Southern Comfort (1981)
My daddy spent over two decades shining boots and counting jeeps with the National Guard, a full time member as part of the Army after serving in the Marines. He probably should have been a soldier out on a base somewhere handling major equipment, but he dutifully supplied the local militia of weekend warriors and often had things to say about their physical fitness. All that to say, having seen that life close up for half my life as well as living in the bayou of Louisiana for a time, Southern Comfort is an accurate depiction of the effectiveness of the National Guard.
Our story starts on drill, the regular training exercises done by the Guard to keep general skills up to snuff. Groups are being sent out into the bayou to reach a certain location to test their cohesiveness and navigation and whatever other bullshit. The group the film follows is full of crazy assholes who run across some swamp-living Cajuns whom they then manage to piss off, so everything goes Blair Witch Project really fast.
Walter Hill does what he does best with Southern Comfort: getting a bunch of crazy assholes together going from one place to another and then killing them off one at a time. The cast list here is insane, a bunch of genre and 80s regulars who bounce off each other for good and ill. Fred Ward and Powers Booth facing off might be the powerful man sandwich we all crave. Watching these men, just normal stupid guys, slowly be whittled down by demoralizing and violent swamp tactics feels less action "meat mountain" men and more like a bunch of idiots who got in over their heads.
That verisimilitude is at the heart of this story and what's missing from a lot of Hollywood. Before Stallone and Schwarzenegger and defied by Willis when he joined in, action movies were about normal guys with average bodies getting into some shit. Not the gods of violence that action would epitomize. Die Hard is the exception, but the trend continues today with action being the domain of dehydrated six-packs when it should be about a bunch of morons coming to terms with violence.
Of course, these don't look like "normal" people. The National Guard fatigues show them as soldiers, but anyone with any knowledge knows these guys were in over their heads the moment they were given automatic rifles. The Guard is good at many things, but violent attack is not one of them. Have them build a road or school or murder college kids but leave the actual war to the professionals. This need to "play war," the boredom of their "mission" is what leads this group into trouble where they first steal boats to move quicker and second shoot at civilians. Do they use blanks? Yeah. But one of the assholes did bring real ammo and the civilians don't know that.
This should come to no surprise, but don't fuck with people on their home turf. It's so refreshing seeing an insurgent force be not only violently repelled from a hostile land, but the Cajuns fuck with the Guard. That Blair Witch mention above was intentional. Dead rabbits, pit traps, subtle messages with the number of traps lessening as the Guard members die show a dark intention. That the film ends with a party in the swamp village is a beautiful bit of setting. People live out here in this wilderness. They have their own language and music and and culture. And they have ways of living in the harsh land you do not understand, so keep well enough alone.
A dark little walk in the swamp, check it out.