Director Jim Van Bebber has been making this censor-baiting movie about the 1969 Tate/La Bianca murders for over a decade. The story of hippie child turned race war antichrist Charlie Manson, it's a demented, psychedelic head-trip of grooving flower power chicks, ketchup bottle gore, and all the zany amateurishness of a high school acting class. It also confirms cult filmmaker Van Bebber (My Sweet Satan, Roadkill) as someone willing to go all the way to the edge... and tumble into the abyss on the other side.
"EXPLOITATION FILMMAKING AT ITS MOST INSANE"
Have no illusions: this is exploitation filmmaking at its most insane, deranged, and unforgiving. Scratched film stock poses as (quite obviously staged) documentary footage; scenes of Charlie (Marcelo Games) inciting his freaky band of boys and girls to murder are cut with lengthy orgies of sex, drugs, and folksy 60s tunes. A handful of Black Panthers turn up in ludicrously fake afros, and several people are murdered with plastic knives.
A restless collage of scrappy scenes loosely strung together, The Manson Family touches all the bases of the mad hippie's story - the sex, the drugs, the messianic posturing, and the helter skelter race war preaching. Fumbled attempts to say something about the death of the counterculture amount to very little, as does the film's half-hearted attempt to deal with Manson's influence as the ultimate anti-hippie. In delivering The Gospel According to Charlie with wide-eyed enthusiasm, Van Bebber hints that he might well be the incarcerated villain's biggest fan. Which, if true, is really rather scary.
With no CGI or digital effects, this is splatter cinema at its goriest as a series of frenzied stabbings capture the drug-stoked nihilistic nastiness fuelling the Tate murders. Edgy, disreputable, and totally indefensible, this cage-rattling trashfest is likely to leave plenty of audiences outraged, grossed out, or simply bored. Memo to Rob (House Of 1000 Corpses) Zombie: this is what a real exploitation horror movie looks like.
The Manson Family (2004)
