Cheap Southern Comfort (DVD) (Keith Carradine, Powers Boothe) (Walter Hill) Price

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Customer Reviews of Southern Comfort

Superb And Thoughtful Action Movie!
This tautly-told tale of the explosive mix of subcultures under extreme conditions is a gem seldom discussed in movie circles, but is indeed a near-cult favorite of Vietnam vets who recognize the allegorical message of its gritty and ironic twists of plot associated with the casual and almost nonchalant attitudes of several Louisiana National Guard reservists off on a weekend military exercise during the early 1970s in the foreboding and eerie bayou country. Famed action director Walter Hill wastes little time in setting the dilemma into motion, and by disobeying orders and "improvising" a way across a large river by "borrowing" some Cajun moon-shiners' boats, the squad soon finds itself engaged in escalating misunderstanding and quite plausible sequences of violence, murder, and mayhem.

For anyone ever in the military of that era, it is a profoundly accurate depiction of just how easily disorganized, untrained, and undisciplined troops who are poorly indoctrinated and even more poorly led can find itself disastrously out of control under circumstances they can no longer positively influence. Moreover, left to their own devices,and slowly decimated through casualties inflicted by their erstwile opponents, they unnecessarily and fatefully add to their own predicament by taking action that makes their predicament much worse. They also find, to their horror, that relatively untrained civilians with guns and attitude can be formidable opponents. The stealth, familiarity with the terrain, and downright viciousness employed by the local Cajun moon-shiners makes this a captivating study in how slender are the threads that binds us together in a large and pluralistic society such as ours. Speaking of terrain, the way in which Hill uses the topography and atmosphere of the swamps and savannas of the bayou make it an essential and unpredictable aspect to their efforts to extricate themselves from this background of madness.

In what is perhaps the best-delivered performance of his many-faceted career, Powers Boothe provides a rational coda to the irrational aggression swirling around him as Hardin, a white collared and college educated trooper who has only recently joined the unit, and whose efforts to corral the others that he characterizes as rednecks, into a more cohesive fighting force finally work to their advantage. Fred Ward is also excellent here, as is Keith Carradine, Peter Coyote, and Alan Autry, who later gained fame as the resident stud-muffin southern boy featured in the TV series version of "Heat Of The Night". Also an essential ingredient in delivering a movie with a knockout punch is Ry Cooder's haunting score, which provides a wonderful mix of southern twang and Cajun chords in accompanying this extremely well told tale. For anyone interested in an allegorical approach to our Vietnam troubles told interestingly and provocatively, I can highly recommend the movie, and am glad it is finally out in DVD. Enjoy!

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A Vietnam set in Louisiana swampland
Southern comfort is a great metaphor for the Vietnam War, except instead of the Viet-Cong, the enemy is some mean and nasty backwood Cajuns you would not want to run into if you were lost in the swamp. The soldiers are really a bunch of civilians thrown into an ugly situation they really want no part of, and they are impotent weekend warriors as well, as they have to fight the Cajun's powerful hunting rifles with nothing but blanks! Powers Booth, and Keith Carradine steal the show as the two soldiers with any common sense , that want to survive the situation...gory and violent, you really get into the story as their situation keeps worsening, and the plot thickens. The score by Ry Cooder is unforgettable and haunting, and listen for some down home Cajun music in the climax...will make you think twice about heading out into the bayous of Southern Louisiana....Highly recommended.

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Deliverance + Blair Witch Project = Terrible, Terrible Movie
It's like Deliverance because it has hillbillies hunting city boys and it's like the Blair Witch Project because all that happens is they wander around not knowing where to go and eventually get killed. The script is so poorly written that someone actually gets killed by quick sand. The music is awful; at one point it's a single note being played for ten minutes. The acting is horrendous; they're supposed to be convincing each other that they're seriously lost and need to think of a plan, but they can't even convince me that they're in the Bayou.
The film is classified as action/adventure, but all that happens is that they walk around for seventy minutes, deliver terrible dialogs, spend twenty minutes in a hillbilly hootenanny, and battle their pursuers in a confrontation that makes the stunts on Xena look like a Bruce Lee movie. There's a scene where a pig is cut open and its guts come out and say, "Look at me: I'm unpleasant, but an hour of me is still better than ten minutes of this garbage!"
If you like this movie, make sure to check out Battlefield Earth and Cut Throat Island.