The '05 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Did they really need to make Wonka into a socially awkward mix between Michael Jackson and Chuck Barris from the Gong Show?
Also, this one wasn't something I grew up with, but does anyone remember the Billy Jack movies?
Yeah, I didn't think so. But I'm bored so let's go:
It was the first big movie franchise ever. Our eponymous hero, a half-Navajo Vietnam veteran and martial arts expert, helps save kids from
the man, man. But he doesn't like to use violence because he's just too good at killing. Because it was the seventies and hippie culture isn't dead just yet!
The first Billy Jack movie was a forgettable drive-in b-movie about bikers called
The Born Losers. It had nothing to do with the other movies, I'm just putting here for completeness's sake. Tom Laughlin (who directed and starred in it as Billy Jack) had been pitching the film to Hollywood since the 50's, wanting to make a statement about discrimination against American Indians. The biker thing was added because that was popular at the time. It was a mild success but critics hated it. (It was a greater success in, of all places, Communist Hungary, where a re-edited version with Hungarian actors named Hands of Death was so popular and controversial that the government banned it three days after its initial release for being "too shocking")
Undaunted, Laughlin revisited the character with a film just called
Billy Jack. This is where the films get weird. The opening narration starts like this
Hippie kid dijo:
All any of the townspeople knew about Billy Jack was that he was a half-breed. A war hero who hated the war and turned his back on society by returning to the reservation—where he watched over the Indians, the wild horses, and the kids at my school. No one even knew where he lived. Somewhere way back in the ancient ruins with an old holy man who was teaching him secret Indian ways and preparing him for a sacred initiation ceremony.
(In case you were wondering, Tom Laughlin did not have any Native American ancestry)
After The Born Losers, Billy Jack now runs an alternative high school called The Freedom School with teacher Jean Roberts (played by Laughlin's wife, Dolores Taylor. Ms. Taylor was not a professional actress, and it shows, because she seems to be having a panic attack every time she opens her mouth). The Freedom School is under attack by close-minded townspeople who don't like these long-haired freaky people and their improvisational theater, and Billy Jack goes after a local gang leader with connections to corrupt town politicians. The film is a heady rush of bizarre contradictions - a middle-aged white square's tribute to hip young people, an anti-violence film that ends with a bloody shootout, a film about hippies where the hippies shun drugs.
Despite being panned by every film critic, the film was popular with younger audiences, leading Laughlin to declare "the youth of America have two heroes: Ralph Nader and Billy Jack". It was a cultural phenomenon. Elvis Presley saw the film nine times, and Marlon Brando of all people praised the acting. Adjusted for inflation, it's still the highest-grossing American independent movie of all time (last time I checked)
So, with Laughlin now getting blank check to do whatever he wanted, he decided to make a sequel.
The Trial of Billy Jack was the first movie to open nationwide on opening day, and commercials for the movie played during the nightly news.
The Trial of Billy Jack opens with tallies of people killed in real-life acts of violence, with special attention to the statistics of the Kent State and My Lai massacres. It then drops the film's first sin: "FREEDOM SCHOOL: 3 DEAD, 39 INJURED". Yes, they went there.
Apparently, ever since the first film, the Freedom School had become Coolsville USA, and have managed to become better than anyone else at everything, included at science. Somehow, they invent the most accurate lie detector of all time, which can even tell when someone is lying on tv or the radio. And guess who it detects as liars?
THE MAN, MAN.
So, the kids then make their own television station to reveal THE TRUTH.
That was the last part of the plot I comprehended - it ends up becoming a bizarre parable on Jungian psychology and Native American spirituality. The film ends with the government trying to invade the Freedom School, leading to another violent shootout, followed by...well, just read it for yourself:
They really dijo:
SOME MAY FEEL THIS PICTURE IS TOO VIOLENT…
but the real massacres which inspired this fictionalized version
were a thousand-fold more violent for those innocent people who were its victims.
Rather than direct anger at this re-creation…
please channel your energy toward those officials who either ordered, condoned, or failed to take action against these events, and perhaps towards ourselves for also turning our backs and letting such events occur unchallenged.
All we are saying is… give peace a chance.
Did I mention this movie was three fucking hours long?
While it was a success with audiences (so much so that Laughlin organized an essay writing contest where fans of the movie defended it against film critics), the series basically had nowhere else to go after that.
But he tried again, with
Billy Jack Goes to Washington. Yes, a remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Unlike the last three films, it never saw wide release and died in theaters, mostly because the hippie movement had completely stopped being relevant. (Laughlin, however, blamed the government for suppressing the film to appease the nuclear energy lobby.) That didn't stop him from trying to make a fifth movie,
The Return of Billy Jack, in the 80's, with our hero fighting child pornographers in New York. But Laughlin severely injured himself while filming a scene, and funding dried up.
Until his death in 2013, Laughlin tried to get the series revived through other ways, including a TV show. In 2004, disgusted by the Bush administration and the War on Terror, he tried to create a new film called
Billy Jack's Crusade to End the War And Restore America to its Moral Purpose and ran for president as a Republican just so that he could debate Dubya
in character as Billy Jack. (This was the second time he ran for president - the first was in 1992 as a Democrat, and he tried again in 2008 as a Democrat as well) When he didn't get to debate Bush, he went ahead with the film anyways (now retitled
Billy Jack for President) and announced that he would use "state of the art digital technology" to have Bush in the film. When he died at age 82, his estate put up everything that was in the house he died in for sale on eBay to pay for Dolores Taylor's Alzheimer's treatment. There were no takers.
As a final footnote to this bizarre slice of Americana, the most famous thing related to the movies was the first film's original theme song, "One Tin Soldier (The Legend of Billy Jack)". A stirring ballad condemning human greed and short-sightedness and promoting peace and love.
The band that performed it, Coven, were Satanists. Their first album, Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls, included the earliest use of the words "hail satan!" in rock music, and they were one of the first bands to use inverted crosses and the horn sign in their imagery. It seems rather fitting for a film as bizarre and hypocritical as this to have a song about peace written by Satanists.
The devil really is in the details.
