The Trial Of Billy Jack (1974) If Billy Jack is the best movie of the seventies, I'm tempted to call The Trial of Billy Jack the worst, but I'll have to hold off on officially naming it as such until I
have the chance to witness the awful sounding Billy Jack Goes To Washington. I can't imagine that it would in fact be worse than the stupefying
self-indulgent mess that the famous half-breed found himself in while he was on
trial in this movie (the titular trial plays very little part in the movie -
though they manage to shoehorn every other idea - good, bad, or mind numbing
that Tom Laughlin and Delores Taylor had into this one).
For those of you who aren't up on your mid-seventies Indian movement/hippie
movies, Tom Laughlin plays a guy who's half Indian and half something else
named Billy Jack. Billy is a Vietnam vet who also is an expert in hap-ki-do or
some type of bland chop suey that someone like Jeff Speakman would probably use
(please Speakman fans - no emails - I know his worthless movies revolve around
some other brand of Far Eastern ga ga called kenpo). Billy has a woman named
Jean. She's a pacifist who runs the Freedom School out in New Mexico and spends
most of the semester getting harassed by bigoted locals, usually lead by dudes
named Posner. Billy Jack detailed Billy's effort to protect the school from these slugs and ended with
him being hauled off by the cops after his girlfriend convinces him to give up
peacefully. This next chapter starts ominously with a bunch of fancy shots of
the wilderness and flying eagles and the like along with all these statistics
relating to all the college punks that the pigs killed back in the day when
campuses were breeding grounds for ungrateful, long-haired, pot smoking, class
cutting, showing no respect for their elders, commie, flower power loving
dopes. Of course that don't give the Man the right to go in there and shoot
the joints up for no reason, now does it? The movie wants to make a point about the government going to these schools
(Kent State, Jackson State, the Freedom School) and provoking confrontations
with the students so that they can waste them and ultimately control them
through fear and violence and thus silence their dissenting voices. The movie
even manages to draw an interesting parallel between those tactics these thugs
used here in the good old US of A and the tactics the military used against
the Vietnamese when we were over there getting our asses whipped. Of course
the movie is so over the top and ham-handed in its handling and presentation
of these themes that you're immediately turned off of whatever message they're
trying to turn you on to.  But what about Billy Jack? When we last saw BJ, he was being hauled off to the
pokey by the fuzz, a line of people raising their fists along the road side as
his car passed by. Did he go to trial? Did he cop a plea? Did he go
undercover in the prison to expose the awful conditions within (see Van Damme's Death Warrant)?
The film uses a pretty clumsy framing device by having a hospitalized Jean
relate to some reporter everything that happened to lead up to the tragic
shooting at the Freedom School. This basically allows the film to present a
series of barely connected events with Jean's narration tying these disparate
happenings together. She even tells us a little about Billy's trial and we get
to see some of the testimony. The interesting thing about the trial is that even though Billy is being
charged with killing some Posners or something, all the testimony is about how
the military massacred women and children back in the 'Nam and how Billy
tattled on the puds that gave the order and carried out the slaughter. Hey, I'm
all for people getting punished for crimes against humanity and all that, but
maybe that should be brought up in a trial where that's the charge. The last
time I checked, Billy was charged with wiping out the scum that raped his woman
(at least I'm guessing that's what he's on trial for - it was never made clear
- it could have also been for his slow motion kung fu). In any event, we get an artlessly staged scene (the movie is chock full of them
- see if you can spot at least twenty) telling the nasty tale of this massacre.
Apparently the jury wasn't entirely convinced that Billy was justified in
killing a bunch of punks back home because the military butchered innocent
civilians abroad because they convict him. So the trial of Billy Jack ends anticlimactically and I felt a bit prematurely
with a guilty verdict on involuntary manslaughter (what?) and a sentence of
five to fifteen years in the pen. I was slightly worried at this point since I
was under the impression that this movie was about a trial and as far as I
could tell, it was all done and the star had lost and been locked away. What
would the rest of the movie be about? Umm, well, what wouldn't it be about?  See, the rest of the movie is a stunning kaleidoscope of unfocused ranting and
raving about every social ill that was popular back in the seventies. The
movie abandons any semblance of a story and Jane just starts telling us every
little thing that those do-gooders at the Freedom School did. There's really
no rhyme or reason to why and when any of this goes on. It's almost as if Tom
and Delores (Tom directed and you can bet that they saw to it that every pet
cause made it into the film) trotted out every lame idea they've ever had to
spread their brand of peace (Billy beats up people, Jean criticizes him for it)
and put it into this movie.
The back of the DVD lists five different people as being a film editor on this
monstrosity. I can only imagine that that's how many people they went through
before they got an editor that made it to the very end of this thing. Did I
mention how long the latest Billy Jack adventure is? It is somewhere in the
neighborhood of 170 minutes. For those of us who were in that special math
class in high school called "consumer math" while all our smart friends were in
"college math," that translates to almost three hours of Billy Jack and Jean
moralizing about every evil they can imagine. As I watched this, I was reminded of what my father said in one of his inspired
(though less than politically correct) moments when he and I were taking a
guided walking tour of Iowa State University that seemed to go on forever. He
complained rather loudly that this is what it must have been like to be on the
Bataan Death March. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that sitting
through this entire movie was like something as awful and deadly as the Bataan
Death March (I am a better person than my father after all), but I will tell
you this: watching The Trial of Billy Jack was a lot like taking a guided walking tour of the Iowa State University campus. Okay, so this movie goes on and on beyond all human conception (a little like
the universe, I guess) and Billy Jack disappears for long stretches of the
movie (this wasn't too smart, because whenever he showed up - usually in that
super-cool black cowboy/pimp hat and too-tight jean jacket - it'd be about the
only time any life was breathed into this hulking behemoth of a flick), and in
the meantime we get the run down on the trouble those Freedom School kids have
been causing. They tackle issues such as child abuse and Indian land rights
and hold all sorts of festivals, including the infamous world's largest band
and drill team contest event dubbed with the really catchy name of "1984 Is
Closer Than You Think" moniker. Whew, that must have looked snazzy on the
concert t-shirts. However blinded Tom and Delores are by their liberal pinko agenda, they know
that the drive-in crowd came to see Billy Jack and not some idiotically-named
marching band Olympics, so Billy gets released after doing 4 years of his 5-15
year sentence. I assume this means that Billy is walking paper on parole (it's
better than being on probation - trust me - every day you walk on parole is a
day off your sentence - every day you walk on probation isn't) which in my
state would prohibit him from doing stuff like, um I don't know, let's say,
holding the lieutenant governor at gun point, smoking peace pipes, kicking
people in the head, throat, knees, gut, and nuts, and they'd probably would
want to him to get a steadier job than just "spiritual protector of the Indians
and their lands." Luckily for us, Billy Jack isn't the type of half-breed Vietnam vet to let the
white man change his ways (we actually learn from Billy that we can only change
from the inside!) and he does all this and lots more when he finally gets
sprung. This leads to the great scenes where Billy reunites with Jean (a kiss
on a sun-drenched mountain - I thought it was a seventies commercial selling
coffee or the old Summit candy bar), nature (he smokums peace pipe and has a
friendly hawk or falcon land on his arm), and with the kids of the Freedom
School (a mob scene that made you feel a bit discomforted in that they seemed
to be trying to deify this dude). The greatest moment in the movie (aside from Billy Jack slapping Jesus Christ)
came when this little girl that we saw in the previous film singing at dinner
time, has taken the four years Billy's been in prison to get her next single in
the can and ready to debut it at Billy's coming home dinner. A truly treacly
piece of syrup that will have you asking for another two stacks of flapjacks
just to soak it all up, the lyrics tell of Billy's absence and the effect it
has had on her. Here's some sample lyrics: "Shed a tear, running dear. Don't
turn back Billy Jack. I am crying. Are you dying just for me?" It's got a
good beat and you can gag to it. I'd give it two boots upside your stupid
head, girly.  The film meanders here and there, lurching from issue to issue so that you're
never quite sure if there is actually anything important happening story-wise
and aren't sure who the bad guys are (The guys who want to take away the abused
child the Freedom School is helping? The guys stealing the Indian lands? The
doctors who won't treat an Indian? Tom and Delores for being this damn
self-important?) and wondering where Billy Jack is all the time these kids are
exposing the corrupt practices of the bigot who runs the furniture rental store
in town (huh?). As for Billy, he spends an eternity going on a spiritual journey to find
himself. This involves a series of increasingly ridiculous scenes that has him
painted up all red and wearing some kind of sash like he just took first place
in an Oompa-Loompa beauty pageant, all the while meeting a blue-painted version
of himself in a cave. It all has to do with spirit guides and finding your
center and all that self-improvement speak that makes you wonder if Tony
Robbins was an advisor on the project. Then Billy goes on some more spiritual journeys and tries to achieve the
"fourth level" of understanding or some such nonsense. I was paging through The Sporting News about this time, wondering who the Kansas City Chefs would draft with their
very early first round pick, but I did look up in time to see Billy Jack smack
Jesus upside the head. I don't think Billy had found his center yet. Shortly thereafter and for the rest of the film, Billy would open up his
strange brand of peaceful whup-ass on various people for various
transgressions, while Jean would be there to berate him for doing so. At the
end of the movie, the government moves in and shoots up the joint and the movie
demonstrates its subtly in getting its point across by having a soldier shoot
a little one armed kid in the back, who was holding the cutest little wabbit I
ever seen! Somehow or other Billy gets busted by the fuzz, then escapes and the next thing
you know everyone is singing "Give Peace A Chance" and a self-serving message
from the filmmakers (thanks Tom and Delores) pops up on screen urging us to do
something or other about some dang issue or incident. All I did was hit "stop"
on the remote control, my life finally my own again after about three days. There's a commentary from Tom and Delores that runs on a separate audio track
here, but who would ever choose to sit through this three hour bowel
obstruction again? This is worse than your usual bad movie, because it has the power of two
stanky films all rolled into one titanic destructive force. It's really hard
to watch them sap all the life out of Billy Jack, while Jean has merely
degenerated into a shrill whiner, forever complaining about everything and
doing nothing (at least Billy breaks the occasional knee cap). This film leaves
us with one burning question: is it possible that the next film in the series
can be even worse? You wouldn't think so, but can you imagine what
happens when these two head to Congress whining about how dirty and corrupt
everyone else is? I don't know about you, but I'd prefer a super slow karate
chop to my nads than having to sit through BJ's summer vacation in D.C.
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