Southern Comfort (1981) Revisited – Horror Movie Review

Deliverance is seen as the benchmark for backwoods, fish out of water thrillers (and yes, we cover thrillers too for all you folks in the comments that will say this isn’t horror) but it’s not alone. While it’s certainly true that the John Boorman 1972 thriller had more success with its 46 million dollar return on a 2-million-dollar budget and 3 Oscar nominations including Best Picture, it may have been bested 9 years later. Southern Comfort has just as good of a pedigree in front of and behind the camera and continues to gain a better and better reputation 44 years later. The horrors found within this movie permeate the entire run time and include one of the most intense and nerve wracking final 20 minutes ever put to the screen that will sit with you long after the credits. Don’t mess with the locals as we revisit Southern Comfort.

Let’s start with director/writer/producer Walter Hill. Hill is a legend in Hollywood on both the big and small screens. Starting in the early 70s as a writer he wrote the screenplay for Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway before a string of popular hits that he would both write and direct like Hard Times, The Driver, and The Warriors. These classics would go on to inspire countless imitators and homages, but it was his first producing credit that would make its mark for decades to come with Alien which he would also have uncredited script additions for. He would go on to help with that franchise in various roles including as a writer on the much maligned Alien 3 and as a producer all the way up to 2024’s Alien: Romulus. He would later give us greats like The Long Riders, 48 Hours, Extreme Prejudice and help produce both Deadwood and Tales from the Crypt for HBO. It’s that horror pedigree that helps us ease into today’s movie.

In the late 1970s, Walter Hill and fellow producer David Giler had a deal in place with 20th Century Fox to “acquire and develop interesting and commercial scripts that could be made on a modest budget with a high return on investment.” One of these scripts ended up being Alien and the other was Southern Comfort that he originally wrote in 1976 as The Prey. Giler and Hill hired a screenwriter named Michael Kane and when he submitted it the two producers would rewrite it with all 3 men receiving credit. Kane wouldn’t have a ton else on his resume but did write additional uncredited dialogue for Jaws 3D and give us the screenplay for the Tom Cruise vehicle All the Right Moves. Producing partner Giler isn’t nearly as well known as Hill but he was just as instrumental with the development of the Alien franchise and Tales from the Crypt as his partner and friend.

Southern Comfort, if just described by someone to you, sounds derivative of Deliverance, but it’s got a lot more depth and has a Vietnam war allegory that Hill, like Romero and Night of the Living Dead’s casting of Duane Jones as a lead, denies as intentional. One of the theatrical posters saying “not since Deliverance” doesn’t help the comparison but this is no copy. The movie opens in a bayou in Louisiana where a squad of National Guard reserve soldiers are preparing for a weekend operation as practice. The squad is led by Poole, played by Peter Coyote, and also includes Spencer, Hardin, and Reece who happen to be played by Keith Carradine, Powers Boothe, and Fred Ward. Coyote has been around forever and is great as Keys in E.T. and of course showed up in Sphere which is why we are covering this movie today. I loved seeing all the shoutouts for Southern Comfort after I mentioned it.

Fred Ward will forever be Earl Bassett in the first two Tremors movies but if you haven’t seen Remo Williams, please treat yourself to that beauty. Keith Carradine is my favorite of that acting family that also includes Robert and John. The Oscar winner worked with Hill often and was a great Wild Bill on Deadwood amongst many other roles. Finally of the big three Powers Boothe was selected by Hill after he saw him play Jim Jones but he’s amazing everywhere especially Tombstone and Frailty. The rest of the unit is played by fun character actors, including T.K. Carter from The Thing, Lewis Smith from Buckaroo Banzai, and Alan Autry from the TV series version of In the Heat of the Night. Boothe’s Hardin is over from the Texas reserves and isn’t impressed by what he sees from the leadership or the rest of the team even if he does get along with Spencer. The crew gets lost early in its journey to get across the landscape and decides to start trouble by taking some Cajun boats that they have intentions of returning.

The group of jokers freely uses their blank ammunition like college kids would joke and that comes back to bite them immediately when a group of Cajuns is glaring at them for stealing the boats. They try to yell to them that the boats will be returned but Stuckey stupidly fires his machine gun at them only to have return fire with real bullets kill Poole. The rest of the squad starts to fall apart emotionally and mentally with Reece also revealing that he brought real ammo, something that is known from a couple other men. The lack of leadership turns the men against each other in some cases and crazy in others. They are hunted by faceless assailants, dogs, and beset by traps that include falling trees and raising spike traps. They have become strangers in a strange land and are outnumbered and outgunned. Hill knew that the comparisons to Vietnam would come up and told the cast and crew that he saw it and didn’t want to hear about it for the whole shoot. It’s hard not to see and adds an angle to the movie that gives it legs that keep making the movie more and more relevant.

The group finds its way to a trapper’s house but find that he only speaks French and is unable and unwilling to help them. One of the men, Bowden, goes full Stallone from First Blood and blows up the shack that was full of food and weapons the rest of the men could have used before becoming catatonic the remainder of the movie. After that act of aggression, it becomes all-out war and confusion with Hardin killing Reece in self-defense, traps and quicksand killing a couple others, and the Cajun hunters picking off the rest until only Spencer and Hardin remain. They get out of the main swamp and are picked up by a friendly couple and taken to a seemingly friendly town, but everything is not what it seems.

Before getting to the riveting final 20 minutes, let’s talk about how horrifying this movie can be at times. The music, by frequent Hill collaborator Ry Cooder, follows the tone of the movie wonderfully. It’s jovial when times are good and becomes farcical in its tone when things fall apart. It adds a sense of confusion and trepidation that we see on the faces of the reserve soldiers as they stumble their way through increasingly dangerous locations. Something I hadn’t noticed until this viewing is how the Cajun hunters, at least the ones in the swamps, are like slashers in the fact that they have that Voorhees ability to teleport around and be where they need to be to kill off the soldiers. Even their camp where the boats are taken from feels like a den that the final girl finds with all their weapons and trophies. They are unstoppable and have a mysticism about them that is terrifying and inevitable. When we run into the one that the team had captured and later gets away, he speaks more than enough English to tell the final two friends that they are in over their heads. Even Bowden who has gone crazy halfway through the movie has a death that sticks with you.

Hardin and Spencer find him hung and we never get a clear answer if he did it to himself or it was bayou justice. The way most of the crew dies is down right horrifying too. While it was Stuckey’s stupid decision to shoot at the Cajuns that started the whole nightmare scenario, you still feel terrible for him and horrified as his wide eyes sink into the quicksand. What’s possibly worse is when Simms is shot while running away and mutters “I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not supposed to be here.” This may not be a horror movie, but it is damn horrifying. Back to Hardin and Spencer. They get to a very friendly village where they are offered food and drinks but just feels off. From the people that may or may not be watching them to the two pigs in cages waiting to be slaughtered mirroring their current situation, everything is tense. The happy music here finally betrays what we see on screen and it’s not until Hardin wanders off the grounds and runs into a surly looking Cajun played by Sonny Landham that we finally know how much trouble the two are in.

They run and fight their way out with everything they have and finally following the helicopter to the road and a truck that is only revealed at the very last minute to be a U.S. military one. They are presumably saved, and we get a happy ending that didn’t seem possible just minutes before. Interestingly in an Iranian version of the film that appeared in the late 80s under the name Operation Lagoon, the soldiers were openly against the Vietnam war and were sent by the government to be killed by hunters in the bayou. Even at the end when the two remaining soldiers seemingly escape, the movie fades out to gunshots after we see the U.S. Army logo on the side, implying that the government had the survivors killed even though they made it out of the swamps. That’s grim.

Southern Comfort wasn’t the success that Deliverance was, nor did it come close to the other script presented to Fox was in Alien. It made less than 3 million on its 7-million-dollar budget in the U.S. but did really well in Europe, something that Hill was always shocked by. Reviews were mostly nice to it with Roger Ebert giving it 3 stars and saying it was a remarkably well-made film but nearly everyone compared it to the previous decade’s Deliverance. It holds up remarkably well and toes a great line between slow burn and action while giving audiences a lot to think about. Vinegar Syndrome just gave it its due with an outstanding 4K release that begs to be explored and reexamined. Southern Comfort is an uncomfortable look at what happens when mistakes are made, and a group of people begin to fall apart in a part of the world that they are grossly in over their heads. It deserves a rewatch or a first time view for people looking for a non-traditional horror experience that will stay with you long after the survivors escape.

Two previous episodes of Revisited can be seen below. To see more of our shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals channel – and subscribe while you’re at it!

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