Welcome to Flopcorn, where Reader writers and contributors pay tribute to our very favorite bad movies. In this installment, social media editor Brianna Wellen tries to find the appeal in her father’s favorite series. Just before the holidays I woke up to see that my dad had left me a voicemail at six in the morning. It’s the kind of thing that would make most people freak out and assume someone was dead, but I know my father well enough to know that this means he had to tell me about something he had seen on TV. This time around? All four Billy Jack movies played in a row on Turner Classic Movies, and now he finally had the whole collection on his DVR.
David Wellen: When I first watched them I was ten, so you can see where that character is bigger than life. But then as I got older, I appreciated the nuances of it, the sayings he uses. One of my favorite lines in any of the Billy Jack movies is when the bad guy’s got the girl and he’s holding a gun up to her head and he goes, “You’re gonna kill her? Just like that?” And then Billy Jack goes, “No, you’re gonna kill her, then I’m gonna kill you. Just. Like. That.”
BW: And there is none of that in Billy Jack Goes to Washington. There was one scene of karate mixed in with basically an exact replication of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. They say in all the descriptions of this movie that I found online that it’s “loosely inspired” by Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But . . .
BW: Oh, OK, so then there’s a whole movie just about the trial? That sounds so boring.
DW: Tom Laughlin (Billy Jack) seemed to get even better at acting in this one.
BW: She gets over it pretty quickly . . .
