Review – The Manson Family

Of all the movies made about Charles Manson and his followers, this indie production is the most unflinching. The pseudo-documentary style makes the Family look far creepier than they do in slick, Hollywood pictures. We also get a heapin’ helpin’ of hippie nudity, sex and gory murder. The graphic visuals shot and edited with a heavy LSD look and feel do a great job of dragging the audience into the environment that bred Manson’s bizarre, deadly cult, making the fanatical murderers hateful in a way that more sanitized productions could never approach. The movie is marred just a bit by the intermixing of a pointless subplot about a documentary film-maker menaced by neo-Mansonites. That aside, however, the video is worth it for the gut-wrenching re-creations of the murders alone. Worth seeing