WATCH PARTY: Billy Jack (1971) directed by Tom Laughlin @ Mary Pretlow Library

This is apparently a pretty polarizing film that my mom & stepfather (and now h/t cinephile Ren) have been trying to get me to watch for a while. Let's see what the fuss is about.

We'll be in the 2nd floor conference room to the left as you get off the elevator/stairs.

RUNTIME: 112 minutes

SYNOPSIS: Ex-Green Beret hapkido expert saves wild horses from being slaughtered for dog food and helps protect a desert “freedom school” for runaways.

BLURBS:
"It’s most logical to conceive of Billy Jack as a dream-movie accidentally created by a spiritually confused, LSD-addled 19-year-old who fell asleep in the early 1970s while watching a weird, humorless movie about a half-Native American/half-Caucasian warrior who does not want to fight, because he’s too good—both in the sense of being a singularly skilled one-man killing machine, and in subscribing to a higher moral and ideological cause than his bloodthirsty brothers-in-arms. And yet he’s pushed by circumstances into dramatically kicking ass, over and over." - Nathan Rabin, The Dissolve

"The movie has as many causes in it as a year’s run of the New Republic. There’s not a single contemporary issue, from ecology to gun control, that’s not covered, and toward the movie’s end you’re wondering how these characters — who are just ordinary folks in a small Southwestern town — managed to confront every single ethical hurdle in a few weeks of living." - Roger Ebert

"You feel guilty liking this manipulative pulp, but it somehow grabs and holds onto you." - Bob Bloom, Journal and Courier