HELTER SKELTER
Pretty freakin' lame
Steve Railsback's performance in this movie seems to foreshadow Jack Nicholson's screen-swallowing in The Shining - when he's not yammering at the top of his lungs, he's just sitting there with his Evil Crazy Man face on.
This isn't a particularly good movie. The pacing's bad, the dialogue is trite (some of it I actually recited along with the film, and I'd never seen it before) and it's a film about something people in the late 90's just don't care about anymore - a high-profile murder trial that enraptured the country. Nobody wants those anymore. Maybe it made for fine entertainment in 1976 (maybe in some other film), but it's just lousy today.
The biggest problem here is with the portrayal of Charles Manson, by Railsback. He gets in a number of good moments - the best of which is his waaaaaaay over-the-top climactic rant (which isn't too far off from the real Manson),half of which is directed right at the camera. Kinda creepy. But like I said, most of the time he's just sitting there with his Evil Crazy Man face on, and by the fourth time he gets the three chicks next to him to disrupt the courtroom and all four of them get hauled out, one is watching the clock and praying for a quick end. You know, kinda like with that other high-profile murder trial.
Additionally, neither the script nor Railsback give us any insight at all into the kind of charisma necessary for a guy like Manson to develop the following he did. Instead, he just seems like a one-dimensional villain who occasionally gets a good line or speech in. How does a guy like this get laid more than I do? Oh yeah, chicks like bad boys, that's it.
The film ends with the ominous note that Manson "will be" eligible for parole in 1978. It's always fun when parole hearing for Manson come around. The parole board doesn't even have to show up. I think there's a movie in there.
It ain't awful, but it's too poor to recommend, or even to fail to recommend avoiding it. BTW - this is a TV movie. But near the beginning, we get a) tits, and b) "Fuck you, Charlie!" Added later on for the video version, perhaps?