Manson's Lost Girls

Linda Kasabian leaves home at 16 for California. She marries Bob but he abandons her and their baby Tanya for South America. Susan Atkins recruits her into Charles Manson's family who are living at elderly George Spahn's old western movie set. Manson predicts a coming race war Helter Skelter leading the group to a string of murders.

The first sin of this Lifetime TV movie is that it fails to give a sense of the time. The cast is unable to shine in a sea of unimpressive performances. The best scene is Manson daring a guy to kill him. For that one instance, the movie shows the possibility of something with greater intensity. The rest of this movie is forgettable and lackluster. Even the Sharon Tate section lacks intensity. A Lifetime TV movie can't go down that violent road compared to other options today.

Does any person who has ever seen Manson think his eyes are blue? That man had the blackest eyes imaginable. The actor portraying him here looks absolutely NOTHING like Manson and it's super distracting.

I know the Charles Manson Helter Skelter story very well. This is a made-for-tv half-assed attempt at telling a story featuring supposed dirty hippies that have outfits straight out of the hippie version of Abercrombie & Fitch. And how is it that they could not find an actor that resembles Charles Manson even a little bit? The guy playing Charlie looks like Kenny Loggins. Not very terrifying. Again very lazy. Spahn Ranch looks like a Disney Amusement Park version of Spahn Ranch, far too nice, instead of the decrepit dump it actually was. The Interiors of the ranch feature stuff you would find in a Williamsburg hipster's apartment, not in a dirty hippie commune. And the dialogue is trite, stereotypical, and just plain silly.. The girl who plays Linda Kasabian is one of the only high points, she's fantastic. But the rest is pretty sad and dumb, one of the only good things is that the story itself is so striking. Hopefully Quentin Tarantino's big budget version will be something that will make us forget all these half-assed versions (with the exception of the original Helter Skelter movie that came out around 1974 or 1976).

For a TV movie, I thought it was pretty good. This was the first movie depicting the Manson family with all its group dynamics. There was the allure to Charlie Manson - along with the control and manipulation. The drugs, open sex, Beach Boy ties, dumpster diving, creepy crawler nights, and of course, the murders. The movie showed they all arrived to the bad psychological places to produce murder. Seems like it's Linda Kasabian take on it all - and it feels genuine.