![]() The result was just a mess and completely lacks quotable lines or coherence, but has some of the most ridiculous "Indian vision quest" nonsense ever put on film and is a must-see if you enjoy poking fun at wannabee shamans and New Agers. It was nearly three hours long, totally paranoid, and tried to tap into the outrage over child abuse, Watergate, and Kent State. This one follows on directly from the events of the last film, with Billy Jack in prison and the students at the Freedom School rebuilding and angering the locals once again with their efforts to bring truth to power. Billy jack trial#Laughlin pulled a similar trick with The Trial of Billy Jack, opening the film nationally in over a thousand theaters, a distribution strategy that was unheard of then but quickly became standard for studio releases big and small. Billy jack how to#By the end of the '70s, any film studio worth a damn had figured out how to market their films on television. ![]() Billy jack tv#He did just that in 1973, upon which it was a smash hit, largely through his use of targeted TV ads rather than the print advertising that the major studios relied on at the time. to get the rights to distribute the film himself. Billy Jack was largely a hit through Laughlin's own efforts after it flopped in its initial release, he sued Warner Bros. While its '70s counterculture politics have largely been forgotten since, the film's greatest legacy was arguably behind the scenes, in how it revolutionized film advertising and distribution. Many of the film's martial arts scenes were choreographed and performed by 9th dan Hapkido karate master Han Bong-soo (who later appeared as himself in The Trial of Billy Jack). Incidentally, life imitated art only a couple years later when American Indian Movement gunmen took over Wounded Knee, South Dakota and held off federal agents before surrendering, a scenario that was nearly identical to that depicted in the movie. You know, the SIEGE, where our lone anti-hero holes up in a compound and fends off law enforcement for a few days. The continuum goes roughly like this: Billy Jack → Walking Tall → Death Wish → First Blood → Rambo: First Blood Part II → On Deadly Ground ad nauseum.Īnd it has a very familiar ending, sort of like Ruby Ridge and Waco. One of the skits involving hip police on the patrol for "squares" appears directly ripped off from the Firesign Theatre.įor all its left-wing counter-culture politics, Billy Jack is probably partly responsible for all the right-wing vigilante movies which since followed, thanks to blatant Billy Jack rip-offs starring the likes of Sylvester Stallone and Steven Seagal. Some of the improvisational street theater, on the other hand, is quite good. Low-budget production values abound, including badly dubbed-in dialogue and a very choppily-edited city council meeting where everyone in the scene appears to have been winging it. This was what happened when somebody decided to make, simultaneously, a hippie film with left-wing politics riding the post-Woodstock mood, a vigilante film featuring an ex-Green Beret martial arts expert, a silly cash-in on the New Age fascination with putative Native American " shamanism" and other pseudoscience, and improvisational street theater. The plot revolves around Billy Jack protecting the "Freedom School", an experimental hippie school for runaways and troubled youth on an Indian reservation in Arizona, from locals who hate the school's countercultural values. Billy jack movie#A fairly inept and apolitical film, it was soon overshadowed by its sequel.īilly Jack is the most famous movie in the series. It was largely based on an incident where members of the Hells Angels were arrested for raping five teenage girls in Monterey, California. The Born Losers was a B-movie made by American International Pictures about a biker gang terrorizing a small town. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |