Michael S
Billy Jack is one of those feel good movies with plenty of action. A creation of director Tom Laughlin, it's become a cult classic.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
12/06/23
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karen c
I absolutely love Billy Jack, he fought for the little guy. The ones who get kicked around and have no voice. I also feel this movie is why I grew up to be so compassionate to others. I also learned respect for the land and animals. It must have been a time in my life where it had such a deep impact. Thank you for that gift. I am a much kinder, and caring human thanks to this movie, and Tom Laughlin and his wife's vision.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
09/10/23
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Audience Member
I've watched some stinkers in my day (among them "Flesh-Eating Mothers" and "Chopper Chicks in ZombieTown") and enjoyed a good laugh. This putrefaction wasn't even laughable. I sort of wish I had watched it back in the late '70s when all my high-school friends were raving about it but alas...I thought maybe it would still be good even today. What was I smoking? It's a bit easier to understand this after reading so many reviews…and realizing that Tom Laughable, er.... Laughlin did everything himself. It would be a crying shame to think that there were an actual GROUP of people who thought this merited ever being produced. Save yourself a couple hours and don't bother with this smelly thing.
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
02/27/23
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Audience Member
Disillusioned half-Indian Green Beret Vietnam veteran Billy Jack comes back home to Arizona and what does he find? Several people illegally hunting on Indian land. And to make matters worse, one of them is the local sheriff, so the law no longer applies, and Billy decides that he must take it into his own hands. Not that the sheriff really matters-the real boss of the town is the local millionaire and his spoiled bully son.
But there's more. There's a set of hippies near the town who have set up a Freedom School on the same Indian land (with permission), and occasionally they go into town to do street theater and other antics. The locals dislike them and the local rednecks harass them, and as pacifists they cannot fight back on principle. So Billy Jack comes as the great cowboy hero, punching out the local rednecks whenever they cause the hippies trouble.
Things get worse when one redneck rapes one of the hippies. She tries to hide it from Billy Jack, knowing what he will do, but he finds out anyway, and despite the hippies' insistence, he shoots the rapist dead, and holes up in a church, ready to die fighting. But a lawman with better integrity comes up and Billy Jack surrenders to the law, the hippies raising their fists in a power salute as he is taken away.
I was a tyke when this film was made, so I don't remember the era, but those who have do, and they laughed at the suspiciously clean hippies and the idea they were just harmless goofs who were unjustly bullied. Real-life hippies were neither clean nor harmless, and the dislike for them not so unjustified. "Billy Jack" is a period piece, but doesn't show the era as it really was.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/22/23
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Audience Member
Kenneth Tobey is The Number One!
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/24/23
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Audience Member
You may have thought that Billy Jack was dead after The Born Losers, shot in the back while trying to do the right thing. The truth is, he was just getting started. An anti-authority film, this movie struggled to be made, with American International Pictures pulling out while it was being made. Then, 20th Century Fox stepped in but refused to distribute the film. Auteur Tom Laughlin would not release the sound for the film, making it unreleasable until he could own the film himself, getting Warner Brothers to distribute it. He was unhappy with how Warner Brothers sold the film, so he sued them and finally released the movie himself.
At the heart of the film, the movie presents a conundrum: the only way to achieve peace is to repeatedly beat the stuffing out of people.
Also, the Navajo Green Beret Vietnam War veteran and hapkido master known as Billy Jack is played by director (as T.C. Frank), producer (as Mary Rose Solti) and co-writer (as Frank Christina) Tom Laughlin, who is totally white. That said, the role of Billy Jack is anything but the way that Native Americans had been portrayed up until the early 70s.
Laughlin was also a muckraker, really in the best of ways. He'd written the film nearly two decades before after seeing the way Native Americans were treated in Winner, South Dakota, the home of his wife Delores Taylor. What took so long to get it to screen? Well, beyond building his acting career, Laughlin also quit acting in 1959 to start a Montessori preschool in Santa Monica, California.
After the school went out of business, he went back into acting and after the Billy Jack series, he was set to change the world with Billy Jack Enterprises, which had plans for a new Montessori school, a record label, an investigative magazine, books, a distribution company and more message-laden movies, including films for children. Yet the last movie, Billy Jack Goes to Washington, didn't connect with audiences. Or, as Laughlin charged, it was the fault of Warner Brothers illegally selling the television rights to his films. Or even Senator Vance Hartke, who he said told him that, "You'll never get this released. This house you have, everything will be destroyed." in front of Lucille Ball, angered that the film correctly pointed out how senators were owned by lobbyists.
There was going to be a fifth film, The Return of Billy Jack, that ended in the 2000s when Laughoun got hurt and the money ran out. He claimed for years that it would get made with the title changing to Billy Jack's Crusade to End the War in Iraq and Restore America to Its Moral Purpose, Billy Jack's Moral Revolution and Billy Jack for President, with the plan to have Billy Jack and President George W. Bush debate each other.
Man, I wish that was made.
That said, the original Billy Jack is an incredibly strange movie, a film made of a singular vision.
Billy Jack is the defender of the Freedom School, a school full of happy children taught my Laughlin's real-life wife Delores, who are assaulted from all sides by the horrible folks of the redneck town where, for some reason, they have decided to make their home. A movie this strange demands a run-on sentence like that to describe it.
This is the kind of movie where the hero must face off with a snake and purposefully be bitten with venom so that he can become brothers with the snake, as well as have a theme song "One Tin Soldier (The Legend of Billy Jack)," which was recorded by Jinx Dawson and her band Coven, whose album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls is as metal as it gets, even featuring a black mass as its second side.
You don't really watch Billy Jack. It washes over you. The words I use to describe it aren't enough. It's absolutely ridiculous in the finest of ways and I really want you to experience it.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/06/23
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