The Manson Family (1997)
Before Jim Van Bebber, the writer, director, and co-editor of The Manson Family, commenced production on his exploitation true-crime splatter flick, the infamous real-life horror story of the Charles Manson Family murders -- a series of murders that transpired in the summer of 1969 and claimed the lives of nine innocent human beings, ten if you include an unborn baby -- had been dramatized only as a single stuffy made-for-TV courtroom drama titled Helter Skelter. While it may have featured a legendary performance from Steve Railsback as Charles Manson, the focus of the narrative was the prosecution of Manson and his cult of deluded, white supremacist followers as told from the perspective of Vincent Bugliosi.
This tragic, stranger-than-fiction chapter in American history is the greatest and most earth-shaking horror story ever committed to the history books, and with its intoxicating cocktail of sex, carnage, emotional manipulation, and a bevy of colorful personalities, Van Bebber recognized how ripe it was for the slasher horror movie treatment. In order to adapt a story as gonzo, gruesome, intricate, and heart-rending as this, the nonfiction characters must be unshackled from the bloodless, buttoned-up confines of a bland courtroom procedural and permitted to roam freely in their natural habitat, unclothed, uncouth, with their knives close at their side, ready for the kill. On the surface, Jim Van Bebber appears to be the man for the job, capable of telling this story correctly, and he offers an up-close, no-holds-barred account of the communal lifestyle of the Manson Family leading up to the fateful summer of 1969 in which their dedication to free love and nonjudgmental, all-embracing camaraderie suddenly took a hard turn into an insatiable lust for blood. Unfortunately, try as he might to replicate the low-budget aesthetic and gritty artistry of Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Van Bebber lacks the aptitude for screenwriting, the coherence for editing, and the casting of talented unknowns to do his titular subject -- or their victims, for that matter -- justice.
In present-day 1996, producer Jack Wilson (Carl Day) is assembling a docuseries about the Manson Family relayed from the jailhouse confessions of five of the seven followers of Charles Manson (Marcelo Games) who participated in the murders on their deranged leader's behalf: Charles "Tex" Watson (Marc Pitman), a former high school football star who became Manson's chief executioner; Susan Atkins (Maureen Allisse), a former singer in her church's choir who became Manson's staunchest cheerleader; Patricia Krenwinkel (Leslie Orr), a former Sunday school teacher who found Christ in Charlie; Leslie Van Houten (Amy Yates), a two-time homecoming princess in her high school molded into a desperate disciple; and Bobby Beausoleil (Jim Van Bebber), a rock musician and porn actor who committed the first murder of the Family.
Utilizing Wilson's project, fueled by equal parts frustration and confusion with society's greater interest in Manson himself as opposed to "the kids that put the knives and the bullets in the victims," as the framing device of his movie, Van Bebber flashes back to the scorching summer of 1969, during which time the Manson Family lived together peacefully and joyfully on an abandoned Western movie ranch owned by an 80-year-old blind man named George Spahn (Norris Hellwig). In exchange for their help cleaning up after the horses, as well as sexual favors from the young women, George allowed the Family to live on his ranch rent-free. Their daily routine consists of three simple components integral to hippie culture: free love, psychedelic drugs, and playing music. To his undeniable credit, Van Bebber captures the uninhibited lifestyle of the Manson Family with an unsparing attention to graphic nudity and orgasmic bucketloads of gore. The young women who constitute the majority of the commune are frequently depicted with full-frontal and backside nudity, unashamed to display their bare breasts, unshaved vaginas, and buttocks. Every actor spends as much, if not more, time unclothed as clothed, running freely through fields, humping each other with the ferocity of sexually emaciated, freshly unchained animals, grinding themselves against their naked bodies. Accurate to the form of both the lifestyle of the Family and the slasher subgenre, The Manson Family nevertheless plays out almost like a straight-up porno with more blood. While preferable to the bone-dry, telemovie aesthetic of a dialogue-driven courtroom drama, Van Bebber unquestionably takes it too far, depicting scene after scene of group lovemaking ad nauseam.
After failing to realize his dream of scoring a record deal with Terry Melcher to become the famous rock-and-roll musician he feels entitled to, Charlie develops an irrational paranoia that this summer will bear witness to the emergence of a racial war between the whites and blacks, an imagined war which he refers to as "Helter Skelter," named after the Beatles' song. According to his theory, black militants will rise up, fueled by resentment over having been mistreated by white society for too long, and obliterate the white race. But Charlie, as is his wont, has concocted the foolproof plan for survival: he and his family will hide out in the bottomless pit of a nearby desert, in which they'll continue to thrive, procreate, spread their messages of peace and love through Charlie's music. Once the war has ceased, the Family will emerge from the cave, un-aged, and assume control over the blacks, relegating them to their previous roles as slaves to the white race, thereby becoming the emperors of a cleansed world. But there's one problem: Helter Skelter isn't coming down as quickly as Charlie had anticipated, and so he and his impressionable followers must initiate it via traveling into wealthy white neighborhoods and slaughtering unsuspecting residents whose vicious deaths will send a shockwave across Los Angeles and the world at large. They'll leave behind blood-written messages to create the impression of black-on-white violence, thereby inciting retaliatory violence from the white race and paving the way for the Family's eventual reign.
Van Bebber, on the other hand, believes that the motivation behind the Tate-LaBianca murders was the love of brother. A couple weeks prior, Bobby Beausoleil had murdered his friend, music teacher Gary Hinman, in his Topanga Canyon home, stabbing him twice in the chest and using his blood to write "political piggy" on the wall, along with a paw print, to pin the crime on Black Panthers. Shortly after, he was arrested when a cop found him recklessly asleep in Gary's Fiat with the bloody hunting knife hidden in a tire well. If the Family would commit a series of murders in a similar style -- grisly stabbings, leaving messages on the walls written in the victims' blood -- the police would have to assume Bobby was innocent of Gary's murder and promptly release him. I don't subscribe to that theory because (1) I don't believe Charlie cared enough about Bobby to concoct such an elaborate scheme on the off chance that he'd be set free, and (2) enough credible firsthand sources, including the reformed, clear-thinking murderers themselves, have confirmed the Helter Skelter motive over the years.
In the opening shot of The Manson Family, a bouquet of colorful flowers on a sunny day becomes drenched in rain, which suddenly turns into blood, causing them to shrivel up as a heavy-handed metaphor for the death of the hippie movement. Cinematographer Mike King films his actors' faces in extreme close-ups, a technique which fails to endear the characters to the viewer. His footage is grainy in the style of a documentary, with static charges constantly dotting the frame like a worn-out VHS cassette. When it comes to letting loose with the bloodshed that would define the Manson Family's existence by the end of the summer, Van Bebber fully embraces the unrestrained spirit of an exploitation splatter fiesta courtesy of gruesome makeup effects by Andrew Copp. King steadfastly refuses to cut away during instances of extreme violence, allowing events to transpire precisely as they did 20 years prior to filming. He explicitly displays hunting knives plunging repeatedly in and out of the chests and stomachs of victims.
The slaying of Sharon Tate, however, is handled with the crucial amount of tact. When Tex administers the sharp-tipped blow, King films the blade penetrating her right breast just below the frame, accompanied by a squishy sound effect to complete the harrowing image in our mind's eye. As Sharon lies on the floor, moaning in agony, King uses a high-angle shot to block her subsequent stabbings with the huddled bodies of her trio of killers. Van Bebber wanted it this way to refrain from sensationalizing the stabbing of a pregnant woman. For the other eight victims, he paints the town literal red, dousing his actors in fake blood from head to toe. A slit in Abigail Folger's throat is presented in close-up as the blood flows freely therefrom. As Tex bludgeons Wojciech Frykowski with the butt of his gun, King uses a close-up of the latter's head to display chunks of brain being expelled.
Before unleashing the blood-gates, King captures the serenity of the Family's hippie heaven at Spahn Ranch, most strikingly in a close-up of Susan Atkins' dirtied foot as Charlie washes it tenderly in a pond. For one set piece, Van Bebber creates a full-bore homage to the dinner scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Sherry Ann Cooper, nicknamed "Simi Valley Sherry," a nervous new recruit to the Family, is drugged and gang-raped at Charlie's physically uninvolved direction, and with the assault illuminated in hellfire-red, King zeroes his camera in on the eyes of the victim, widened in incomprehensible horror and darting frantically around the room, taking in every last face of her assailants, both men and women. As she screams, King moves his camera inside her wide-open mouth, filling the frame with her palate.
Working in tandem with Capone, Van Bebber cuts choppily between flashbacks of the Manson Family executing their repetitive daily routine on the ranch, present scenes of Jack and his assistant sitting in their office, taped jailhouse interviews of the convicted murderers, and a modern-day cult of nondescript, heroin-addicted Mansonites preparing for the assassination of Wilson with no rhyme or reason, disrupting the flow of his titular subject's story. His transitions between scenes are abrupt and jarring, lacking the connective tissue to trace the Family's devolution from a loving, peaceful commune to a bloodthirsty cult enamored with death and world domination. At one point, Jack is cut off mid-sentence while speaking to his assistant. When Leslie is ordered by Tex to get her hands dirty during the double homicide of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, Van Bebber and Capone cut from a shot of Tex lifting up the blood-soaked nightdress worn by Rosemary, whose corpse lies face-down and immobile on the floor, and ordering Leslie to stab to Leslie having already begun the postmortem stabbing of Rosemary's lower back and exposed buttocks. Rather than tracing Leslie's transformation from a reluctant bystander to a gleefully laughing, knife-happy psychopath, the editors completely trim the connective tissue in-between.
As a writer, Van Bebber overly relies on the verbal exposition of the Manson murderers as they recount their experiences in the present interviews. In the most bizarre shot of The Manson Family, which occurs during the commencement of the Tate murder reenactment, Tex suddenly develops a pair of devilish horns on either side of his head. Obviously, this visual is intended to signify his delusion that he's the Devil, fueled by his recent inhalation of speed, but the editors neglect to draw a distinction between the fantasy of the murderers and reality of the victims, making it look as though the horns are visible to the victims. The worst offense Van Bebber and Capone commit in the editing room is their use of fast motion when depicting the activities of the modern Manson cultists. Whether it be of one simply watching Jack's docuseries on TV, or a young man exulting after stabbing Jack repeatedly and splattering himself in his blood, or the gang inexplicably turning on each other and bashing one of their heads against a sidewalk, the effect is bizarre and stupid-looking, adding no urgency to their scenes whatsoever.
As for the cast of non-actors Van Bebber has assembled, The Manson Family is in want of a single standout performance. The acting ranges from natural and uninhibited at best to downright amateurish at worst. In the most integral role of the narcissistic, manipulative cult leader himself, Marcelo Games fails to convey the charisma and soft-spoken tenderness that captivated his followers in the first place. The greatest ability of Charles Manson was the magnetism of his personality, capable of seeing through somebody younger than him, gaining instant access to their deep-seated vulnerabilities, desires, and parental hang-ups. He made them feel understood, listened to, and protected. By the time he was preaching about an oncoming race war which they would need to initiate, his followers were so enthralled by his otherworldly insight and ability make sense out of nonsense that they were nothing more than an extension of him, willing to blindly comply with his every demand, too ignorant and hopped up on acid to make decisions for themselves or realize they were adhering to a white-supremacist policy. Games conjures zero of Manson's insight, charm, humor, or warmth that would explain why so many people, some from privileged or stable middle-class backgrounds, would abandon their families and individuality and submit themselves to this lunatic's will.
His off-putting appearance (long black hair and oversized black beard) reflects that of the post-capture, Jesus-like caricature that Manson would go on to portray from behind bars and in front of TV cameras instead of the down-to-earth, relatively clean-cut look he maintained as the leader of his cult (short, bushy hair and a light, scruffy beard). He may not have been particularly handsome in the vein of Ted Bundy, but he was presentable and human-looking enough to physically attract young, lonely women in desperate search of love and acceptance. Games' voice is goofy, with a Southern drawl reminiscent of a hillbilly. He emulates Manson's devil-may-care, impish, and self-possessed demeanor, but lacks the intimidation in his gradual transition from peace-loving guru to frustrated wannabe musician to full-fledged white supremacist, misogynistic murderer.
As the most publicized victim of Manson's summer reign of race-based terror, Hollywood actress Sharon Tate, who was two weeks away from giving birth to her son, Paul Richard Polanski, Tina Martin is woefully miscast. From a physical standpoint, she's too overweight and flat-out plain to evoke the timeless, ethereal beauty of her real-life counterpart. From an acting standpoint, Martin's initial line reading is as flat as a pancake (and not nearly as delectable), sounding more like the fear that stems from a blind date than a home invasion. When the time comes to reenact Sharon's tearful plea for clemency, Martin performs an adequately convincing cry, her voice cracking in desperation to live long enough to deliver her son. But she's no match for the underrated Marilyn Burns, who poured her heart and soul into a similarly vulnerable performance of psychological torment in the aforementioned dinner scene of Texas Chainsaw. Daun Edmunds is visibly too old by anywhere from 20-30 years to play Abigail Folger, the slain heiress of the Folgers coffee fortune, who was only 25 at the time of her murder.
On a superficial level, the entire ensemble cast as the Manson Family exhibits commendable bravery in allowing themselves to be filmed stark naked, awarded zero privacy by the camera. For their outdoor lovemaking scenes, these people are physically fearless, submerging themselves in the grime of the grounds, running like liberated children, dancing naked with each other. Van Bebber clearly orchestrated an atmosphere of mutual trust and camaraderie, elevated by his willingness to strip off his own clothes behind the camera as well. However, all the physical pride and lack of inhibition in the world is unable to mask the evident lack of acting experience or talent onscreen. Leslie Orr's line deliveries, especially pertaining to her post-coital rant at Tex about the genius of Charlie, are over the top to the point of self-parody. As Manson's right-hand man, Marc Pitman traces Watson's arc from timid, mild-mannered, jealous country boy to assertive, paranoid, soulless, sadistic executioner with authoritative credibility. As the sadistically enthusiastic and sexually boundless Susan Atkins, nicknamed "Sexy Sadie," Maureen Allisse isn't as facially attractive as her real-life counterpart (usually the other way around in Hollywood), but she reflects Atkins' uninhibited personality with alluring smirks and an impromptu pre-murder dance that help her live up to her Beatles-influenced nickname. In his one scene as Leno LaBianca, Geoff Burkman delivers the most heartbreaking performance of any of the victims, his wheezy pleas for mercy and helpless screams for his wife raw and haunting. Van Bebber treats himself to the role of Bobby Beausoleil, and he carries himself with more assurance in front of the camera than behind it. As one of the more handsome men in the Family, Bobby relishes his rock-star good looks and effortless success with the women, and Van Bebber conveys the necessary masculine swagger to go along with it. Once Bobby finds himself entangled in a hostage negotiation-turned-crime scene, Van Bebber captures the anger, uncertainty, exhaustion, and desperation of a man so blinded by his uncritical devotion to a megalomaniac that he fails to recognize the violence he's inflicting on his own friend.
When Jim Van Bebber commenced production on The Manson Family, the year was 1988. Once he completed filming the 1969 portions detailing Family life on the ranch, he returned nearly a decade later to "catch up" with the murderous disciples on the 27th anniversary of their summer of slaughter. In what easily takes the cake for his most egregious miscalculation, Van Bebber conceived of an utterly worthless and unnecessary subplot about a modern cult of meth-head disciples of Manson hell-bent on assassinating the "pig producer" of their heroes' documentary. It's the most detrimental aspect of the entire movie. The reason for its inclusion, to be fair, is apparent: Van Bebber wants to illustrate that Manson's influence is so powerful that it cannot be contained by the sheer metal bars of a prison cell. Even though his physical body has been locked safely away from society for the past 27 years, he continues to exert an indescribable spell that poisons the underdeveloped minds of impressionable, emotionally brain-dead teenagers and young adults drifting through life without a sense of purpose or direction.
In practice, this subplot serves only to distract from the far more compelling true-life story at its center and drag out the runtime to an interminable 95 minutes. The personalities of this modern Manson-worshipping cult aren't even remotely delineated. All these unsightly freaks do is hang out in a dark, brick-walled basement, watch Jack Wilson on TV with ill-defined animosity, and inject themselves with heroin needles. Physically, they're just as indistinguishable, covered from head to toe in tattoos and frequently walking around naked. Van Bebber gifts them neither a single conversation of coherent dialogue nor a discernible motivation for wanting to assassinate Wilson. If anything, you'd think they'd revere him for bringing their 60s countercultural heroes back into the spotlight. And their final outburst, in which the rats suddenly turn against each other on a whim, as though killing Wilson unlocked an insatiable bloodlust within, makes no sense.
Despite the inclusion of dialogue, the titular white supremacist cult isn't afforded much greater character development than the 1996 one. In crafting his screenplay, Van Bebber omits the compelling and complex backstories of Charles Manson and his prominent followers, opting to present them as is. The backgrounds that led these fundamentally good-natured, middle-class teenagers and young adults away from their normal lives and into the submission of an egotistical, self-deluded madman are neither visually depicted nor alluded to in conversations, save one in which Patty mentions that she was studying to become a nun before she met Charlie. Every member of the Manson Family is united by their mutual passion for spontaneous group sex and LSD. Van Bebber wholeheartedly embraces Manson's command for his disciples to shed their individualities and mutate into a single hive mind. As a result, he neglects to bestow his script with a protagonist with whom the audience may identify and sympathize, such as the innocent, single-mother newcomer, Linda Kasabian, or good-girl-seduced-by-the-dark-side Leslie Van Houten, who is featured in only two scenes within the flashback portion. No one character drives the story or makes any choices to alter its outcome, thereby eliminating any semblance of momentum.
To reenact interviews of some of the unimprisoned Manson followers, such as Lynette Fromme, Mary Brunner, Sandra Good, Catherine Share, Paul Watkins, Steve Grogan, and Nancy Pitman (hopefully no relation to Tex's actor), Van Bebber lifts monologues and dialogues nearly verbatim from the 1973 Oscar-nominated documentary, Manson, by Robert Hendrickson and Laurence Merrick. In the process, he and his actors capture their irrational mindsets and delusions of superiority and grandeur. "He is God!" one woman proclaims. "Why do you think they're sending him to the gas chamber?" "As soon as Charlie gets out, it's on! The revolution is on! And if you try to hurt Charlie, you'll all die!" These documentarian segments exhibit exhaustive research on Van Bebber's part. Clearly, he re-watched Manson ad nauseam while transcribing the real, disturbing words of the non-murderous Manson women into his script. But mimicry alone doesn't equate to honest insight as to how these women bought into Charlie's conspicuously nonsensical beliefs. It amounts to little more than an exercise in actors reciting lines spoken by their real-life counterparts. Listen, memorize, repeat.
The production designer's recreation of Spahn's bears a closer resemblance to a farm than a Western movie ranch. Haystacks abound outside of conspicuous barns in which the Family lives. A nearby waterfall, also adapted from the documentary, under which they swim nude and copulate adds a peaceful touch. Van Bebber makes effective use of the infinite outdoor space, providing his actors a playground to roam freely and explore one another's bodies without shame, beneath a sky whose scintillating sun is soon obscured by ominous gray clouds. Sherri Rickman demonstrates an eye for the detail of some of the more documented outfits worn by Family members and their victims alike: the pitch-black shirts and long pants that camouflage the killers against the blackness of night during their creepy-crawlies and the Tate-LaBianca homicide reenactments, the white nightgown worn by Abigail Folger on her final night alive, the white pants with black vertical stripes, blue button-down shirt, and black high-top boots worn by Jay Sebring, and the infamous fringed buckskin jacket worn over Charlie's bare chest and shoulders to show his pretentious commitment to nature.
The real songs of Charles Manson, recorded before he made the transition to full-time doomsday conspirator and director of senseless, era-ending carnage, are integrated appropriately into the movie: when the Family women undertake a garbage run, climbing into dumpsters behind supermarkets and collecting boxes of still-edible fruits and vegetables, the grating "Garbage Dump" takes the place of dialogue; while the Family engages in group sex and basks in the freedom of the hippie lifestyle outside the ranch, the sentimental, upbeat, and percussive "Your Home Is Where You're Happy" musically expresses their jubilation, as does the soothing nursery rhyme, "I'll Never Say Never to Always," sung by some of the women. Because Marcelo Games clearly can't sing (though his voice couldn't have been much worse than Manson's), Van Bebber allows him to lip-sync one of Charlie's songs for his audition for Terry Melcher in a studio. However, Games' lips don't synchronize with Manson's lyrics, making it obvious that Manson's voice isn't emanating from his actor's mouth.
The heavy-metal score composed by Philip Anselmo and Ross Karpelman, to which the back-to-back nights of horror are set, undermines the tragedy of both sequences and feels disgustingly incongruous with the gruesome violence that occurs within them. The sight of innocent people screaming and crying for their lives while being stabbed, shot, and bludgeoned doesn't jibe with the obnoxious sound of rock music on the soundtrack. It comes across as tacky, tone-deaf, and exploitative, as if Van Bebber is trying to sensationalize the inhumane butchery of 10 people by presenting it as "exhilarating" when it should be stomach-turning and heart-wrenching. Here is a filmmaker who cares more about the blood and chunks of brain than the people beneath them.
4.5/10
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