The Born Losers

The first Billy Jack film, and much nastier than the earnest sequels that made the character famous. A half-Cherokee Green Beret drifter takes on a sadistic biker gang terrorising a California town, and Tom Laughlin's mix of pacifist rhetoric and brutal violence is already present in raw form.

It is a rougher, meaner film than Billy Jack, closer to the biker cycle it belongs to than to the counterculture parable it became. The gang is vicious, and the vigilante satisfaction is uncomplicated.

The grim origin of an unlikely 70s phenomenon.