Southern Comfort (Hill, 1981): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm
This 4K restoration screening is a Lost Reels presentation and the first time the film will have been seen in the UK for decades.
Time Out review:
Transposing The Warriors from Brooklyn to the bayous of Louisiana,
this reactivates the old genre of the platoon movie, echoes to the
distant trumpets of Vietnam, unconcernedly risks pigeonholing as Deliverance II,
and generally sets up more reverberations from its pared-down premise
than do any number of scattershot epics. Nine part-time National
Guardsmen embark on weekend training manoeuvres in the southern
swamplands, expecting only a long, wet walk towards a whorehouse - until
the gunplay abruptly stops being kids' stuff, and eight virgin soldiers
suddenly face long odds on survival, lost and leaderless in a guerrilla
war of attrition against the native Cajuns. Walter Hill's characters exercise
their own deadly group dynamics in the firing line, while Ry Cooder's
score, an eerily-shot alien landscape, and a lifestyle familiar mainly
from Les Blank documentaries point up the internal cultural divide.
Straight-line conflicts, low-light visuals: the film's basics, its
strengths, and its critical Achilles' heel are all those of the classic
American male action movie.
Paul Taylor
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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