The Manson Family Massacre

This was not ready to be released. Feels like watching a school project.

The worst kind of exploitation. Andrew Jones is rivaling Johannes Roberts for the worst British Horror film director crown and his exploitative eye and sheer proliferation means he is winning the fight.

A keen eye, Jones probably saw that Tarantino was making a Manson movie (or at least a film that featured Manson) and made his own.

A tenuous 90s story, lifted from Trent Reznor renting the famous address at Cielo Drive to record in, binds together a haphazard story about evil spirits and negative energy. Flashbacks aplenty allow for a scenery chewer to shout in a Manson beard at people equally poorly cast. Nothing of the cult, the charisma and complex entanglements of hatred nor the complexities of what need Manson filled in his followers is investigated.

It is about stabbings, and when they come they are...well, hilarious...and that is in-spite of it actually having happened to various people in real life. The acting is so low grade, the framing and composition of shot so botched that the moments of violence create nothing but snigger.

As with all horror hacks the director plunders the classics, the Texas Chainsaw camera snap and whine are stolen here and used without real thought.

As with most sub-generic smut based on true crime there is a coda that features a re-telling of the outcome of the events shown, but the pinnacle of bad taste is the 'tribute' pictures of the actual victims that ends the credit sequence - this is a tribute to no-one. Something so cynical cannot be. While I have many issues with Once Upon A Time In Hollywood at least the title belies the construction, it is a fairy tale that offers the representations of the victims a happy ending after of years of myth making and counter myth. That is doing something different with a story re-told and re-told. This holds no lofty goals rather it appears to scramble for a few dollars falling from the Tarantino tree.

Andrew Jones is to be admired in many ways, he has cultivated a career for himself that few others have but quality seems very low on his list of concerns.

One positive - it is much better than 'Bundy and the Green River Killer', truly one of the worst films ever made.

I didn't really follow the main plot points very well. I fell asleep watching and didn't really care to watch it again the next day. Nothing really happens in the film. It jumps about from past to present and back again. It doesn't really tell the story of anything.

For a movie with Massacre in the title you expect a lot of violence going in and this delivers on that with a plethora of brutal stabbings. Some are very disturbing because they just go on and on and knowing it really happened to real people makes for grim viewing. For an obviously low budget movie there are pretty solid performances and everyone looks the part but the story does change the known version of the real case and includes a lot of conspiracy theories as part of the plot here. The story is told in two different time periods and there is a lot of new age stuff in both which borders on pretentious at times. But after seeing countless Manson movies playing out the exact same way I welcomed a different take on this subject.

The story seemed so far fetched. The actor playing Manson had the charisma down but lacked the believable villian qualities. It felt more like a rush to be released to the viewing public.