you see it.Overall, it's alright. Check it out if you think you might like it.

Southern Comfort finds a small squad of Louisiana National Guardsmen on a training exercise in those swamps so familiar to me from those fabulous two months I did at Fort Polk. Where I was in the central part of the state was not as bad as where these guys were doing their weekend warrior thing. Still it's not a time I'd care to repeat.What our weekend warriors did was upset a group of Cajun fisherman who call these swamps home and now they're shooting back at the guardsmen with real bullets. They first kill sergeant Peter Coyote which was bad because he apparently was the one best suited for leadership. The others have to find their way out of the swamps and most of them don't make it. They have a captain with them in Les Lannom, but he may have the rank, but sure not the right stuff.The lead characters are Keith Carradine and Powers Boothe of strikingly different personalities who don't like each other, but they do see the need for a bit of discipline.If I were in a combat situation this is not a group I'd care to have my survival depend on. Southern Comfort, a bit of Deliverance, a bit of Platoon, is something watched and not quickly forgotten.

Walter Hill's Southern Comfort is the bees knees when it comes to backwoods survival thrillers. It's frightening, elemental, and relentless in pace, inciting primal fear in the viewer who finds themselves terrified of these events ever happening to them. It's a very overlooked film, with most of the kudos within this genre going to John Boorman's Deliverance. This one is way better, at least for me. The immediacy of the protagonist's situation, the hypnotic atmosphere of both score and cinematography working together for something really special. In rural Louisiana, a platoon of American soldiers prepares to embark into the tangled wilderness of the nearby bayou, attempting a routine training mission. Powers Boothe is awesome as Cpl. Charles Hardin, a well educated man who silently resents the roughnecks and dimwitted dead enders in his regiment. He's joined by Spencer (a cavalier Keith Carradine), and a whole host of others as well. Now, the Bayou is home to the reclusive and eccentric Cajun people, who apparently will keep to themselves if you do the same. But try telling that to a troupe of childish, immature GI's packing heavy artillery that's beyond both their pay grade and IQ. After one lugnut plays a nasty prank on a group of Cajun fisherman, they take it slightly personally. Before you can say crawfish, they promptly murder the commanding officer (Peter Coyote) and set a series of deadly traps and snares for the soldiers, out to send every last one of them to a swampy grave. It's a beautiful backwoods nightmare, and Hill tells the story exceptionally, aided by a twangy, brilliant score from his go to composer Ry Cooder. Boothe and Carradine are shoe ins to hold off their pursuers, while the rest of them soon fall prey, in elaborate and gruesome ways. Fred Ward is badass as a fellow soldier who turns homicidal, and has a wicked knife fight with Boothe that ramps up the adrenaline and then some. The late Brion James makes quite the impression as a Cajun who they briefly capture, after which he eerily warns them of the hell that's coming from his compadres. The locations feel authentic, damp and waterlogged as hell, making you feel every squelchy step these poor bastards take into the Bayou and closer to their end. Near the end of the film we are treated to some authentic live Cajun music (some of my favourite kind) from Dewey Balfa, a gorgeous interlude and showcase of Hill's desire to make the auditory atmosphere of his films as heightened and immersive as possible. An unheralded classic.