Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

Southern Comfort Blu-ray Movie Review

Will these warriors attain deliverance?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 5, 2014

If Southern Comfort is supposed to be an allegory for the American experience in the Vietnam war—and this Blu- ray’s supplementary documentary makes it clear this is at least a debatable proposition—it’s an amazingly on the nose one, at least in certain respects. While the film deals with so-called “weekend warriors”, a ragtag troop of Louisiana National Guard guys, the location, a backwoods swamp in the bayou, is a near perfect visual metaphor for that oft repeated “quagmire” term that is used to describe Vietnam. The fact that the Guardsmen seem to be more or less hapless victims who through their own stupidity cause a battle with the local native Cajun population might seem to be at odds with the historical record of the American government’s involvement in Southeast Asia, but there’s an emotional veracity to the reactions of these guys who find themselves in way over their individual and collective heads that rings true for anyone who has experienced war, whether that be in Vietnam, Korea, Germany, or any of the more recent theaters like Iraq and Afghanistan. Director Walter Hill is sometimes thought of as a kind of “poor man’s Sam Peckinpah”. Like Peckinpah, Hill delights in the camaraderie of men under pressure, and also like Peckinpah, he finds a certain odd lyrical grace in extremely violent deaths (something co-star Peter Coyote takes him to task for in the included documentary featurette). But in the case of Southern Comfort, Hill might be thought of less as a cinematic sibling to Peckinpah than to John Boorman, for this particular film often plays like a slightly more militarized version of Boorman’s great Deliverance. The film is also more than a bit reminiscent of another Hill opus which came out just a couple of years before Southern Comfort, the somewhat better received The Warriors . Both films posit a group of guys trying to survive against considerable odds in unfamiliar territory. Neither film is as concerned with the mechanics of that survival as with the interplay between the characters as relationships devolve in the heat of more and more atavistic situations.

Hill, who co-wrote Southern Comfort’s script with Michael Kane and David Giler, wastes no time in introducing what initially appear to be mere types, as a gaggle of National Guardsmen assemble for maneuvers in the Louisiana bayou. There’s newcomer Hardin (Powers Boothe), a transplant from Texas who finds the good ol’ boy ambience of the Louisiana Guard not exactly to his liking. Chief among the braggarts is a smarmy Private named Spencer (Keith Carradine), a guy who is making the best of a bad situation by arranging for a bunch of “working women” to be available to the squad after their maneuvers have finished. Despite a perhaps incipient mistrust, Hardin and Spencer turn out to be the focal pair of the film and band together as partners after some unexpected carnage ensues (in a way foreshadowing a similar "oil and water" pairing that Hill would exploit in one of his most successful films, 48 Hrs.).

Those who have never seen Southern Comfort and who don’t know the vagaries of military maneuvers may be shocked in an early scene where the squad appears to be firing their weapons directly at some of their comrades, but therein lies one of the chief plot points of the film: the guys are only shooting blanks (so to speak). Later, two stupid decisions in a row bring them into conflict with the local backwoods Cajun community, most of whom speak a bizarre patois consisting of French and English. The first decision involves the squad “borrowing” some Cajun canoes to get across a river, and the second, more disastrous one, involves an amped up Guardsmen deciding to fire his automatic weapon at some non-threatening Cajuns on the shore. The Cajuns don’t realize that the soldiers only have blanks, and they decide to return fire with actual ammunition. That results in a shocking death (the first of many), and makes the Guardsmen prey in a rugged and unfamiliar terrain.

While that would seem to be more than enough plot—basic though it is—to sustain the film, it’s in the characters’ reactions to their predicament that Hill ultimately ends up finding a lot of dramatic force. It goes without saying that alliances shift and a number of hotheaded, testosterone fueled moments end badly, but through it all, Hill rather smartly focuses on the relentless, primal instincts of Hardin and Spencer as they attempt to navigate both the geography and the various nemeses, both within the squad and without, which they encounter. Hill also provides a couple of outright shocking moments, some involving deadly skirmishes between the guys and a couple which involve various Cajuns the squad interacts with in their panicked trek toward civilization.

While Carradine and Boothe are the stars of the film, and both deliver standout performances, the supporting cast is large and colorful, providing great showy roles for Fred Ward, Lewis Smith, Peter Coyote as Guardsmen and an especially memorable Brion James (Blade Runner) as Cajun trapper. The film is also notable for its ethnic score by Ry Cooder, something that adds a very distinctive flavor to the film, especially in the raucous finale when the surviving Guardsmen find themselves in the midst of a backwoods Cajun hoedown.

Southern Comfort Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Southern Comfort is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory (an imprint of Shout! Factory) with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Shout! press materials tout "a new high definition transfer" without explicitly addressing the issue of whether it's newer than (and different from) that used for the lackluster British blu-ray released by Second Sight. I don't own the British version, but a cursory comparison of screenshots suggests that if this is the same master, at the very least some color correction has been done. The color of this presentation, while often intentionally muted and muddy looking, is often quite striking, especially in the deeply lush greens of the tangled vines and other flora of the Louisiana bayou. Unfortunately, this presentation suffers from several of the same anomalies my colleague Dr. Svet Atanasov noted in his review of the British version. While grain is more than abundantly in evidence, it clumps at times and is littered with slight but visible video noise, especially in some of the dimmer sequences. There are also compression artifacts afflicting the image, typically in the lower half of the frame, some of which look almost like splotchy pixilated overlays on the image. That said, the brightly lit close-ups reveal excellent clarity and fine detail. Some midrange and establishing shots are relatively soft by comparison, a tendency exacerbated by the diffuse lighting utilized for some sequences. While the bulk of the image is stable, there's some fairly jittery telecine wobble during the credits.

Southern Comfort Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Southern Comfort features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track which offers a surprisingly full sounding low end (making the many gunshots sound viscerally impressive) and featuring overall excellent fidelity if a generally somewhat shallow sound. Cooder's score is brightly and clearly presented, and the film's dialogue is always easy to hear, even in some noisy environments. There is no appreciable damage to report.

Southern Comfort Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Documentary (1080p; 27:12) is a newly produced piece which features interviews with several of the actors, along with writer David Giler and director Walter Hill (who appear courtesy of SKype). There's some interesting back and forth between the participants about just whether or not this is an allegory for the Vietnam war or not.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080i; 2:09)


• Still Gallery (1080p; 5:39)

Southern Comfort Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Walter Hill argues that "I make films, not metaphors" in the featurette accompanying this Blu-ray as a supplement, but the fact is it ultimately doesn't matter if you choose to see Southern Comfort as a symbol of something else or simply a viscerally exciting (and often quite disturbing) film depicting desperate men in a desperate struggle for survival. The film has a rather ironically lyrical visual aesthetic, something that plays out as counterpoint to the raw emotions on display. This new Blu-ray has some video issues, which the audio and supplements help to counterbalance. Recommended.