Way Overdue Movie Overview: Billy Jack

Recently while looking through my DVDs, I stumbled onto one that I totally forgot I had; a low-budget movie originally released in 1971 called Billy Jack that I had not seen in many years. I popped it into the DVD player and looked forward to watching it, remembering it as a Bruce Lee-type karate kick-ass movie. My how things change over the years! What I wound up watching is best described as a distinctly anti-white propaganda film and is among the funniest unintentionally funny movies I've ever seen.

The title character, played by a man named Tom Laughlin (who also wrote and produced it under various pseudonyms) is a half-breed Native American/Cracker who seems to be an early prototype for Rambo; a quiet, intense loner, a Special Forces Vietnam Vet, and most important, a one-man army who is highly skilled at armed and unarmed combat. 

Billy Jack in training attacking anything white, including groovy shades

 The character's debut was actually in a 1968 movie called Born Losers, which I vaguely remember seeing sometime in the 80's, and was yet another of those movies that confirm outlaw biker gangs like the aptly-named Born Losers are every mother's nightmare, even if she’s a biker momma herself.

Billy Jack, made at the pony-tailed end of the smelly-ass Hippie Era, is stridently gringophobic. There are very few melanin-deficient good guys in this flick for sure. Funny part is, most of the people in the movie are as white as a sheet, and Tom Laughlin himself looks about as Native American as Tom Arnold. The movie has three main elements, all of which collide in a small Southwestern town, apparently somewhere in Bumfuck, Arizona:

A bunch of greedy and vicious white assholes that comprise the conservative, corrupt, racist, and rapacious White Establishment;

A school for fucked-up counterculture teenage runaways operated by an excessively peaceful hippie woman named Jean (played by Laughlin's real-life wife) whose commitment to pacifism apparently disguises a sadomasochistic streak that’s several time zones wide;

Last but not least, Billy Jack, avenger and protector of the oppressed and all-around good guy.

The film starts with Billy Jack preventing the usual suspects from stealing horses from an Indian reservation to sell for dog food at six cents a pound; some things never change, and as all leftists know, you can always count on gangs of horseback-riding, gun-toting, capitalist white assholes to rustle your livestock and steal your shit. Billy Jack makes an enemy of the local political boss, who tells Billy Jack, "You've made a mistake." Billy Jack replies, "I've made them before." The Evil White Man in the form of a sheriff's deputy gets some payback of sorts after being informed by his teenage daughter that she's pregnant, and the father could be "White, Indian, Mexican, or Black." Talk about promoting diversity! Deputy Evil White Asshole Dad doesn't take kindly to this news and gives her a brutal beating, as if we expected anything else.

The film continues to follow the trials and tribulations of the usual oppressed victims at the hands of the usual oppressive pricks. The first good fight happens when the kids are denied service at an ice cream parlor because they aren't “white” enough, and the satanic son of the local political boss, Bernard Posner (Posner is a Jewish surname; evidently Mr. Laughlin’s way of including Jews), makes a rude and crude racist statement by rendering a couple of the kids "white" by pouring flour over their heads and faces after beating up an Indian boy named Martin and doing the same thing to him. 

White privilege; or "Flour Power"

 Billy Jack shows up, becomes enraged, knocks Posner out and throws a huge white goon through a window. Billy Jack, anticipating even more white trash to thrash, shows us what an incomparable badass he is by taking his boots OFF to fight. 

Billy Jack gives a heel a heel

 After kicking more evil cracker cracks in a nearby park, the low-brow peckerwoods finally get the upper hand on Billy Jack, but the timely intervention of the Sheriff, one of the few "good" whites in the movie, saves Billy Jack’s freshly-kicked ass.

The conflict between the hippies and the squares continues to escalate. The white teenage perpetual runaway girl who is fond of “promoting diversity” runs away again (surprise, surprise) and falls in love with Martin, the recently beaten and humiliated would-be (vanilla?) ice cream eater. In the hospital after falling from a horse, Martin is visited by Ms. Runaway Prick Pouch, who brings him a flower; better "flower" than "flour", eh Martin? The town's evil white fascist crowd makes their dislike of the hippie kids even more vocal and evident, and the hippies respond in kind. Meanwhile, Billy Jack goes through a strange sadomasochistic ritual where he allows himself to be bitten by rattlesnakes, making him (ironically) even more “white” by sudden eligibility to attend certain churches in Appalachia. Somehow unfazed by massive doses of hemotoxic venom, Billy Jack gives an impassioned speech that only a severely perforated and envenomated half-breed nihilist would understand.

Bernard Posner, the savage, overprivileged (Jewish?) white asshole who is the film's primary antagonist, begins to kick his sociopathy into high gear, swearing revenge on Billy Jack, and once again supervises the beating up and the beating down of Martin. None of these people apparently saw Easy Rider, and what happens to longhairs when they make the mistake of entering a small town populated by Evil White Hicks, as if there are any other kind, right? Martin would have been better off never leaving the reservation; had he waited, saved his money, and bided his time, he could have gotten in on the ground floor of a casino and had the last laugh, watching drunken palefaces blow their money on his slot machines and roulette wheels before telling the bouncers to drop-kick their even paler asses to the curb after cleaning their dumb asses out of cash and credit.

Meanwhile, Billy Jack continues to fuck with Posner, rudely interrupting Posner's even ruder attempt at raping a girl at knifepoint, and, taking Jean's atypically unpacifistic advice, forces him to drive his (white privilege) Corvette into a lake. This marks the point where the violence in the movie sharply increases. 

So much for pacifism

 A skinny-dipping Jean (despite being constantly surrounded by vicious white thugs who are never too far away, you’d think the dumb-ass bitch would know better by now) is tied up and raped by Posner and one of his subhuman henchmen, which forces her to question the decision to take a pacifist approach to life. Well, duhhh!

The plot continues to thicken; the perpetually-promiscuous runaway teenager is no longer pregnant, losing the multicultural baby after falling from a horse. The movies usually are good for that; if someone falls down a flight of stairs, they break their necks and die; if the woman is pregnant, she loses the baby and/or dies. The hapless and luckless would-be white-teenage-runaway-bimbo-boning Injun Martin is finally finished off by that evil anthropomorphic rodent Posner. At least this time, Martin puts up a fight. Guns make an ever-increasing presence in the movie from this point on. Billy Jack, after being informed of Martin's demise and the rape of Jean, has finally had enough.

Billy Jack tracks Posner down and rudely interrupts him (again) while he's in bed with a thirteen year-old girl. Posner has a gun handy and fires it, but in possibly the worst display of marksmanship in cinematic history, misses Billy Jack while shooting at point-blank range - twice! Billy Jack finally kills that evil asshole with the good-old, tried-and-true judo chop to the larnyx. Billy Jack then holes up in a crude church of all places, and after a lengthy white cop-killing shootout, Billy Jack finally gives up. He's led away by the cops, and presumably gets an unfair trial from a rigged jury. THE END