Southern Comfort

Keith Carradine and Powers Boothe lead a superb ensemble cast in this suspenseful action thriller. It's kinda like a mix of Deliverance and Predator, but with really good acting and a great score by Ry Cooder. The climactic confrontation in a Cajun shantytown is excellent.

all-american bundles of machismo & entitlement stomp into the swamps of the bayou, or is it 'nam? whores await, but it's "steel pussies" & castrated trees they gotta worry about; they fire blanks as they're hung by their own rope or gutted like pigs -- ironically the climax is immense. hill punctures a nation's self-serving myths with primal economy, while laszlo's oppressively desolate visual pallette is augmented by feverish dissolves/freeze-frames/slo-mo & spare, disorienting sound design.

Very good thriller with a strong 'survival horror' undercurrent running though it. Powers Boothe is especially good.

While the setting is a bit like Deliverance, this film stands out due to the amazingly rich character development of a squad of soldiers. The nearly invisible threat of the Cajun hunters is more of a side-effect. It's the drama within the unit that makes this a great thriller. The underlying friendships and alliances make for some wonderfully intense character interactions.

Walt Hill is a director who definitely knows his craft where suspense is concerned. Aside from the gorgeous but foreboding bayou setting itself, the cleverest devices are used to create an atmosphere of mounting tension, successfully building up to a dynamite climax. While well-written, the movie is somewhat mired by the almost surreal stupidity displayed by the entire squad. Occasional plot developments that are slightly over-the-top or a little too neat, also bog it down. It's no Deliverance.

Very cool little hicksploitation piece. The comparisons to Deliverance have some merit, but that shouldn't keep you from watching this.

Flawless for what it is. Great actors, great directing, great music. And man what an ending. Beautiful movie.

Intense and adhesively atmospheric.

I don’t know Lloyd, the French are assholes

Hill didn't intend to provide any commentary on Vietnam, but parallels can easily be drawn, not least in the premise of a group of poorly equipped men in a foreign and hostile territory and the sheer impotence of their macho bluster against the 'enemy's' home turf advantage. Either way, it's difficult to believe it isn't also addressing the American crucible in one way or another. The locations are very well used, Boothe and Ward shine, and there are many tense scenes of violent conflict.

Near-brilliant allegory of US-troops in Vietnam and a tough survival-movie at the same time. Direction, cinematography and music is flawless.

Boothe and Ward are bad-ass in this simple, but fun thriller.

Flunkies in the Army National Guard mess with the Cajuns and it doesn't go well. Tense movie. Nicely paced with great shots of the eerie Louisiana swamp, plus an effective soundtrack. Marred by excessive crude language and some stupid dialogue.

to survive in this swamp you need to (a) not be a maniac or (b) speak French, and none of them speak French

Good film.

An underrated gem of a thriller, it's essentially a Vietnam movie that takes place in the swamps of Louisiana. Score is often effective. It was made in the early 80s but has a very 70s feel. Really liked Powers Booth in this. He's good in pretty much everything. Not quite as iconic as Deliverance, but it's a damn good, very entertaining movie.

Wow! Glad I revisited this one. Like First Blood meets Deliverance. Intense action drama with a great ensemble cast.

Deliverance 2: Swamp Siege is cliched and downright dumb at times. The uneasy third act pulls its weight, but Hillbilly Predator doesn't stand out from the crowd.

A purely mediocre action thriller flick featuring a squad of asshole soldiers who unrealistically(?) completely lack discipline. I found it quite boring, and for the most part you could give any one character's line to any other and you wouldn't tell the difference. Pacing was bad, acting wasn't incredible. The third act was decent. All in all, the film was watchable, but I can't help but feel I wasted my time.

Sometimes the acting was lacking and the reaction to attacks were odd and disconnected, but otherwise it was interesting. Sucks for the Cajuns' image though

Swamps have never been so beautifully shot as in here, as this group of arrogant, unprepared soldiers just get hunted down -- by forest and Cajuns from who they've stolen canoes and provoked in the first place, invading their land and shooting blanks -- by nearly invisible, existential predators. Simply no allies or rivals. Just pure subtle horror and mayhem all over -- sound design is also stunning --, as the US military is found with yet another huge blow -- now in its own country.

Nam down in the bayou. I dig it.

Solid execution of a very simplistic plotline. The characters are sometimes difficult to distinguish, and it goes on a bit towards the end, but certainly worth a watch.

This plays like Deliverance meets Vietnam War movies meets slasher. With people out of their depth in the countryside being hunted by locals the comparison with Deliverance is easily made. Although it all plays out in the American South, this feels very much like an allegory on the Vietnam War in how soldiers deal with stress and tension in a unknown hostile landscape. The way different characters get killed off one by one and the slow-building of tension of this is very reminiscent of slashers.

Hill captures the kinds of a—hole behaviors certain males (& lets be honest, disproportionately males) engage in that, (take note PC zealots) understandably, give the rest of us a bad name. He also unnecessarily throws a complete nut job into the mix which doesnt help the main idea. But the locations are stunning, the performances mostly solid (esp Boothe) & the last 10 minutes are not just incredibly suspenseful, but reveal the potential ugliness lurking inside every tightly-knit community.

Predator, but with Cajuns, the most poorly trained soldiers in history, and set in the South. As Cajuns are naturally unsettling, this scenario makes for a tense 100 minutes. Of course you also get Hill's love for machismo and knife fights so yeah.

B+

Just ridiculous...

Walter Hill is great at directing action (eg. "The Warriors") but he's lousy at directing actors and at character development.

Good movie with an amazing thrilling ending.

There's a pretty obvious Vietnam allegory going on here, but this is still pretty enjoyable due to the strong characterization and nicely photographed setting. Ry Cooder's soundtrack is a good one.

Solid movie with soldiers who carry it from start to end.

great soundtrack , that's bout it

Don't know where this movie came from but it was dope.

One of the great Hill's, for sure. Muck and grime and mud and water, fake bullets, opressive foilage (as in something out of Tourneur), one-armed Cajuns like MIKE. Some men are small-souled and some are not.

A not very intelligently assembled piece of us vs. the backwoods exploitation, where us is a military platoon of the hateful eight with a behavior so bizarre that, well, it's gotta be an allegory about Vietnam, right? Tension and interest only bubble up in the finale, where our heroes find their way back into a dubious kind of civilization.

Very heavy-handed Vietnam allegory wrapped up in a moody but somewhat predictable action/thriller film. The closing 20 minutes though are incredibly tense and frenetic, and well worth the wait.