Category Archives: Film Review

Review: The Last House (dir. by Louis Leterrier)

Posted on by Arleigh

“The day the rains came, we learned we were not alone.” — Ruth Delgado

The Last House has the kind of premise that is immediately effective: a family wakes up to find that their home has become an inescapable prison. Doors refuse to open, windows cannot be broken, and the outside world is suddenly as unreachable as it is threatening. Directed by Louis Leterrier, the Netflix thriller gets plenty of mileage out of that simple idea. It turns a comfortable suburban house into a claustrophobic survival space, pushes a family toward desperation, and gives its familiar setting a creeping sense of hostility. Still, while the movie is often tense and well-acted, it eventually becomes too crowded with ideas to make any one of them land as strongly as it should.

Wagner Moura and Greta Lee play Jason and Ann Delgado, parents trying to keep their two children calm while they figure out why they have been sealed inside their own home. The film wisely does not waste much time getting to the central crisis. Once the family realizes that no amount of force can open a door or shatter a window, the atmosphere shifts quickly from confusion to panic. At first, there is still a practical logic to their reactions. They test the house’s boundaries, look for tools, try to contact the outside world, and ration what they have. But as each option fails, the family begins to understand that this is not a temporary inconvenience. It is a situation that may outlast their food, water, patience, and ability to trust one another.

That is where The Last House is at its strongest. The film understands how quickly a normal home can become frightening once its basic purpose changes. Kitchens, bedrooms, closets, and hallways are not inherently scary spaces, but the movie makes them feel smaller and more oppressive as the Delgados lose their sense of control. A stocked pantry becomes a countdown. A closed bedroom door no longer offers privacy. The family’s routines and minor annoyances, which initially make the house feel lived-in, become sources of friction when nobody has the option to leave. The production design effectively captures that deterioration, gradually turning an ordinary family home into a cramped, stale environment defined by empty shelves, dim rooms, and blocked exits.

Moura is the film’s standout. Jason begins as someone who wants to solve the problem through force of will and practical action, but that confidence wears down as he realizes that the situation is beyond him. Moura gives the character a believable mix of frustration, fear, and stubbornness. He is not simply an action-thriller father trying to save the day; he is a man whose sense of usefulness begins to collapse when he cannot protect his family or even provide a way out. Greta Lee is also good as Ann, particularly when the film allows her to show the exhaustion of having to steady everyone else while quietly processing the danger herself. However, Ann is not written with quite as much specificity as Jason, and Lee is sometimes left carrying scenes that ask her to reassure or react rather than reveal more about who she is.

The children help maintain the emotional stakes, though their roles are less developed. Their fear and frustration make sense, and the film does a decent job of showing how confinement affects them differently than it affects their parents. But they often function more as pressure points for Jason and Ann than as characters with their own fully formed perspectives. The family dynamic is convincing enough to keep the story grounded, yet the screenplay never digs quite deeply enough into their shared history or unresolved tensions. There are signs of financial strain, parental guilt, and marital distance, but the movie tends to introduce these ideas without fully following through on them.

The film also brushes against an interesting nature-versus-civilization theme. The Delgados’ home represents the ordinary comforts that make modern life feel secure: stocked food, electricity, sturdy walls, private rooms, and the assumption that help is available when something goes wrong. Once the house becomes sealed, those comforts lose their meaning. The family is forced to focus on the basics—food, water, shelter, sleep, and cooperation. Their home no longer separates them from danger; it contains them inside it. The movie’s best thematic moments come from that reversal, as it suggests that civilization is much more fragile than people like to believe.

Unfortunately, The Last House complicates this solid foundation by adding another mysterious danger from the depths. The threat remains vague for much of the story, and that uncertainty creates an unnatural, ominous feeling around the family’s confinement. It gives the film an extra layer of dread, making the Delgados’ problem feel bigger than a sealed house or an isolated storm. But it also pulls attention away from the more compelling material already in place. The family’s struggle to survive, their conflict over dwindling resources, and their gradual loss of trust are strong enough to sustain the movie without needing such an elaborate additional mystery.

That is ultimately the film’s main weakness: it keeps expanding its scope when it should be tightening its focus. The intimate story of a family stuck together under impossible conditions is more powerful than the larger explanation the movie slowly reaches for. As the plot adds more questions about the source of the danger, it risks making the situation feel less immediate. The best scenes are not necessarily the ones that hint at what is happening beyond the walls. They are the ones where the Delgados must decide who gets the last resources, whether to take a reckless chance, or how much truth the parents should tell their children. Those moments make the house feel like a real emotional battleground rather than simply the setting for a mystery.

Leterrier keeps the pacing moving well enough, especially in the first half, and the rainy exterior, muted lighting, and increasingly worn-down interiors give the film a consistently uneasy mood. Even when the screenplay starts to overreach, the movie remains watchable because it knows how to frame the house as a hostile space. It is not a deeply original visual concept, but it is effective. The sense of enclosure becomes almost physical as the family’s world shrinks to a few rooms and the possibility of escape starts to feel less real with every failed attempt.

In the end, The Last House is a decent, occasionally gripping survival thriller that does not fully live up to the potential of its premise. Moura and Lee give it enough emotional weight, and the movie’s domestic setting gives the tension a relatable edge. Yet the script does not always trust its strongest idea: that being trapped with the people you love can become frightening when there is no exit, no help, and no certainty that normal life will return. By piling a mysterious external danger onto its family drama and survival story, The Last House becomes more ambitious without becoming more meaningful. It is worth watching for its atmosphere, performances, and early suspense, but it would have been stronger as a leaner, more focused film about a family discovering how quickly safety can turn into confinement.

Review: Colors (dir. by Dennis Hopper)

Posted on by Arleigh

“You got problems with the whole fuckin’ world.” — Officer Bob Hodges

Consider, for a moment, the cultural landscape of 1988. Inner-city gang violence was hardly a new phenomenon, but it remained largely relegated to local news broadcasts and distant urban nightmares for most of the country. Dennis Hopper’s Colors changed that dynamic almost overnight, serving as a brutal, unfiltered introduction to a world that mainstream America had collectively chosen to ignore. Hopper, whose own countercultural credentials were cemented decades earlier with Easy Rider, took a considerable risk here, and while the final product is undeniably uneven, its cultural footprint is impossible to overstate. The film functions simultaneously as a historical document, a cautionary tale, and a cinematic watermark that forever altered how audiences perceived the volatile landscape of Los Angeles.

The basic setup is old-school buddy-cop material. Robert Duvall plays Bob Hodges, a seasoned LAPD officer in the CRASH unit—Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums—who has spent enough years policing Los Angeles to understand that aggression does not automatically produce respect. Sean Penn plays Danny McGavin, his hotheaded new partner, a guy who approaches every situation like he has something to prove. They are assigned to patrol neighborhoods divided by Bloods, Crips, and Chicano gangs, attempting to keep retaliation killings from escalating into full-scale warfare. The main plot is not especially complicated, and that is probably intentional. Hopper is less interested in a twist-heavy police procedural than in dropping the viewer into a city where tension seems to hang over every street corner, traffic stop, and act of public bravado.

Duvall is the film’s anchor. Hodges is not written as a saint—he is still a cop working inside a hostile and often brutal institution—but Duvall gives him a weary, almost paternal quality that makes him more compelling than the standard “veteran teaching the rookie a lesson” archetype. He understands that policing gangs is not as simple as walking in, making arrests, and congratulating yourself afterward. He has a kind of street fluency, knowing when to talk, when to threaten, and when to step back before a small humiliation becomes a body count. Penn, meanwhile, is all sharp edges. McGavin is reckless, racist in ways he may not fully recognize, and always a half-second away from making a situation worse. Penn can be exhausting here, but that is the point. His character embodies the movie’s fear that a badge, a gun, and an appetite for confrontation can be as combustible as any gang rivalry.

Hopper directs Colors with a lot of energy and an almost documentary-like alertness to its setting. The film’s Los Angeles feels sun-blasted, crowded, and perpetually unstable, not the glossy dream factory of postcards and celebrity magazines. Haskell Wexler’s cinematography does huge work in making the city feel tactile and lived-in. Hopper also has a sharp ear for the way music, cars, clothing, graffiti, and neighborhood boundaries become a visual language of identity. The title is not subtle, but it works: colors signify affiliation, pride, danger, and the instantly visible lines people are willing to kill or die over. The film’s soundtrack, including Ice-T’s title song, further locks it into the cultural moment, giving the movie a rawness that separates it from more generic police thrillers.

What makes Colors uncomfortable is also what makes it valuable. Its attention to gangs was controversial from the beginning, with critics and community voices arguing that it risked sensationalizing violence and reducing Black and Latino communities to dangerous backdrops for a cop story. The criticism is fair. The film sees gang life largely from the windshield of the LAPD cruiser; its gang-affiliated characters are often treated as threats, symbols, or tragic consequences rather than people granted the same interiority as Hodges and McGavin. Even at its strongest, Colors can make complex social realities feel like an arena in which two white cops test their methods and masculinity.

Still, it would be wrong to dismiss it as empty exploitation. Colors does not really romanticize its violence. Hopper shoots drive-bys, funerals, and retaliations with a nasty abruptness; nobody comes out looking triumphant. The gang members are not cleanly divided into monsters and victims either. Some are cruel, some are frightened, some are locked into a status they may not know how to escape, and some clearly enjoy the power that comes with being feared. The movie may not fully examine poverty, segregation, institutional racism, the drug economy, or generational trauma, but the instability of its world comes through. The police are not presented as saviors, either. They are frequently antagonistic, operating through intimidation and humiliation, while McGavin’s actions repeatedly demonstrate how easily law enforcement can intensify exactly the conflict it claims to contain.

This is where Colors matters most historically. Before it, movies had certainly depicted urban crime, racial conflict, and youth violence, but Hopper’s film made contemporary L.A. gang culture recognizable as a major studio subject. It helped bring gang culture, strained police-community relations, and inner-city issues into a much wider popular conversation. The film did not invent the genre that followed, but it helped clear a path for the wave of gang-related and urban-crime movies that arrived in the late ’80s and especially the ’90s. Films such as Boyz n the Hood, American Me, South Central, New Jack City, and Menace II Society inherited some of its urgency, its focus on neighborhoods under siege, and its refusal to pretend gang violence was merely a distant news-story problem.

The major difference is that many of those later movies also corrected Colors’ biggest limitation: they shifted the point of view inward. Boyz n the Hood does not treat South Central as a backdrop for police work; it makes the residents’ friendships, families, dreams, grief, and daily routines the emotional center. American Me follows the historical and institutional roots of Chicano gang identity with a scope Colors never attempts. South Central turns toward redemption, fatherhood, and the possibility—however fragile—of interrupting the cycle. In that sense, Hopper’s film can feel like an important opening statement rather than the final word. It showed mainstream audiences the subject; the films that followed increasingly demanded that audiences understand the people living inside it.

Its influence can also be felt internationally, though it is best understood as part of a broader transnational exchange of urban-crime cinema, hip-hop culture, and anti-police sentiment rather than a simple one-to-one blueprint. Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine is far more formally daring and politically focused than Colors, but both films draw power from a city divided by territory, race, policing, and simmering retaliation. La Haine brought France’s banlieues to mainstream French audiences and put police violence and marginalized youth at the center of the frame. Where Colors views the street crisis through law enforcement’s eyes, La Haine makes its young Black, Jewish, and Arab protagonists the whole point. Yet the resemblance is there in the oppressive sense of escalation, the combustible police encounters, and the idea that one violent incident can send an already alienated community toward catastrophe. Colors helped establish a mainstream vocabulary for this kind of story, while La Haine transformed that vocabulary into something more intimate, stylized, and politically devastating.

In the end, Colors is messy, dated in places, and frustratingly narrow in its perspective, but those flaws are part of why it is worth revisiting. It captures a Hollywood industry beginning to confront an issue it did not fully understand, using the sturdy frame of a cop thriller to look at a social wound much larger than its plot. Dennis Hopper brings volatility, Duvall brings soul, Penn brings danger, and Los Angeles itself does the rest. It is not the definitive gang film—later movies would surpass it in depth, perspective, and emotional force—but it is a crucial precursor. Colors made the subject visible to the mainstream, and the films that came after kept pushing the camera closer to the people trapped inside the picture.

Brad reviews Samuel Fuller’s RUN OF THE ARROW (1957), starring Rod Steiger and Charles Bronson! 

Posted on by Bradley Crain

RUN OF THE ARROW opens with confederate sharpshooter O’Meara (Rod Steiger) shooting the final shot of the Civil War. With no war to fight and with a heart full of hate for the Yankees, O’Meara declares himself to be a man without a country and heads west. When he’s captured by a band of Sioux warriors led by Crazy Wolf (H.M. Wynant), he invokes the “run of the arrow”, a ritualistic game that could save his life. The problem… no one has ever survived the run of the arrow, but today’s his lucky day as he’s wounded but survives just long enough to be saved by the beautiful Yellow Moccasin (Sarita Montiel). She nurses him back to health and presents him to her tribal chief, Blue Buffalo (Charles Bronson), who eventually allows O’Meara and Yellow Moccasin to get married. Things seem to be going so well, too well. When Crazy Wolf starts another violent campaign against the American army, O’Meara must decide if he’s a Sioux warrior willing to kill American soldiers, or if there’s a part of him that can still love his country?

In RUN OF THE ARROW, director Samuel Fuller made a movie about the damage that occurs when human beings allow their hearts to be so filled with hate that they quit caring about other people. It’s also about what happens when those same people run into rational people, and we find out if they’re capable of considering the possibility that their own hate has blinded them from the truth. In other words, it’s a film that’s possibly more relevant today than it was when it was made in 1957. Bitterness and hate are represented by the characters of O’Meara (Steiger), Crazy Wolf (Wynant), and Lieutenant Driscoll (Ralph Meeker). O’Meara hates Yankees, Crazy Wolf hates the white man, and Driscoll hates the Indians. The rational people are the characters of Yellow Moccasin (Montiel), Blue Buffalo (Bronson), and Captain Clark (Brian Keith). Yellow Moccasin saves O’Meara when everyone else would have just let him die. Blue Buffalo engages in honest conversation with O’Meara and even welcomes him into their tribe. Captain Clark shows O’Meara an empathetic ear and kindness when others have told him to just get over himself. The actions and fates of the characters play out against this dynamic of hatred versus humanity, with the results underscoring just how tragic it is when people focus on the things that separate us rather than the things that unite us. It’s all so unnecessary, but it’s also a realistic vision of the world we live in. The film also struck me as particularly violent for a 50’s western, which also underscores that reality.

Some of the performances are very effective in the film. Rod Steiger’s Irish, confederate Sioux is an interesting character and the actor gives it his all as you’d expect. I’m a big fan of Steiger and his performance here only solidifies my respect for him. Brian Keith’s Captain Clark arrives fairly late in the proceedings and comes across as a tough, but honest man of integrity at a point when the movie really needs him. He has an excellent scene with Steiger where he debates the old confederate’s reasons for renouncing his citizenship with both sound logic, empathy, kindness and a hint of likable sarcasm all at the same time. It’s one of the best scenes in the film. And likewise, Charles Bronson, the most buff Hollywood Indian to ever strip down to a loincloth, comes across as a reasonable and kind tribal chief in his dealings. Bronson had played American Indians before, but he was usually more of the renegade, warpath variety, so it was nice seeing him as a good guy here. H.M. Wynant took the renegade Sioux warrior role here which you might have expected for Bronson at the time. He’s suitably fierce but one-dimensional. The same can be said for Ralph Meeker as Lieutenant Driscoll. He’s pretty much just a stereotypical jerk. He’s good at being a jerk though! And Sarita Montiel, voiced by Angie Dickinson, is quite the beauty as Yellow Moccasin. 

I’ve recently heard RUN OF THE ARROW compared to Kevin Costner’s DANCES WITH WOLVES, and there are definitely similarities. I won’t go into all of those here, but one of the things I appreciated the most about RUN OF THE ARROW is the fact that the movie makes its feelings known about politics. In a movie filled with characters who have had their lives upended by the various decisions of political leaders, Fuller has crafted a story that focuses most sharply on defining the quality of men based on what’s in their “hearts.” When it’s all said and done, oftentimes the only control we have is the way we respond to the events in our lives, and that’s not politics, it’s personal. To drive this home, an older scout named Walking Coyote tells O’Meara that he could have been a chief if he had wanted to be. When O’Meara pushes him on why he didn’t want the position, Walking Coyote responds with, “Because I hate politics!” On that point, I couldn’t agree more. 

Review: Rollercoaster (dir. by James Goldstone)

Posted on by Arleigh

“If they pay me and if they do what I say, I’ll never bother them again.” — Young Man

James Goldstone’s 1977 film Rollercoaster exists in a fascinating, albeit deeply flawed, space within the history of seventies disaster cinema. If you are a fan of retro 70s movies, specifically the whole Sensurround era where Hollywood was desperately trying to get people out of their living rooms and into theaters with seat-rumbling audio gimmicks, you have probably heard of this one. It has a genuinely neat, gritty vibe because it was actually shot on location at real amusement parks like Kings Island and Magic Mountain. You get this awesome, vintage, mid-century theme park atmosphere that you just cannot fake on a studio backlot. You can almost smell the cotton candy, the hot asphalt, and the stale beer. But once that initial wave of nostalgia wears off, you are left looking at what is actually on the screen, and honestly, Rollercoaster is not a great film. In fact, one could very easily say it is not even a good film. At its absolute best of times, it is a thoroughly average, middle-of-the-road thriller that feels more like a slightly elevated, padded-out television movie of the week than a major theatrical release.

The plot is about as standard as it gets for this era of disaster-adjacent cinema. A mysterious, young terrorist starts blowing up rollercoasters, not for any grand political manifesto, but simply to extort amusement park owners for millions of dollars. Enter our protagonist, Harry Calder, played by George Segal, who is a cynical safety inspector that just happens to survive the first derailment. Segal is basically just playing George Segal here—exasperated, a bit snarky, wearing a rumpled suit, and teaming up with an FBI agent played by Richard Widmark. The villain is played by a very young Timothy Bottoms, who is effectively creepy but given virtually zero backstory or motivation. He is just a blank-eyed psycho doing psycho things because the script needs an antagonist. The movie essentially just bounces from one park to another, with Segal walking around looking stressed while the FBI tries to figure out where the next bomb is hidden.

The pacing is arguably the film’s biggest sin. For a movie literally named Rollercoaster, it is shockingly lacking in momentum. Goldstone’s direction completely lacks the tight, pulse-pounding beats you would expect from a high-stakes thriller. There is so much filler here, so many scenes of Segal drinking coffee and staring at blueprints, and so much tedious FBI bureaucratic nonsense that it completely kills any tension. The romantic subplot feels entirely tacked on, and the climax fails to deliver the massive, explosive payoff you have been waiting for. If you judge Rollercoaster purely on its cinematic merits—the acting, the script, the direction—it is undeniably average, the kind of movie you leave on in the background while you fold laundry.

However, despite all of these glaring, undeniable flaws, Rollercoaster has a fascinating, almost prophetic legacy when you look back at the history of the thriller genre. It may not be remembered as a great movie, but it essentially built the exact template for an entire subgenre of cat-and-mouse thrillers that dominated the 90s. It practically invented the “specific-professional-against-a-psychopathic-mastermind” formula. Before Rollercoaster, thrillers were usually about spies, cops, or generic everymen. But this film introduced the idea of a highly specific, niche expert being forced into a one-on-one intellectual duel with a terrorist who targets them specifically because of their expertise. Think about how that exact template was endlessly copied and refined in the decades that followed. Look at In the Line of Fire, where Clint Eastwood plays a Secret Service agent hunted by a psycho played by John Malkovich. Or look at Blown Away, where Jeff Bridges is a bomb-defusing expert tormented by an Irish terrorist played by Tommy Lee Jones. Even The Bone Collector fits this mold perfectly, with Denzel Washington’s bedridden forensics expert being targeted by a serial killer who uses specific crime scenes just to test Washington’s intellect. All of these films drew direct DNA from Rollercoaster, using that exact same dynamic of a reluctant protagonist with a very particular set of skills being singled out by a psychopath who treats mass murder like a twisted, personalized game of chess. And if you want the absolute pinnacle of the “expert vs. bomb” trope, you have to look at Speed, which polished the cat-and-mouse dynamic perfected right here in Rollercoaster.

Because the original film was so hampered by 1970s filmmaking technology, it really makes you realize how easily this movie could be remade in this day and age. Back then, the actual destruction of the rides was limited by practical effects, clunky models, and standard camera angles that made the crashes feel somewhat static and safe. Today, technology in filmmaking has advanced to the point that the sheer scale, speed, and physical danger of the rides themselves really does become the focus of real danger. With modern CGI, drone cameras, and advanced practical rigging, you could put the audience right inside the front car of a 300-foot hyper-coaster as the tracks buckle and twist in slow motion. You could make the metal fatigue, the snapping cables, and the horrific physics of a derailment feel genuinely terrifying, turning the amusement park rides into massive, mechanical monsters rather than just static backdrop props for guys in suits to talk around.

Naturally, if Hollywood were to actually remake Rollercoaster today, you know exactly how it would look and who would star in it. It would undoubtedly star someone like Dwayne Johnson or Chris Pratt, a guy who can deliver a quip while looking concerned and holding a blueprint. They would inevitably give the safety inspector a tragic backstory, probably a dead wife or a kid they are estranged from, just to artificially raise the emotional stakes. And because it is a high-concept thriller that does not quite have the cultural weight of a massive comic book franchise, the remake would almost certainly be relegated to a streaming release. It would drop on a Friday on Netflix or Amazon Prime with a generic, algorithmically tested poster and a slick, forgettable title. It would be exactly the kind of mid-budget, mildly entertaining action flick you watch on a rainy Sunday afternoon before completely forgetting about it by Monday morning.

So, ultimately, how do you rate a movie like Rollercoaster? You just have to accept its extreme averageness and respect its ripple effect. It is clunky, the performances are uneven, and it is rarely as thrilling as its title promises. But it absolutely should not be written off entirely. It was the exact moment Hollywood realized that pitting highly specialized professionals against high-concept villains made for compelling, relatable drama. Without George Segal boredly walking around Magic Mountain, we probably do not get the overly dramatic, incredibly ridiculous, yet thoroughly entertaining 90s thriller boom, nor the slick, CGI-heavy streaming thrillers of today. Rollercoaster might just be a mediocre hill, but it is undeniably the hill that started the entire ride.

Review: Zulu (dir. by Cy Endfield)

Posted on by Arleigh

“Because we’re here, lad. Nobody else. Just us. — Color Sergeant Frank Bourne

Cy Endfield’s Zulu is one of those old-fashioned war films that earns its epic reputation less through grand speeches or sentimental manipulation than through patience, physical detail, and an almost brutally simple premise: a small British force at Rorke’s Drift must hold its position against a vastly larger Zulu army. Released in 1964 and set during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, the film takes a historical event that could easily have become a stiff patriotic pageant and turns it into something tense, visually overwhelming, and surprisingly measured for its era. It is certainly built around British soldiers as its main point of identification, and it cannot fully escape the colonial framing of its story, but it gives the Zulu fighters a degree of discipline, courage, and humanity that many comparable films of the period would have denied them.

The opening has a deliberately sober quality. Before the siege gets underway, Endfield establishes the aftermath of the British disaster at Isandlwana, an event that hangs heavily over every decision made at the isolated mission station. Lieutenant John Chard, played by Stanley Baker, is not introduced as an obvious hero. He is an engineer officer who finds himself unexpectedly in command, unsure of what authority he truly has and visibly aware that the situation may be hopeless. Michael Caine, in one of his early major roles, plays Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead as the more aristocratic and initially dismissive counterpart. Their relationship is a familiar clash of temperaments, but the actors keep it from becoming too cartoonish. Baker gives Chard a practical, weary steadiness, while Caine makes Bromhead’s pride feel like both a weakness and a defense mechanism.

What makes Zulu work so well is how clearly it understands the mechanics of a siege. The film takes time to show men sorting supplies, moving mealie bags, organizing firing lines, reinforcing walls, and deciding which buildings can or cannot be held. That attention to logistics gives the action real weight. When the Zulu army finally appears along the hillsides, it is not just a cue for spectacle. It is the moment when every earlier decision becomes frighteningly important. The defenders are not winning through superhuman skill; they are surviving because they build, adapt, reload, retreat, and improvise faster than the situation can collapse around them.

Endfield’s command of scale is still impressive. The broad South African landscapes make the station seem tiny and exposed, while the formations of Zulu warriors moving across the terrain have a force that CGI-heavy battle scenes often struggle to recreate. The action is not especially graphic by contemporary standards, but it is physically convincing. Bodies fall, rifles jam, ammunition runs low, and the walls that seemed secure a few minutes earlier suddenly look inadequate. The battles have a clean visual geography as well. You can generally understand where the soldiers are positioned, where the attacks are coming from, and why a breach in one area threatens everyone else. That clarity is a major reason the film remains so watchable.

The Zulu warriors are filmed with genuine awe. They are the opposition in a military sense, but the movie rarely treats them as faceless monsters. Their attacks are coordinated, their persistence is formidable, and the British soldiers repeatedly acknowledge their courage. One of the film’s strongest ideas is that the men on both sides are forced to recognize the ability of the other. The final exchange of salutes is still powerful because it does not feel like a cheap declaration that war is noble. Instead, it feels like exhausted recognition after a catastrophe that has demanded terrible losses from everyone involved.

The film deserves credit for this, particularly considering the era in which it was made, although it still gives the Zulu perspective far less interiority than the British one. Individual British soldiers receive backstories, doubts, comic beats, and personal arcs; the Zulu fighters are mainly presented as a collective force. That limitation matters because the actual Anglo-Zulu War was not simply a neutral contest between two equally situated military forces. It occurred within the larger reality of British colonial expansion, and the film only lightly touches the political forces that made the battle possible. Zulu is more respectful than many older war movies, but it is not free of the assumptions of its time.

The historical side of Zulu is one of its most interesting qualities. The film does a very good job at historical accuracy, which is a rarity for films depicting real-life historical events, especially in the way it presents the basic structure of the defense at Rorke’s Drift: a badly outnumbered British garrison fortifying the station and enduring repeated Zulu assaults. Its investment in terrain, formations, material conditions, and the general progression of the battle makes the event feel researched rather than casually invented. The staging has a sense of military procedure that helps sell the defense as something grounded in a real crisis rather than merely a legend inflated for the screen.

That said, the characterization of the historical people involved was not as accurate, which is where the dramatic license comes in. The most famous example is Private Henry Hook, played with rough comic energy by James Booth. In the film, Hook begins as an unruly alcoholic and apparent coward before proving himself under fire. The real Henry Hook was a disciplined soldier and a teetotaler, making the movie version an almost total reinvention built around the satisfying “unlikely hero” arc. Bromhead is also simplified into a more inexperienced upper-class officer than the historical man appears to have been, while Colour Sergeant Bourne is made into a weathered older veteran despite having been only 24 at the time. These choices make sense as storytelling devices, but they are worth recognizing because they shape the viewer’s emotional understanding of the people involved.

There are other liberties that are harder to overlook once you know the history. The film presents the 24th Regiment as strongly Welsh and builds toward the memorable use of “Men of Harlech,” even though the regiment was not formally the South Wales Borderers at the time and the song was not its regimental song during the battle. The famous singing exchange between the defenders and the Zulus is also pure cinema rather than a recorded historical occurrence. It is a great scene on its own terms—moving, tense, and an effective pause before the final strain of the battle—but it also shows how Zulu turns history into myth. The movie is at its best when its embellishments intensify the human stakes without pretending that they are literal fact.

The performances throughout are solid, even when the writing leans into broad types. Stanley Baker holds the center with quiet authority, avoiding the temptation to make Chard a conventionally inspirational leader. Michael Caine is more visibly theatrical, but that suits Bromhead’s gradual shift from aloofness to responsibility. Jack Hawkins brings warmth and moral conviction to Reverend Witt, while Nigel Green’s Colour Sergeant Bourne provides the hard military backbone of the defense. James Booth is entertaining as Hook, even if the character’s historical distortion is unfortunate. The ensemble works because the film makes room for fear, resentment, class tension, and stubborn professionalism. These men do not suddenly become perfect comrades; they simply realize they have no choice but to depend on one another.

John Barry’s score deserves mention too. The music has the grandeur expected from a film of this size, but it does not overwhelm every scene with triumph. It often emphasizes rhythm and mounting pressure instead, helping the battle feel like a sustained ordeal. The sound of rifle fire, shouted commands, and the Zulu war chants combines with the score to create an atmosphere that is both stirring and unnerving. Even viewers who know the outcome can feel the uncertainty of each new attack because the film never lets the defense seem comfortably under control.

Ultimately, Zulu is a compelling and visually magnificent war film that remains worth watching precisely because it is not as simple as its reputation might suggest. It can be thrilling without being entirely celebratory, respectful without being fully equitable, and historically attentive without being historically pure. Its battle reconstruction is unusually convincing, while its treatment of real individuals often bends the truth to create clearer dramatic roles. That tension is part of what makes the film so fascinating. It is a classic piece of large-scale filmmaking, anchored by memorable performances and superb action staging, but it is also a reminder that even a relatively careful historical movie can turn real people and complex colonial history into a more streamlined story. Zulu does not offer the final word on Rorke’s Drift, but as cinema, it remains tough, exciting, and far more thoughtful than a standard war spectacle.

Review: Scarface (dir. by Brian De Palma)

Posted on by Arleigh

“All I have in this world is my balls and my word.” — Tony Montana

Brian De Palma’s Scarface is one of those movies that seems almost impossible to discuss at a normal volume. Everything about it is loud, excessive, sweaty, violent, vulgar, and deliberately too much. The movie does not simply tell the story of Tony Montana, a Cuban immigrant who rises through Miami’s cocaine trade before destroying himself. It turns that rise and fall into a neon-lit, operatic explosion of greed, paranoia, sex, money, and violence. At first, Scarface can feel like an overlong, incredibly entertaining gangster fantasy. But underneath all the cocaine mountains and machine guns, it is also a deeply cynical story about the American dream and what happens when ambition is allowed to become a substitute for an actual soul.

Tony arrives in Miami during the Mariel boatlift, immediately presenting himself as someone who refuses to be intimidated. He is not interested in being grateful, polite, or patient. Tony wants power, and he wants it quickly. That impatience is both his greatest strength and the obvious source of his downfall. He is willing to do things that other people are too afraid to do, which helps him climb the criminal ladder. At the same time, he cannot understand the idea of limits. Every success only makes him want something bigger: more money, more cocaine, more influence, a bigger house, a more beautiful wife, and absolute control over everyone around him.

The screenplay by Oliver Stone gives Tony a kind of blunt, almost cartoonishly direct philosophy. He believes that the world belongs to people who take it. In Tony’s mind, morality is mostly an excuse invented by people who lack the courage to seize what they want. That attitude makes him magnetic, but the film never truly presents his worldview as admirable. Tony may have the confidence of a king, but he behaves more like a man who is constantly terrified that someone will discover he is not really in control. His bravado is a shield against humiliation, poverty, and powerlessness. The more successful he becomes, the more obvious it is that he is still fighting the same emotional battle he was fighting when he first arrived.

Al Pacino’s performance is the central reason Scarface remains so watchable. He plays Tony as a human grenade, a character who seems to be vibrating with anger even when he is sitting still. The accent, the posture, the rapid shifts in mood, and the exaggerated physical gestures could easily have turned Tony into a parody. In fact, there are moments when Pacino absolutely does push the character into parody. Yet that is also part of the performance’s strange power. Tony is a man who has constructed himself as a larger-than-life personality, so Pacino makes him seem like someone performing Tony Montana even while he is alone.

Pacino understands that Tony’s violence is not simply about cruelty. It is about insecurity, pride, and the panic of losing status. Tony cannot tolerate being laughed at, challenged, ignored, or treated as inferior. A casual insult can become a life-or-death confrontation because he experiences disrespect as an existential threat. Pacino makes those reactions frightening, but he also gives them a pathetic quality. Tony is powerful enough to terrify an entire room, yet emotionally he often behaves like a wounded child demanding recognition.

That contradiction is what keeps the performance from becoming empty scenery chewing. Tony is ridiculous, but he is also tragic. He is disgusting, but he has flashes of genuine feeling, especially in his relationship with his sister Gina. Unfortunately, even his love for her becomes possessive and destructive. Tony wants to protect Gina, but he also wants to own her choices, her sexuality, and her future. He cannot separate love from control. The same problem affects his relationship with Elvira, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, and eventually his entire empire. Tony does not know how to care for people without turning them into extensions of himself.

De Palma’s direction matches Tony’s personality. The film is staged like a gangster epic filtered through a fever dream. Miami becomes a place of bright colors, glass surfaces, giant mansions, tropical heat, and constant artificial light. The city feels less like a real environment than a hallucination of wealth. Tony’s home is especially important because it looks like a monument to success but gradually becomes a prison. The famous final shootout transforms that mansion into a battlefield, with Tony defending his kingdom even after it has already collapsed around him.

The violence in Scarface is often shocking, but it is also theatrical. De Palma uses suspense, wide compositions, sudden bursts of brutality, and moments of grotesque visual humor to make the violence feel both horrifying and unreal. The movie’s excess can be exhausting, particularly in the middle section, where Tony’s rise begins to blur into an endless parade of deals, parties, arguments, and drug use. The length is part of the point: we are meant to feel Tony’s world becoming bloated and unstable. Still, some of the film’s scenes repeat ideas that it has already established. Tony is ambitious, Tony is paranoid, Tony is violent, and eventually Tony is high. The movie sometimes keeps shouting after the audience has already heard it.

That criticism matters because Scarface is not a flawless film. Its dialogue can be clumsy, its supporting characters are sometimes more functional than fully developed, and its treatment of women is frequently limited by Tony’s perspective. The film wants to condemn male domination and criminal capitalism, but it is also fascinated by the same things it condemns. It shows us the luxury, the clothes, the cars, the glamorous parties, and the apparent freedom of Tony’s lifestyle. Even while warning that this life ends in misery, it makes the fantasy visually seductive.

That tension helps explain the movie’s complicated legacy. When Scarface was first released in 1983, many critics found it excessive, ugly, and morally confused. Over time, however, its reach expanded dramatically through home video and popular culture. The movie became especially important to hip-hop, where artists recognized Tony’s language of survival, hustle, ambition, and self-invention. Al Pacino has credited hip-hop with helping the film find its audience, saying that rappers understood and embraced it. That relationship became one of the most important parts of Scarface’s afterlife.

Hip-hop did not simply treat Tony as a cool gangster. It also turned him into a symbol. The character could represent ruthless ambition, immigrant struggle, street credibility, material success, or the danger of becoming trapped by one’s own myth. Lines from the movie entered rap lyrics, album skits, music videos, and stage names. The film’s imagery became a shorthand for a certain kind of rise-from-nothing fantasy, even when the original movie was trying to show how poisonous that fantasy could be. In this sense, Scarface became bigger than its initial critical reputation. It stopped being only a crime film and became a cultural text that people could quote, remix, parody, and reinterpret.

Its influence on video games is just as obvious, especially in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. That game’s 1980s Miami setting, neon colors, criminal empire structure, radio culture, and flamboyant protagonist clearly operate in the same general territory as Scarface. The film has also been connected directly to other games, including Scarface: The World Is Yours, which imagines an alternate continuation after the movie’s ending. The game allows players to rebuild Tony’s empire, purchase businesses, intimidate rivals, and expand across Miami. It turns the movie’s rise-and-fall structure into an interactive fantasy in which the player gets to ignore the ending and keep climbing.

That difference between film and game is revealing. Scarface ultimately insists that Tony’s dream cannot survive because Tony himself is incapable of moderation, trust, or self-knowledge. Video games can take the same world and make the player feel rewarded for doing exactly what Tony does: acquiring territory, collecting money, buying weapons, and becoming more powerful. In that format, the critique of excess can easily become a celebration of excess. Yet that is also why the film remains so influential to games. It provides an instantly understandable fantasy of criminal ascent, complete with a distinctive visual style and a protagonist whose personality is impossible to ignore.

In the end, Scarface is both a warning and a temptation. It tells us that Tony Montana is doomed, but it makes his climb so entertaining that we understand why generations of viewers, rappers, and game designers kept returning to him. Al Pacino’s performance is the movie’s beating heart: outrageous, funny, frightening, and occasionally heartbreaking. De Palma’s film may be messy and overstuffed, but its messiness is part of its identity. Scarface does not want to be tasteful or balanced. It wants to overwhelm you, seduce you, and then leave you staring at the wreckage of a man who mistook having everything for being somebody.

Review: A Fistful of Dollars (dir. by Sergio Leone)

Posted on by Arleigh

“When a man with a .45 meets a man with a rifle, you said, the man with a pistol’s a dead man. Let’s see if that’s true.” — Joe

When examining the films that fundamentally reshaped a genre, 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars stands as an undeniable cornerstone. Directed by Sergio Leone, this movie didn’t just accidentally stumble into creating a new genre; it grabbed the classic American western by the collar, dragged it into the mud, and spat on its shiny boots. This was the first leg of Leone’s “Dollar’s Trilogy,” and honestly, looking back at it now, it’s kind of crazy to think about how much of an underdog this production was. It was made on a shoestring budget, shot in Spain with a bunch of Italian and Spanish actors speaking different languages and then dubbed over, and it featured a lead actor who was mostly known for playing a lovable cowboy on a little American TV show called Rawhide. Nobody expected A Fistful of Dollars to become a massive international hit, but it did, and it permanently altered the cinematic landscape.

The story itself feels incredibly familiar today, but that’s only because it has been copied and homaged about a million times since. Unapologetically lifting the plot from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, the film follows a gritty, chain-smoking drifter who rides into a dusty, miserable border town called San Miguel. But the fun part about this cinematic lineage is that Yojimbo wasn’t entirely original either. Kurosawa openly borrowed the core concept from Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled detective novels, specifically Red Harvest and The Glass Key. Both of those books featured a lone, cynical protagonist who manipulates warring criminal factions fighting it out for control of a corrupt town. So Leone was essentially taking a Japanese interpretation of an American noir trope, stripping it down, and repackaging it as a western. Once our drifter arrives in San Miguel, he quickly realizes the town is torn apart by two rival gangs: the Baxters, a family of American gun-runners, and the Rojos, a ruthless group of Mexican smugglers. Instead of playing the traditional white-hat hero who immediately picks a side and saves the day, our guy does the exact opposite. He decides to play both sides against each other, hiring himself out to the highest bidder, switching loyalties at the drop of a hat, and essentially bleeding the town dry for his own profit. It is a brilliantly cynical setup that completely subverted what western audiences were used to seeing at the time.

And then there is Clint Eastwood. Now, pop culture famously knows him as the Man with No Name, but that is actually the result of a very clever piece of US marketing. In A Fistful of Dollars, his character absolutely has a name: Joe. The American distributors thought the mysterious, anonymous angle sounded cooler for the posters, and the moniker stuck so hard over the decades that most people forget he literally introduces himself as Joe to the locals early on in the movie. Regardless of what you call him, when Leone cast Eastwood, American studios were apparently confused, wondering why an Italian director would want a TV actor to lead a movie. But Leone saw something in Eastwood’s squint, a kind of rugged, lazy menace that was perfect for this new brand of anti-hero. Joe isn’t a knight in shining armor. He’s greedy, he’s manipulative, and he kills people without losing a wink of sleep. But he has an undeniable coolness to him that is just magnetic. The costume design plays a massive part here too. The weathered brown poncho, the stubble, the short cigar clamped in his jaw, and that iconic hat all combined to create a look that felt lived-in and dangerous. Compared to the impeccably groomed, brightly dressed cowboys of the 1950s, Eastwood looked like he actually smelled like sweat, horse hair, and gunpowder.

Of course, a conversation about A Fistful of Dollars is totally incomplete without talking about the villains, because Leone knew how to cast bad guys who were genuinely terrifying. Gian Maria Volonté plays Ramón Rojo, the main antagonist, and he is absolutely phenomenal. Ramón isn’t just a cartoonish thug; he is smart, cold-blooded, and utterly devoid of mercy. There is a famous scene where Ramón is demonstrating the accuracy of his rifle by shooting at the heart of a man he has just murdered at long range, and Volonté plays it with such a creepy, casual indifference that it makes your skin crawl. The Baxters are mostly just pathetic pawns, but the Rojos feel like a legitimate, organized threat, which makes the stakes feel incredibly real. You genuinely believe that if Joe slips up even once, these guys will brutally torture and kill him without a second thought.

Visually, A Fistful of Dollars is an absolute masterclass in atmosphere. Leone was working with a limited budget, but he used what he had to create a style that felt massive. He employed these extreme, lingering close-ups of people’s eyes, sweaty faces, and flies buzzing around, which gave the film an almost unbearable tension. Then he would suddenly cut to these massive, sweeping wide shots of the barren Spanish desert, making the characters look like tiny, insignificant specks in a cruel, uncaring world. The violence was also shockingly graphic for the time. People didn’t just clutch their chests and fall over gracefully like they did in older westerns. They bled, they grimaced in agony, and the gunfights felt loud, chaotic, and messy. Leone stripped away the romanticism of the Wild West and replaced it with a gritty, dirty reality that felt much more authentic, even if it was entirely a fabricated Italian fantasy of America.

You also absolutely have to talk about Ennio Morricone’s legendary musical score. It is basically a character in the film itself. Before A Fistful of Dollars, western soundtracks were mostly made up of traditional orchestral arrangements and folksy songs. Morricone threw that playbook out the window. He used electric guitars, twanging banjos, screaming trumpets, whip cracks, choral chants, and even a bizarre, wailing coyote sound that sounds like a human having a mental breakdown. The main theme is so incredibly catchy and weird that it burrows into your brain and stays there for days. The music didn’t just support the action on screen; it told the audience exactly how to feel, ramping up the tension during the standoffs and giving Eastwood’s character a larger-than-life aura. Without Morricone’s score, the Spaghetti Western genre simply would not exist as we know it.

The pacing of the movie is something that modern audiences might need a minute to adjust to, but it is completely intentional. Leone was in absolutely no rush to get from point A to point B. He wanted to linger on the tension, letting scenes breathe and stretch out to almost uncomfortable lengths. When Eastwood is staring down a group of thugs in the street, Leone holds the camera on their faces for what feels like an eternity. You can see the sweat dripping, you can see the fear building, and by the time the first shot is finally fired, the release of tension is almost physical. It is a slow burn that requires a bit of patience, but it makes the eventual bursts of violence so much more impactful and satisfying. It is the exact opposite of the fast-paced, action-packed blockbusters we get today, and that deliberate slowness is a huge part of its strange, hypnotic charm.

Despite all of Joe’s outward greed and manipulation, there is a subtle emotional core to the film that keeps you totally invested. It comes in the form of Marisol, a woman who is being held captive by Ramón Rojo and used as leverage against her husband. When Eastwood sees the absolute misery of this family, his cold exterior cracks just a little bit. He risks his entire scheme, and his own life, to sneak Marisol and her son out of town in the middle of the night, giving them money to start over. It is a beautifully quiet, understated scene that proves there is still a shred of humanity left underneath all that grit and cynicism. He doesn’t make a big speech about it or ask for thanks; he just does it because it is the right thing to do. It gives the character a moral center without turning him into a traditional good guy, which is a really difficult balancing act that the film pulls off perfectly.

The climax of the film is where everything comes together in a spectacular display of style and sheer badassery. After getting brutally beaten by the Rojos, Eastwood escapes and returns for revenge, utilizing a makeshift iron chest plate hidden under his poncho. Watching him walk slowly down the empty street, taking bullet after bullet to the chest without flinching, while the electric guitar wails in the background is just pure, unadulterated cinema magic. He outdraws Ramón in a final, agonizingly tense standoff, proving that his wits and his nerve are just as deadly as his revolver. It is the perfect payoff to the slow build-up of the entire movie, cementing Joe as an absolute icon of pop culture.

And this endless game of cinematic telephone didn’t stop with Leone. Just as A Fistful of Dollars was heavily “inspired by Yojimbo“—which itself transplanted the 1920s pulp noir concept into the 1860 Edo period—it went on to inspire a whole new wave of imitators looking to put their own spin on the formula. The most obvious example is the 1996 action flick Last Man Standing starring Bruce Willis, which takes the exact same plot of warring factions and a lone drifter playing them against each other, but moves the action to a Prohibition-era Texas border town. It is wild to trace that DNA from a 1920s pulp novel to the 1860 Edo period, to a 1960s Italian western, and all the way to a 1990s Bruce Willis shoot-em-up, proving just how durable and universally cool this basic storyline really is.

Looking at A Fistful of Dollars today, it is easy to see the cracks in its foundation. The dubbing is notoriously clunky, some of the supporting performances are a bit wooden, and the fact that it is a direct rip-off of a Japanese masterpiece is impossible to ignore. But honestly, none of that really matters in the grand scheme of things. Leone took a great story and injected it with so much style, so much attitude, and so much raw energy that it became its own completely distinct entity. As the first leg of Leone’s “Dollar’s Trilogy,” it laid the foundational blueprint that he would later perfect with For a Few Dollars More and absolutely master with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. But there is something special about this first outing. It has a rougher, scrappier, and more experimental vibe that is incredibly fun to watch. It is the movie that killed the old western and birthed the new one, and for that alone, it deserves every bit of its legendary status.

Brad reviews THE BADGE (2002), starring Billy Bob Thornton!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

Being an Arkansan, and living in the same county where SLING BLADE was filmed, I’ve always been a big fan of Billy Bob Thornton. One of the things I like about him is his ability to somehow make the most miserable human beings just a little bit sympathetic. So many of his characters seem like they have no redeeming characteristics on the surface, but way down deep, in places they may have forgotten about, there’s a decent man trying to get out. That’s certainly the case with his Sheriff Darl Hardwick in THE BADGE.

Darl is a small-town Louisiana sheriff who spends most of his time dealing with the drunks, unruly youth and other assorted troublemakers. He’s not a model law enforcement officer, either. He drinks too much, womanizes, has a short temper and seems to take his marching orders from the politically powerful and corrupt Judge (William Devane). When the dead body of a transgender woman is discovered, Darl initially treats the investigation like any other. But it soon becomes clear that certain powerful people in the community want the situation to quietly disappear. Things get more interesting when the deceased woman’s spouse Scarlett (Patricia Arquette) shows up from New Orleans, with Darl ultimately deciding to confront some ugly things about his past and the community he serves.

THE BADGE is a movie that’s not afraid to get dirty and uncomfortable. Everything here feels sweaty, rundown and a little bit rotten. And that’s whether we’re in the porn shops and strip clubs of New Orleans or a majestic mansion near Shreveport. On multiple occasions, Darl comments on the bad smells that are around him. When you consider the ever present political corruption that we witness throughout the movie, it seems clear that the filmmakers are pounding that stench into our heads. It’s a heavy handed approach, but it gives the movie an atmosphere that fits its story of small town power and prejudice versus the LGBTQ+ community. 

As I mentioned earlier, Sheriff Darl Hardwick fits Billy Bob Thornton like a glove. He’s a deeply flawed man, but he still has a sense of right and wrong, and when he’s up against the wall, he decides to do what he thinks is right. The supporting cast is very good, with Patricia Arquette, William Devane, Ray McKinnon, Thomas Haden Church, and Sela Ward all giving strong performances. I thought Patricia Arquette is especially good as Scarlett, and she has one line that made me laugh out loud. If you know anything about Arquette’s politics, her line, “I can’t believe I’m depending on Republicans to save me,” can’t help but make you smile.

THE BADGE isn’t a perfect movie, and there are times when it sacrifices some reality in order to make its points. But thanks primarily to Thornton’s strong work, I did appreciate it as a dark crime drama about an extremely troubled man who finds enough decency to do the right thing and fight for justice when everyone else just wants him to go away.

Scenes That I Love: Billy Jack Learns About The Three Levels In The Trial of Billy Jack

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Seeing as how he was born in the month of August, this seems like a good time to pay tribute to Tom Laughlin, the actor who revolutionized independent American cinema through his Billy Jack films.

In four films, Laughlin played Billy Jack, an American Navajo, a former Green Beret, a veteran of the Vietnam War, a hapkido master, and a man who just protects children and other living things.  When he first appeared in 1967’s The Born Losers, he was protecting a woman from bikers.  In 1971’s Billy Jack, he was protecting the Freedom School from ignorant townspeople.  In 1974’s The Trial of Billy Jack, he was …. well, in that film, Billy Jack did a little bit of everything but the National Guard still ended up destroying the Freedom School.  Finally, in 1977’s Billy Jack Goes To Washington, Billy was appointed to the United Stated Senate because what else are you going to do with someone who has killed a tremendous amount of people over the course of three films?

(Of course, in Senator Jack’s defense, they were all bad people.)

Laughlin not only starred as Billy Jack but he also directed all four of the films and, starting with Billy Jack, he also handled the distribution of them.  A huge box office hit, Billy Jack is considered to be a seminal counter culture film.  The other three films are a bit less acclaimed and Trial of Billy Jack is often cited as one of the most pretentious and self-indulgent films ever made.  But, regardless of their individual artistic merits, all of the Billy Jack films share an appealing mix of sincerity and silliness.  Laughlin was a good actor and, visually, he was a stronger director than he was often given credit for. Some of the shots in the original Billy Jack are breath-taking.  At a time when even self-styled progressive films still portrayed women in the most condescending and demeaning way possible (check out Getting Straight or R.P.M., if you dare), the Billy Jack films were as much about Jean (played by Delores Taylor, Laughlin’s wife and creative partner), the founder of the Freedom School, and her beliefs, as they were about Billy Jack and his struggles to accept pacifism.  If nothing else, the Billy Jack films featured actual conversations and debates about actual ideologies and philosophies, as opposed to the usual shallow Hollywood politics.  Unfortunately, Laughlin was also a heavy-handed storyteller and a terrible editor.  The Trial of Billy Jack goes on for three hours.

And yet, of all the Billy Jack films, The Trial of Billy Jack is my favorite.  It’s just so weird that it’s hard not to like it.  It’s a film that doesn’t really work but, at the same time, you can’t help but appreciate all the effort that was put into it.  Whatever else you might be able to say about him and his films, it’s obvious that Tom Laughlin truly did think that the movies could make a difference.  There’s an aching sincerity to Laughlin’s work that pretty much cannot be found in the majority of today’s films.

In honor of Laughlin’s birthday and his legacy, here’s a scene that I love from The Trial of Billy Jack.  In this scene, Billy goes on a vision quest and experiences the Three Levels.  I would be lying if I said I really followed much of the logic in the scene but at least we get to see Billy hit a hippie professor.  Billy also smacks Jesus, which isn’t cool but Jesus shows exactly how to handle that type of belligerence and hopefully, he provides a lesson for us all.

Learn about the Three Levels, with Billy Jack.  And be sure to spare a thought for the hard work of Tom Laughlin.