THE BORN LOSERS lives down to its title by delivering a package of reprehensible junk: ugly, violent, stupid. Other than adding a gob to the seen-it list and putting in place a key piece of the Billy Jack Puzzle (file under ‘Who Cares?’) the main thing this self-victimized ‘square’ gained from grimacing thru it was the knowledge that ‘The’ was part of the title: as an ardent film fan I’d been aware of this flick for ages but rather than scolding myself for nearly sixty years of inattention I’d rather take it as a character plus. That might balance the sacrifice of 114 minutes that could’ve been spent with Lean, Ford or Kurosawa instead of witnessing a fountain of shite.

Before the beatings and rapes commence we’re given a pretentious lead-in that informs us that “He had just returned from the war, one of those Green Beret rangers, a trained killer, people were to say later. Before the war he had hunted down and broken wild horses in these mountains. Some said the reason he was so good at these things, and the reason he lived alone in this forest, was that he had some Indian blood in him. Others said he simply didn’t like people. All I knew was his name: Billy Jack.”   Heavy.

Get ‘plot’ out of the way. A mean, cretinous motorcycle gang does their ‘marauding outlaw’ thing in a small California town. Weak-kneed local lawmen fail to protect against repeated assaults on the citizenry, including rapes of teenage girls and young women. Led by charismatic a-hole ‘Danny Carmody’ (Jeremy Slate), the Ameri-huns only real opposition comes from stud-of-few-words ‘Billy Jack’ (Tom Laughlin) who gets down to serious payback when Danny’s crew of pukes capture and violate ‘Vicki Barrington’ (Elizabeth James) who has the risky habit of riding her motorcycle, alone and ‘dressed’ in a bikini. Okay, it’s Hip’fornia, but groovacious Miss Vicki is unbelievably idiotic enough to repeatedly flaunt form and attitude in front of the ‘Born Losers’.

Smelling green grass (of all sorts) and chopper smoke from the surprise 1966 hit of The Wild Angels, the thoughtful gurus at American International Pictures throttled up the outlaw biker exploitation subgenre with a vengeance, and this pig was the head hog in a pack of four that littered their way thru 1967. Compared to the other three, the $300,000 budget allotment for this vet v. violaters sleaze was Cleopatra. Alas, skill, finesse and taste stayed on the Nile with upscale rebels Liz & Dick.  Jack strawman is third-string Marlon wanna-be Tom Laughlin. Twelve years in, his thin thespic career dead in the L.A. river, Laughlin, 35, took the idea of the Billy Jack character that he and wife/producing partner Delores Taylor had been nursing since they met in 1954, and cobbled it onto a script written by comely co-star James, 24 (taking the credit—word used loosely—as James Lloyd), with Laughlin directing, using the pseudonym T.C. Frank.

We find the entire subgenre about as entertaining as running into a gang on a deserted highway, and only see fit to waste life minutes to see it for  compendium inclusion sake because of its link to 1971’s mega-hit Billy Jack, and the doleful fact that it somehow attracted enough people into drive-in’s and grindhouses to earn an astonishing $26,500,000, making it the 10th most attended film of the year—it scored more money than In The Heat Of The Night and Cool Hand Luke, let alone at least four dozen other 1967 movies of actual quality. A 1974 re-release to capitalize on Billy Jack took the gross up to $36,000,000. As for the brother three, Hells Angels On Wheels (with Jack Nicholson) was 43rd, Devil’s Angels (with John Cassavetes) was 56th and The Glory Stompers (with Dennis Hopper) sputtered in at 123rd: one wonders how proud any of them were of these resume stains. *

Laughlin merely poses, James fills out her costume (she forgot to do the same with her script), actual decent actor Slate, 41, plays it like camp, and somehow Jane Russell, 45, was convinced to do a cameo, in which she puts across her blowsy character’s anger with a degree of honesty because director Laughlin had pissed her off enough that she let fly with unfeigned irritation.

With William Wellman Jr., Jack Starrett and Robert Tessier (33, debut).

* Tom, Jack & loony: nothing if not ambitious, just two years into his career, 26-year-old Laughlin wrote, directed & starred in The Proper Time. Done in 1957 (for $20,000) it wasn’t released (such as it was) until 1962. In the interim he’d again pulled triple-threat for Like Father, Like Son, shot in 1960, released in ’65 on a double bill with A Swingin’ Summer, which Cogerson lists making $100,000 (that one featured, billed sixth, a girl named Raquel Welch). The phenomenal 1971 success of audience-gulling Billy Jack—in which his headgear went trendier, skipping from cowboy to Indian—briefly propelled Laughlin to fame & glory, short-circuited by his ambition turning messianic with two tortuous sequels and The Master Gunfighter. After that came three runs for President. Considering where we’ve landed, could he have done any worse?