Walter Hill is probably best known for more popular box office hits like The Warriors and 48 Hrs., but this movie is by far his most intense and underrated one. Advertised as the "1980s version of Deliverance," this movie is really an allegory for U. S. involvement in the Vietnam War, mixed with an updating of the Agatha Chrisitie "Ten Little Indians" theme.
Nine (not ten) Louisiana National Guardsmen enter the bayou, miles away from civilization, for a routine weekend warrior training exercise. Despite their training, they get lost in the swamps and borrow Cajun pirogue boats to make up for lost time. A practical joke by one of the dimmer weekend warriors backfires. The Cajuns are not pleased an retaliate with real ammo, which is no match for the blanks the Guardsmen brought with them.
One by one, the Guardsmen are picked off. They are unwanted soldiers in a strange, hostile land, that happens to exist within the borders of the United States. Each Guardsmen brings a distinct personality to the screen, all variations of male machismo: The cocky but ineffective second-in-charge Casper, who becomes the leader after the more serious Poole gets shot near the beginning of the film; the brute Reece, who as one character says "acts as if he's in a dime novel;" the aforementioned prankster Stuckey, "who can't even read a dime novel"; the likely unbalanced high school football coach Bowden; the wise-cracking Black Guardsman; and so on.
Keith Carradine's Spencer and Powers Boothe's Hardin are the only two grounded members of the team, besides Peter Coyote's Poole, who we really don't learn much about before his murder. Of course they turn out to be the sole survivors in the swamp. They initially believe all is well when they end up at a Cajun village, miles away from any non-Cajun town. Spencer believes "these are the good Cajuns." But the appearance of the hulking character actor Sonny Landham as a Cajun hunter suggests otherwise (the late Landham had a career of playing psycho villains, including his character in Hill's next film, 48 Hrs.)
Another character who appears several times to make things complicated for the Guardsmen is a trapper played by another late character actor best known for villain roles: Brion James.
The atmosphere depicted in the film is moody and dangerous. Ry Cooder's score is equally ominous. And although a few women appear near the end in the Cajun village, this is definitely a male-dominated action/thriller. The sequence at the Cajun village near the end is memorable and disturbing, as Hill intercuts the ritualistic slaying of a boar with the scenes pitting Spencer and Hardin against the hunters (the sequence also works as a tribute, or rip-off to more cynical viewers, to the climax of Apocalypse Now).
The actors are first-rate. Carradine is our sympathetic center of attention, and gets top billing. Boothe is also supposed to be a hero in the movie but his character seems "off" as well - he has a giant chip on his shoulder, and as a chemical engineer, feels "above" his fellow weekend warriors. Fred Ward is especially memorable as the bullying Reece, who does nothing to hide his animosity towards James' trapper character (the trapper may or may not have been involved with the killings of the men). Ward and James would reunite more civilly twelve years later in Robert Altman's The Player.
Hill's later films were an uneven bunch, ranging from a Sam Peckinpah-inspired western, to a "rock and roll fable," to a silly Richard Pryor/John Candy buddy comedy, to a strange road movie musical hybrid. Southern Comfort, and possibly The Long Riders, rank as the director's most artistically gratifying works.
