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THE MANSON FAMILY (2003)
Haphazard and messy, but not easily forgettable Jim Van Bebber's The Manson Family, six to fifteen years in the making depending on who you ask, is a sloppy, slapdash shamble, so damaged that even the DVD I rented was scratched to the point where important scenes at the beginning and the end were almost indecipherable. It's also the most convincing, evocative homage to the late 70's-early 80's glory days of American splat I've seen. It's not exactly deep or artful (one of the first things we see is white flowers splattered with blood to the tune of some astonishingly shitty folk music, the only kind Manson knew how to make) and the structure would beggar comprehension even if the DVD did work properly. Let's see if we can put this together. What we see throughout are: re-enactments of the activities of Charles Manson and his family, years- (decades?) later interviews with actors portraying his family members (who must still be in prison, but they don't look like they're in prison), a Bill Curtis-like fellow who makes TV shows about sick freaks like Manson, and a heroin-shooting weirdo goth cult which has no apparent connection to anything, and never works as a modern-day parallel to Charlie's boys and girls because of their lack of leadership and purpose. The movie careens wildly between the fiction and Satanic hallucination and faux documentary, which is impossible to set in time and no wonder - when a movie is filmed over as long a time as this was, people age noticeably. These "interview" scenes show the grown friends of Manson as regretful but candid, with two of them finding religion in a big way. I have heard these are re-enactments of real interviews...with based-on-fact movie like this, I don't know what the hell to believe so I just accept it as part of the movie. Charlie himself, played by Marcelo Games, is still a bit of an enigma. I've never really understood the fascination with Manson, since charismatic nuts who can convince a few sheep to kill for them have always been a dime a dozen. His charm in this movie is limited to supplying the drugs and enabling the group sex that everybody around him gets to enjoy almost constantly. He certainly isn't a very compelling figure of power, as he feeds his cult by rooting through health food store dumpsters. As the title suggests, the movie focuses less on Charlie himself than on his followers, who have some semblances of their own personalities when they come up for air from going down on each other. They're not mindless automatons in the thrall of a psychotic master, and they have their own often messed-up agendas and desires. The motive presented here for the famous Tate killings is not a clumsy attempt to start a race war (as was my understanding), but an attempt to pull suspicion for another crime away from a jailed family member - disguised as a clumsy attempt to start a race war. True, false...whatever. Works in the movie. Lots of nudity and group sex, and lots and lots and lots and of gore. This is not one of the watered-down horror flicks we see so much of these days, and can't go five minutes (even through the closing credits) without evoking that long-passed time frame. But is it more than a nostalgia trip? I might be more sure if the damn disc worked properly all the way through, but I think the movie itself worked more often than not, and there's not much else like it. It might not fool you into thinking it's 1979 all over again, but you might catch yourself with a passing notion that it wasn't all that long ago. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE M's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |