Southern Comfort (1981) – Review

Sometimes, you get a couple of films that are so similar, even the slightest chance of coincidence is all but utterly impossible. However, it takes a serious filmmaker to take a movie with the same basic plot as another and turn it into something that feels completely and utterly its own thing, and in this respect, Walter Hill deserves nothing less than our full respect.
On paper, Southern Comfort is John Boorman’s Deliverance simply shifted from the mountains to the bayous of Louisiana. It looks like Deliverance, it sounds like Deliverance – hell, the ad men even slapped the tag line “Not since Deliverance…” on the top of the fucking poster as if we couldn’t figure it out already. However, the proof is in the pudding, and after viewing Hill’s damning ode to male machismo under duress, the differences between Deliverance and Southern Comfort are pretty much the same as Alien is different from Aliens. This time, ladies and gentlemen, it’s war.

It’s 1973, and a disgruntled squad of nine members of the Louisiana National Guard find themselves trudging around the swampy recesses of the bayou on weekend manuevers. It’s fairly safe to say that thanks to a whole bunch of conflicting personalities, morale is well and truly in the toilet, but Staff Sergeant Poole does well to keep his unruly guardsmen in line thanks to his expertise due to being a Vietnam veteran.
However, after finding that the route they are supposed to take has been flooded, the troops lobby it steal a bunch of boats they find at a deserted hunter-tapper camp in order to make short work of the swamped journey – but it’s this fateful decision that sets off a string of events that inexorably lead to disaster. After spotting the hunter-trappers staring at them from the shore as they make of with those boats, squad moron Stuckey thinks it’s hilarious to fire on them with blanks from his machine gun – however, the laughs stop fairly abruptly when the Cajun’s fire back with live ammo, blowing Poole’s brains out with a doozy of a shot.
In the chaos, all the boats are capsized and after reuniting, it soon becomes obvious that ambitious-but-inexperienced second in command Casper, simply does not have what it takes to hold these men together as fear and paranoia soon start forcing them to come apart in a myriad of ways. The thuggish and selfish Reese wants payback, the hulking Bowen finds his sanity is on incredibly shaky ground and the incredibly misanthropic newcomer to the squad, Hardin, plans to get home to his wife by any means necessary.
I guess it’s down to the level-headed, wisecracking Spencer to try and get all these clashing personalities on the same page long enough to make it out of the swamps alive; but if the Cajuns have their way, they’ll never be heard from again.

If I’m being honest, I don’t want to spend this entire review comparing every single aspect of Hill and Boorman’s movies ad nauseam (although it’s admittedly a fascinating thing to do), and I think I nailed their differences quite succinctly with that Alien/Aliens comparison. However, I will say this, while the more haunting and thought provoking Deliverance lingers in the mind far longer thanks to it being a profoundly harrowing experience, Southern Comfort is the more immediate of the two as it takes more of a basic thriller approach to being stalked through the wilderness by murderous hicks. That’s not to say that Hill’s movie is simplistic; the director has always been fascinated with overtly masculine themes, be it the brutish banter of 48 Hrs. or the hard bitten nobility of The Warriors, but here he takes sadistic enjoyment in taking that basic pleasure of guys being dudes, and then viciously stripping it of all comfort like a bear clawing bark of a tree.
With all the gung-ho, testosterone on display in the opening scenes, you think that Hill is going to deliver the National Guard version of a men on a mission movie as they crack cruel jokes, get excited about the prostitutes they’ve arranged to fuck after maneuvers are over and constantly try to one-up one another with constant boasts of bad-assery as they glare at their comrades like Lee Van Cleef. However, when the chips are down, and the unifying force of Sgt. Poole has his brains blown out, the company suddenly comes apart like a cheaply tailored suit and it’s awesome to watch.

Themes of masculinity fracturing under duress was a popular theme back in the 80s, with war films such as Platoon and Full Metal Jacket rubbing traumatized shoulders with the like of The Thing, Aliens and Predator, but Southern Comfort really does feel like the missing link that unites both parties. While it often feels like the characters are solely defined by how they individually react to the news that they’re being hunted (we never get meet them in their civilian lives), the fact that these men are clearly defined by their faults is Hill’s entire point as their reactions usually end being just as detrimental as being targeted by Cajuns. Some, like the dangerously irresponsible Stuckey, simply refuse to accept responsibility for the mess they’ve caused; others, like Fred Ward’s snarling Reese, close ranks and become inordinately selfish by hording live ammo for himself. However, while the group argue even further when they take Brion James’ one-armed hunter hostage, taking point as the most level-headed of this fractured group is Powers Boothe’s epically stand-offish Hardin and Keith Carradine’s affable-but-sardonic Spencer, but even they get drawn into the panicked fuckery in the form of fatal knife fight and what have you – I mean sure, we’ve all been there, right?
Outside of the characters, Hill manages to cinch the rest film in an unbreakable headlock of unrelenting tension as he tightens the screws with sadistic glee. While he could easily go the Boorman route and portray the hostile surroundings as intimidatingly beautiful, he instead makes the swamps of Louisiana as murky and as claustrophobic as the ones on fucking Dagobah and the sound of sloshing water is virtually constant as the cast spend virtually the entire film wading through knee-high water as they risk contracting a serious case of trench foot all in the name of art.
However, in its most impressive act, Southern Comfort somehow gets more tense when the survivors actually make it out of the swamp to find themselves in a ramshackle, Cajun town and the rampant paranoia shifts into overdrive. All the revelers seem welcoming enough, but among the musicians, dancers and butchers, there’s a very good chance that those unseen trappers are somewhere very very close and Hill keeps you biting those nails right to the very end.

Some may balk at some scenes that portray some pigs being slaughtered for food, but Southern Comfort’s hard-edged style wins through as some bang-on direction, some grizzled performances and Ry Cooder’s twanging score give us a tantalising alternative, muscular take on Deliverance’s more dream-like outing.

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