The Trial of Billy Jack
Tags: tragedy, cult, murder, violence, flashback

Plot synopsis:
Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin) goes to court facing an involuntary manslaughter charge stemming from events in the earlier film. He is found guilty and sentenced to a prison term. Meanwhile, the kids at the Freedom School—an experimental school for runaways and troubled youth on a Native American reservation in Arizona—vow to rebuild the school. They raise funds and acquire a new building, eventually starting their own newspaper and television station. Inspired by Nader's Raiders, they begin using the newspaper and TV station to conduct investigative reporting, angering several politicians and townspeople in the process with their exposés.
The school's activities range from having their own search and rescue team, to artistic endeavors such as a marching band and belly dancing. This culminates with the school hosting a large marching band contest and arts festival, which they call "1984 is Closer Than You Think", to raise money for the school.
Midway through the film, Billy Jack is released from prison and, trying to reconnect with his spiritual beliefs, begins a series of lengthy vision quests. He gets involved in a radical group on the reservation which is trying to oppose the federal de-recognition of their tribe and the turning of their tribal lands over to local developers. When one of the tribal members is arrested for poaching deer on what was formerly tribal land, the school comes to his defense.
The school begins to hold hearings on Native rights and child abuse. One of the children at the school was abused by his father who cut off his hand in a fit of rage, and the school defies a court order to turn the boy back over to his father. The FBI begins visiting the school and taps their phones. As tensions mount between the school and the people in the nearby town, a mysterious explosion at the school knocks their television station off the air. The governor calls a state of emergency and mobilizes the National Guard, and a curfew is established in town. The students respond by holding a parade in the town in violation of the curfew. On the way back to the school their bus breaks down and local townspeople confront the students and threaten to set their bus on fire. Billy Jack shows up during the incident to protect the students, and then comes to the rescue of a tribal member who is being harassed and beaten at a local dance in town. Near the end of the film, the National Guard is stationed around the school and is ordered to open fire on the students, killing four and wounding hundreds more.
The entire story is told in flashbacks by Jean Roberts (Delores Taylor, Laughlin's wife), a teacher at the school, from her hospital bed after the shooting incident. The violence in the finale is a symbolic bookend to the massacre of Vietnamese civilians seen in the beginning of the film. During Billy's trial, he mentions the 1968 My Lai massacre and recalls, in a flashback scene, witnessing a similar incident while serving in Vietnam. This scene also reveals a plot error. In all four films, Billy Jack is described as an ex–Green Beret (Special Forces), yet in the flashback he and his fellow soldiers all have 101st Airborne Division shoulder patches on their uniforms. While the army recruits many Green Berets from airborne divisions, qualified Special Forces troops would not be wearing insignia of other formations.
In the DVD audio commentary, Laughlin mentions he also wanted the bloody, disturbing finale to represent all the shooting incidents at college campuses (particularly the 1970 Kent State shootings) where police and National Guardsmen fired upon students during anti-war protest rallies. Unarmed men, women, and children are gunned down in a massacre by Army troops.

Review: Child abuse, the trampling of Indian rights, prejudice, illegal FBI wire-tapping and subterfuge, television exposes, campus shootings by the National Guard, the Mi Lai massacre, culture clashes, Jungian philosophy, police brutality, government corruption, karate, guns, and a spiritual journey are just some of the subjects explored in this sequel to Billy Jack.
The director's commentary on the DVD is very interesting, and my favorite discussion is when Tom and Delores acknowledge they "threw in everything but the kitchen sink." They both wish they had reduced the exposition and some of the plot lines, which would have certainly made it a better film, but they were being true to themselves at the time.
The movie The Apple also rises (?) to this level of dreck as well.Our hero (?) is Billy Jack, a half-breed American Indian who teaches peace through the repeated use of bone-crunching violence!
In fact, the also deadly serious Billy Jack (1971) made zillions at the box office--not because it was a good film (though it wasn't quite as bad as The Trial of Billy Jack) but because it was a perfect film for the times.
Meant to be poignant, it's just hysterically funny instead!FYI--This film had the dubious distinction of being selected for inclusion in the book "The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time" by Harry Medved.
After the first Billy Jack movie where he went to prison for five years for involuntary manslaughter the freedom school that Delores Taylor was building on the Indian reservation has expanded quite nicely.
The maddest of the lot is Riley Hill who is the brother of Bert Freed who was the owner of the local Ponderosa in the first Billy Jack movie.
Which leads to a horrible Kent State like confrontation at the school on the reservation.This film could easily have told the story in a third to half of its running time.
Omaha, Nebraska, had the dubious honour of being the city Tom Laughlin chose to have the world premiere for "Trial of Billy Jack".
How anyone can claim it was good without being an intensely close minded person who honestly believes Laughlin's (sadly not unique) brand of conspiracy theory frankly seems impossible to me.The film is so left wing they did all but urinate on an American flag.
About the only reason I went to see it was because it had been promoted heavily as a karate movie, and martial arts films were quite big at the time.
In this sequel to "Billy Jack", Tom Laughlin and Delores Taylor continue to strongly and clearly convey, via the motion-picture medium, that the situation with which this movie deals is extremely, again, controversial.
Following, it may also beg the question concerning whether or not Billy Jack is a villain or hero, since the caring person has no mercy on the mean people who do the harassing and does not care what happens to such horrible people.
I had previously enjoyed BILLY JACK for what it was, an interesting little action picture with a leftist political conscience.
A lot of people just don't get the point of the BILLY JACK movies.
In these days and times, we need a role model like Billy Jack..
I have spoken to a number of people who didn't like this film, some of whom also did not like BILLY JACK.The only conclusion I can come to is that those people all have one thing in common: they are the kind of people who can never accept correction, and hate having to hear others speak truths they would rather not face.
They don't want to face the prospect of having to stretch their minds or reconsider their preconceived notions.This movie came at a time in my life when it was just what was needed.
It was just what I, and many other young people, needed when it came out.Plus the fact that it is a wonderfully photographed film, that also pays great respect to the Native American community, something no other film had done at that time.Although it has it's flaws, TRIAL is still, to this day, my favorite film of all time.Like the spirits teach us, "Courage is not the absence of fear, but the conquest of it.".
This movie was long,and it was very powerful for its time in both relation to the Native American movement as well as the anti war movement that was common when the film took place and when it first hit the big screen.
This is the third of the Billy Jack films & possibly the worst.
Taking place 5 years after the events of Billy Jack, we have our hero coming out of jail & reentering society to find his friends' school now a major hub of culture & education.
Billy Jack's literal and spiritual trials are boring, pretentious, and minus any good beatdowns.
Pretentious sequel picks up with Billy Jack being put on trial for the events of the first film.
Kind of "Easy Rider" meets "Walking Tall." A lot of the fun of that film was the unintentional irony that Billy Jack was promoting peace & love while giving a beatdown to every intolerant bigot he encounters, but this sequel forgot to include the satisfying Hapkido beatdowns and instead seemed filled with joyless self-important speeches.
While I support most all of the political leanings expressed by the filmmakers, a series of hippie kids making speeches and playing terrible folk music does not make for good entertainment (not to mention having to endure Billy's spirit journey which includes him slapping Jesus at one point).
Top it all off with a Kent State inspired finale and it's pretty obvious that the filmmakers (who are really just writer/producer/director/star Tom Laughlin) forgot what made the first film work.
Overall, Billy Jack's literal and spiritual trials are boring, pretentious, and minus any good beatdowns.
"The Trial of Billy Jack" was included in "The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (and how they got that way)" by Harry Medved and Randy Lowell..
Following the events of the previous movie, Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin) stands trial and is sentenced by the corrupt system to prison.
The kids from the Freedom School decide to fight the system themselves.The movie makes a big early mistake.
After Billy Jack gets sentenced, the movie needs to follow him into prison.
Instead, his prison time is skipped over and the movie follows a bunch of no name kids with his wife.
a friend had told me there was a powerful sequence in the movie about Billy going on a Vision Quest, something I have been into in different forms ever since.
McLauglin  and his family put their heart and soul (and his money, I'm told) into the Billy Jack movies.
This film, while poorly acted (as were all the Billy Jack films), has a strong message and it sure gets in your face with it.
After the success of Billy Jack, the Husband and Wife team of Laughlin and Dolores follow up their mega hit with this epic of padded proportions.
Billy Jack, after serving his prison sentence returns to the Freedom School only to be harassed by a new villain.
I love Trial of Billy Jack but it would be so much better if it was tightly edited and had more fights.
I don't mind the politicalness of the movie but less students and more Billy Jack!That Jason is a real cad, punching that girl in the stomach and smashing that guitar.
Trial Of Billy Jack sadly disappointing ....
While I enjoyed both THE BORN LOSERS and BILLY JACK as fun to watch cult films "Trial Of Billy Jack" was terrible.
I highly recommend it.Come back Billy Jack, we need heroes like you.
I didn't see any of the Billy Jack films when they were first released.The "radical " political sentiments they portrayed were all over the landscape at the time and frankly it was easy to see these films as low budget quickie productions that didn't bring much of anything new to the screen.
"Billy Jack" has the weirdly contagious feel of an improvised film, which it sounds like it almost was.By contrast, The Trial of Billy Jack is every bit as bad as you've heard it is...
Don't think for a minute that anyone had control of this chaotic jaw-dropping idiotic free-for-all.From camping Billy up as a Christ figure, complete with Jesus and Judas in a test in the desert, to bad Kung Fu parodies with wack "effects" that could have been made by shining a Lite Bright into the lens (now you know I'm old) to Laughlin and Taylor having basically the same exchange 50 times ("Damn it Billy, when are you going to learn?" "Aw shucks Jean, what choice do I have?") to Laughlin's over-the-top mind-numbing "gloating" before he "gets physical" with the baddies...
Do a search for listing of the worst films of all-time and you will see this movie on whatever site you come across.
The Second of Three Billy Jack Films.
We saw Billy Jack as a martial arts hero protecting oppressed Indian children in the 1st 2 films so this film that seemed to be saying "You shouldn't have done that, Billy" was just totally wrong.
third Billy Jack movie.
this third movie in the Billy Jack series wasn't as enjoyable for me as the previous two.this one deals with social injustice and racism takes aim at the political machine of the time.beyond that,this film delves deep into Native American mysticism and spirituality.for me,the first half of the film was very long and drawn out.it picks up in the second half.but it's just way too preachy and emotionally manipulative for me.i felt like i was watching a sermon.and the songs seem to serve no other purpose than to tug at your heartstrings.being so blatantly manipulated wouldn't necessarily be so bad,except it seems this is the only reason the movie exists.if there were some lighter moments to break up the heaviness,it would have made the movie easier to bear.as it was,it was just too oppressive and depressing.for me,The Trial of Billy Jack is a 5/10.
On the one hand, this film is in desperate need of editing, since nearly three hours long is far too much(lots of speeches).
Ignore or disparage "The Trial of Billy Jack at your own peril, as "Freedom School, 1975" is "Anytown, 2010".
Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin) spends four years in prison for his killing of a sheriff's deputy.
During that time, the Freedom School, a hippie commune led by Billy's lover Jean (Delores Taylor) begins to prosper, releasing newspapers and TV that stick it to the man, caring for underprivileged and abused children, and no doubt doing lots of drugs (oh, I'm sorry - drug use is against the rules there).
Billy helps the Indians and the Freedom School stick up to the crooked landowner Posner (Riley Hill), who ultimately calls out the police and National Guard, with tragic (I guess) results."The Trial of Billy Jack" is an atrocious film that has to be seen to be believed.
The movie's pretentious, overwrought and hilariously un-ironic political and social content isn't the problem here; it's the length, and boy does it drag.The first Billy Jack had a certain purity of form.
The movie could never reconcile its pleas for pacifism with the appeal of Billy Jack's martial arts heroics, but it hardly mattered.
Billy Jack is continually celebrated throughout as a paragon of virtue, albeit a somewhat flawed one, sung about and worshiped by the freedom school kids - yeah, nice humility, Tom. And of course, Laughlin's smug self-assurance that we'll agree with our heroes and their noxious political viewpoint is rather off-putting as well, but he gets around that problem - sort of.The politics are by their nature laughable, accepting and endorsing every bit of radical, leftist conspiracy jargon as concrete fact.
He juxtaposes the film's climactic massacre with real life school shootings like Kent State, portraying them as premeditated acts of mass murder by the National Guard.
Laughlin and Co. seem convinced that they're so important that they're being investigated by the FBI, CIA, and the US government at large for their "scorching exposes" (Laughlin would, in real-life, use this excuse for the failure of his later Billy Jack Goes to Washington).
And we STILL have the problem that Billy Jack is kicking ass is pretty much antithetical to the peace and love message we're supposed to be getting.Okay, the movie has some camp value.
The lengthy Indian vision scenes - where Billy Jack confronts his "spirit double" and a cave full of demons - are pretty darn funny, in a trippy sort of way.
A lot of the dialogue and acting is pathetically bad (I love the scene where a hippie suggests that the Freedom School "BOMB THE HELL OUT OF THEM!").
But the defense of Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin) seems inept; the lawyer does not ask about the circumstances.
In the end, Billy Jack goes to prison for involuntary manslaughter and serves four years, so that Laughlin is off the screen for perhaps three-quarters of an hour.
This screen time allows attention on Jean Roberts (Delores Taylor) and the progress of her Freedom School.
The pacing is torpid and several scenes take up too much screen time, like Billy Jack's spiritual vision to conquer his demons (while painted in red).
In all of Laughlin's films we are told that all white people are evil, that the Native Americans are pathetic creatures always getting the short end of the stick, that the President and the government are so gosh-darned evil that they would want to tap into the phone lines of seemingly innocent flower power girls and guys.
Not the case here: I have to be barefoot and were tight-fitting jeans with a goofy looking black hat.The acting is awful, the singing is horrendous, and if the DVD commentary is to be believed that Laughlin and his family didn't know what they were doing, then I guess the majority of you can see why we hate this film.
By comparison to Rambo, a far superior soldier who underwent far worse conditions in the same war and location, Billy Jack comes off as a very hypocritical, stupid character and more like a fan-fiction "self-insertion" of the director..
The actual trial of Billy Jack only lasts a few minutes, and he spends four years in jail, but when he comes back, well...that's when the tedium kicks in full swing.The Freedom School has prospered to the point where it even has its own TV station, and the local Indians host them.
After serving his sentence for involuntary manslaughter, "Billy Jack" (Tom Laughlin) is released from prison and returns to the Freedom School on the Navajo Reservation.
It gets so bad that both the students and Billy Jack retaliate in kind and this only aggravates the situation even worse.
The Trial of Billy Jack is a perfect example of the idealism of many in the 1970's, and how naive many of us were at the time.
Check out the Billy Jack Collection, as it includes The Born Losers, and features 2 different commentaries by Tom Laughlin and Delores for each film!
As pointed out elsewhere we see Billy Jack in court having a flashback to his Vietnam days.
Overlong and indulgent by what feels like 15 different dream sequences, the sequel to "Billy Jack" barely redeems itself with bigger budgeted action scenes.
Tom Laughlin may have been able to coax the Billy Jack character out of his slumber, but in this sequel the man practically needs a pair of crutches.
Laughlin gained weight after the blazing success of "Billy Jack"--instead of getting buffer like Stallone for his follow-up "Rambo"--and it shows in the fight scenes.
Now, Billy Jack likes to talk even more to his combatants before kicking their heads in.
Sad to say the 170 minute movie "The Trial of Billy Jack" was not really about his trial, that lasted no more then ten minutes of screen time, but the suffering of Billy's girlfriend Jean Roberts, Delores Taylor.
Almost the entire film is told in flashback by a crippled Jean in her hospital bed in how a series of tragic events lead to the school massacre that she's a survivor of.Having been released from prison after serving five years for involuntary manslaughter, the justifiable death of Bernard Rosner, Billy is back in town, or on the Indian reservation, and with a new outlook on life.
In that Billy Jack's film success is based on his sh*t kicking abilities not his turn the other cheek pacifism you know that his peaceful and passive outlook on life, as well as his and the Freedom School's enemies, wouldn't last too long!It's when Jean's students start to expose local as well as national, from the president on down, crooked politicians and their big business supporters with a serious of scorching exposes on the students-run TV station that those who run the country, and our lives, decide to put their foot down; On Jean's and her student's necks.
Using a bunch of paid off American Indian leaders to sell their people out, by signing away their land rights, the late Bernard's father Mr. Posner, Riley Hill, who runs to state bank has Jean and her students threatened and harassed at every turn in having their precious Freedom School taken away from them.
Rosner & Co. being totally unsuccessfully in putting Jean and her Freedom School out of business now plans to have the state and federal government do their dirty work for them.Nowhere as good as the previous Billy Jack movies, "Born Losers" & "Billy Jack", the film "The Trial of Billy Jack" despite it's marathon-like screen time, a world-class marathon runner runs that race faster then the length of the movie, it's not at all boring.
What really spoiled the movie for me is that I expected, but knowing better, Billy to throw off his violent past and become a true man of the spirits where violence would be the absolute last thing on his mind.