A squad of National Guards on an isolated weekend exercise in the Louisiana swamp must fight for their lives when they anger local Cajuns by stealing their canoes. Without live ammunition and in a strange country, their experience begins to mirror the Vietnam experience.
This movie contains 4 potentially triggering events.
There is a graphic scene where several dogs attack the troop of National Guardsmen, and although we see the troops trying to fight off the attacking dogs with the butts of their rifles, we (thankfully) don't hear any yelping and then the dogs, all of them, run off.
We do not see abuse, but we see a lot of dead carcasses, and since the two pigs' REAL shooting and gutting was allowed in this movie, I have no doubt that all the dead rabbits hanging, and the dead dear were likely real as well.
Who voted no?!? Two large pigs are shot in the head, then gutted. Unless they used extremely sophisticated animatronic pigs or pigs trained to drop when someone pretended to shoot them, then to twitch very realistically before slowing down and playing dead, which I doubt. The gutting looked very realistic and I had to cover my eyes when blood started gushing out of the first knife cuts.
It is quite possible that they were already going to be shot in the head by the locals in Louisiana in the first place, or on their way to the slaughterhouse, then gutted, and the director just asked if they could film it to be edited in later. I doubt even in 1981, that Walter Hill would just grab a couple pigs who were minding their own business simply to specifically kill them for the movie. Either way, I could have done without seeing two pigs in cages suddenly get shot in the head. It’s hard to watch.
Edited to add: yes, two real animals were killed. The pigs were going to be killed anyway, and the AHA was on the set (to make sure they didn’t suffer??). I still highly would have preferred if the footage of them being killed and cut open right after wasn’t in the movie.
Lots of them. Dead gutted rabbits hanging. Dead fish, mink, a deer, and game of all kinds. There are hunters and trappers in the story, so we see the animals they killed. One scene shows a man skinning some creature, though it's hard to see what kind of animal it is. Real slaughter of two pigs and other pigs on spits.
Several bloody deaths. A bullet into the brain. Booby trap that impales a guy. A few stabbings. A couple guys riddled with bullets. A guy stabbed in the genital area. Hogs shot and slaughtered. Gutted hanging rabbits. Dead bloodied animals.
We see a national guardsman impaled in a trap that was hidden in the bayou water. When he steps on it, it flies up out of the water and several sharp pieces hit the guy full front.
One man is stabbed in his gut and killed. Another character stabs a man right in the crotch with a HUGE knife (self-defense reasons), he screams and blood pours out. Another man stabs a man in the gut violently about a dozen times in quick succession (also self-defense).
It's hard to answer this one. One guardsman does a suicide run, possibly to distract long enough for his teammates to get away, but that may not fit the criteria. One guardsman is found hanging, but we don't know if he did it to himself.
More than one character freaks out and panics from being frightened . One character completely loses his sh-t when a friend is killed, paints a cross on his chest with red paint, laughs like a maniac, then sets fire to a cabin he knows has dynamite in it and it explodes, even though there were important things inside. Later he goes nonverbal and will not respond to anyone, apparently having a psychotic episode from the earlier trauma.
Two real pigs get taken to a big cookout in the back of a truck in cages. A Cajun guy comes over and shoots them both in the head. The camera does not cut away and you can see at least one of them’s legs twitching after he dropped. I highly suspect they did not use special effects or trained pigs. Afterwards they are graphically gutted (Full disclosure: I did cover my eyes for a few seconds when their guts were first cut into, when I realized those were not stunt pigs). The scene takes place in a very small Cajun town and is in the last 20 minutes. Look away when the guy parks, then walks towards their cages in the truck bed until a minute or two after the gun fires twice, if you can do without seeing two real pigs getting killed onscreen. Poor things.