Walter Hill hasn't forgotten entirely how to string shots together, as evidenced by the climactic hide-and-seek game intricately choreographed in a backwater Cajun village, though it is necessary there to overlook the corny travelogue notion of a rustic sanctuary insulated like Brigadoon from the encroachment of modernity: any time you might wander into this quaint little village, the impression is given, you would be able to witness a nonstop festival of toe-tapping folk music, dance, barbecue, happy faces. And Hill has obviously worked very hard at finding and keeping a consistent visual quality: a near monochrome that gives the bayou locale the all-over look and feel of a fungus. Otherwise, though, this movie repeats what was most disappointing about The Long Riders, a creeping conventionality in the action scenes (much slow-motion, especially at moments when bullets are striking, and much telephoto collapsing of space), and at the same time, while wisely retaining Ry Cooder to compose the music, it does away with the complexity of human relations, substituting a monotonous wolf-pack snappishness. It also repeats the minimal narrative situation of The Warriors, but eliminates the external novelties. Southern Comfort is simply that dusty old Lost Patrol, only in a swamp, not a desert. It must have been a bit of a challenge, filming there, to find solid pieces of ground on which to set up movie cameras, and this must have had something to do with the decision to rely so heavily on telephoto lenses that squash the space as flat as a pancake and that make the action (to continue the metaphor) appear to flow across it like Log Cabin syrup. Keith Carradine, Powers Boothe. (1981) — Duncan Shepherd
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