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“Born Losers is just a straight forward biker white exploitation film. No flowery signifying from Billy Jack, no sir. Too bad he went into a different direction with the latter films, padded out with nonsensical scenes and overlong running times. He could have revolutionized action films.”IMBD
“Born Losers, also known as Born Losers (it’s the title used in the trailer), is the first in a series of four movies known as “The Billy Jack Franchise,” featuring actor Tom Laughlin as the badass ex-Green Beret sort of hippie half-Indian hapkido master Billy Jack, a hero in a world that really doesn’t have any. The Born Losers, which Laughlin also directed under the pseudonym T.C. Frank, functions as both a straight up action drama/crime movie and an indictment of the establishment/society in general at the time the movie was made. To a certain extent, the movie seems to be saying that if people were more like Billy Jack, the world wouldn’t be the relentless shithole that it is.
The Born Losers takes place in a peaceful little California town called Big Rock, where a motorcycle gang known as the Born Losers has just arrived to cause trouble/engage in mayhem. At first, the young people hanging out on main street are intrigued by the gang, especially a group of young, bikini clad women. Who are these guys on motorcycles? Why are they in town? And what the heck is going on with the Nazi symbols on their hats and jackets and shit? Some of the young women decide to hang out with the gang (they’re attracted to the danger the gang represents?), which turns out to be a massive mistake. The Born Losers, led by supreme scumbag Danny (Jeremy Slate), aren’t in town to celebrate life. The gang is in town to rape as many women as they can. One of those women, Vicky Barrington (Elizabeth James, who wrote the movie’s screenplay under the name James Lloyd), manages to fight back and outsmart the rapists, but the numbers are not in her favor and Vicky ends up getting assaulted, too.
Now, Billy Jack comes into the story after he leaves his trailer out in the woods to come to town to get supplies and whatnot. While in town, Billy Jack saves a guy from being beaten to death by the gang, which leads to Billy Jack being arrested for wielding a rifle in public (some of the gang members are also arrested). Billy Jack is then told by his lawyer that he has to come up with money or he will end up having to serve three months in jail (the gang members will only have to serve a thirty day sentence, which is just outrageous after all the shit
bad things they did in public). So Billy Jack has to stick around and figure out how the he’s going to come up with the money. Before he went off to kick ass as a Green Beret, Billy Jack was a noted horse breaker, one of the best in the state. Unfortunately, no one in the area needs a horse broken in, and since no one will front him the money, Billy Jack has to figure something else out. How much can he possibly get for selling his jeep? While he tries to figure all of that stuff out, the gang members Billy Jack didn’t beat the ….. out of harass him. Have they learned nothing from their first encounter with him? Of course not. Those guys haven’t learned anything. They’re just waiting to get their asses kicked.
And so the local authorities try to figure out what to do about the gang. The district attorney and the police attempt to convince the gang’s victims to testify in court, but the gang is very adept at witness intimidation. The cops can offer protection now, but what about in six months? Will the cops protect the gang’s victims then? The gang’s victims are also dealing with the whole “rape victims don’t want to testify because they don’t want to re-live the event in public” thing, something the authorities have no idea how to handle. The authorities seem to think that all they need to do is yell at the gang’s victims and loudly make them aware that only they can stop this gang and the victims will “come around” at some point. It never happens. No one in this world seems to understand trauma.
Well, Billy Jack understands trauma. He was in the war. He saw bad shit in the jungles of Vietnam. And, hell, on his way into town he saw multiple animals get killed by other animals. The whole world is a brutal place. Billy Jack also knows that the only way the gang’s bullshit is going to stop is if he goes at them full bore and takes them out. The cops can’t do it because of the law, which is screwed up (think back to the earlier encounter with the gang and the jail sentences all involved would have had to endure). Billy Jack can, though. He isn’t a cop. He’s an ex-Green Beret, sort of hippie half-Indian hapkido master who just wants to live his life but, when the shit goes down, is forced to get involved. And, yeah, he’s going to get involved.
What’s fascinating about The Born Losers is how star and director Laughlin balances the action hero movie stuff and the idea stuff inherent in the story. On the surface, Laughlin knows that he’s making a low budget asshole biker movie, which was a hot cinematic prospect at the time. The Born Losers biker gang members are anti-establishment, they’re dangerous, and they’re attractive, in a weird way, to the youth that inhabit the town. But they’re no good at all. They’re the villains of the story. At the same time, these villains didn’t just pop up out of the ground, fully formed and ready to do evil. The establishment/the old guard/the parents are responsible, in some way, for the creation of the gang. Look at the scene where Danny goes to pick up his brother and his father shows that he, too, is a gigantic piece of….. Some of the parents of the rape victims are just clueless about the world that they have created/the world that they have allowed to fester, too. They’re concerned about the welfare of their children, but they don’t seem to be all that involved in their lives, either. So what are the parents really concerned about?
I mean, look at the gang. It’s filled with young people who are, yes, pure evil, but they’re also espousing what amounts to a mixed message. The gang, just like the hippies, are against the establishment. They’re rebels (check out the big picture of James Dean on the wall of their hideout). At the same time, they’ve adorned their clothes with Nazi insignia and paint a …….. quote on the wall. You can’t tell if that Nazi ….. is the source of their evil or is just something the gang uses to get people upset. Don’t these people know their world history? It’s obvious that they don’t. Didn’t the establishment teach these kids what the Nazis did? Again, obviously not. The establishment is a mess. The kids in the gang are a mess. The world is a mess. There needs to be a balancing force to sort of even ……..”
