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The book by Tom O'Neill was excellent and when I heard about this coming to Netflix, I was excited. But making it into an hour and a half made it very rushed. Pretty disappointed they didn't make it into at least a 4-part series.

A 4-part series would have at least allowed for the time to explore so much more of the backstory and details that were in the book. I guess maybe it's possible that they will make Chaos a series of documentaries about the different parts of the book, but if not, this was a real let down for me.

I highly recommend the book by Tom O'Neill if this documentary at least piqued your interest.

This ninety (90) minute documentary is based upon Tom O'Neil's controversial book on the Manson Family. His book is a counter to the best selling Bugliosi book, Helter Skelter. The basic premise of the book and documentary is that Manson was not simply a crazy cult leader. He was a product of CIA MK Ultra LSD mild control experimentation by the US Government. The movie uses great documentary and interview clips to tell the story. It also uses Manson's original music as part of the soundtrack. The biggest issue with the documentary is that if you don't have some level of understanding of the facts and characters the film may be hard to follow. I recommend it anyway, and the book.

I have yet to read the book that this documentary is based on ("Chaos: The Truth Behind the Manson Murders" by Tom O'Neill and Dan Piepenbring. I believe the hardcover version was titled "Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties"). I've read several reviews of the book that go into the specifics O'Neill uncovered in greater detail than this documentary did. This documentary touches on some of what he found, but not all of it. O'Neill's book appears to be a much more thorough and truthful book on the subject than Bugliosi's Helter Skelter (O'Neill proves that Bugliosi purposely lied and left key facts out of his book). For a good introduction to O'Neill's book, check out Abby Aguirre's Substack post about it, or her excellent review "Down the Manson Rabbit Hole" in the LA Review of Books.

It's worth watching if the subject interests you, but from the reviews I've read the book sounds much more comprehensive. The documentary has some interesting interviews with one of the prosecutors, some Manson family members, and O'Neill himself. It brings up some of the questions found in the book, such why did Manson's parole officer continue to insist that Manson was doing great when meanwhile he was arrested repeatedly (and not locked up for violating his parole)? Why have Manson's complete parole records never been released? Why were his parole files not permitted as evidence in his trial?

I feel the documentary could have been edited better and should have been longer and included more of the details from the book, but it is still interesting for people who want to learn more about this subject.

So sloppily done. I couldn't even tell who was speaking most of the time as there were no titles. We were to assume we knew who they were. So the author made the claim that the author of Vincent bugliosi was way off in his theory about why Manson and followers murdered in cold blood. Yet the author of this book did not offer any evidence to the contrary. He uses the term "brainwashing " which can not be used in a court of law because there is no such thing as brainwashing. It's correctly called thought conditioning or thought reform, supported by peer encouragement. The idea that the CIA had anything to do with this event was ludicrous. They were freaking high on drugs and in an isolated cult which removes them from any sort of consciousness or morality other than what they were told. The author Tom O'Neill was simply not credible enough for me to believe.

While this documentary was highly entertaining, holding my interest for its duration, it certainly wasn't earth-shattering in its analysis or profoundly insightful. As far as this viewer could tell, the central premise of the film - that Manson and his followers were (perhaps unwitting) participants in MK Ultra, a CIA-administered "mind control" project relying primarily on the use of the hallucinogen LSD - the research into both components of this dyad (i.e., Manson and MK Ultra) seemed superficial at best, retelling only what numerous previous docs on these subjects separately have reveled, drawing only tentative, unsurprising correlations between them. Still, the presentation of material was concise and balanced, allowing viewers to arrive at their own conclusions. The interviews with many of the key players were likewise fair, interesting, and new. All-in-all, a well-made, if not jaw-dropping, endeavour.

As "Chaos: The Manson Murders" (2025 release; 96 min.) opens, the documentary states its opening premise: how did Charles Manson get total control over the minds of the so-called Family, ordering them to murder innocent people? We then go to "August 9, 1969", the day after Sharon Tate and 4 others were murdered and before 2 more innocent people were killed later that day. At this point we are less than 10 minutes into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this is based on Tom O'Neill's book "Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties", in which he wonders whether the CIA somehow was involved in all this as it was working on a secret project called CHAOS to understand how to control people's minds. I have not read that book, and frankly I would not have been all that interested in watching this documentary, but for the fact that this is directed by the Oscar-winning Errol Morris ("The Fog of War"). Morris interviews O'Neill extensively, and makes it clear that he (Morris) is quite skeptical about O'Neill's original premise. One of the things that sets this documentary apart from the many other documentaries about these events is that Morris pays close attention to Manson's music (the lack of getting signed by a label; even better: the use of 8 songs sung by Manson, culled from his 1968 demoes).

"Chaos: The Manson Murders" recently started streaming on Netflix. After reading an interesting review on it in yesterday's NY Times, and realizing that Errol Morris directed this, I watched it last night. The documentary is currently rated 66% Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, which sounds about right to me. If you have an interest in the Manson murders now 56 years later, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

A deep dive? Hardly, more like a disjointed mess with quick cuts of old documents and photos with little or no explanation.

There is no narrative here, no explanation of the theories on which the film is allegedly based, namely the book by Tom O'Neill. I've read the book, which is quite fascinating, but if you haven't, there is just no way to follow the random bits and pieces thrown out by this documentary.

Case in point, O'Neill is briefly interviewed, but without any explanation of who he is. O'Neill briefly discusses some of the shadowy players associated with the Manson saga like Jolly West and Roger Smith, but little information is given about why they were relevant and what they did or might have done. Music industry people like Brian Wilson, Terry Melcher and Gregg Jakobsen are briefly mentioned, but with little background on their relationship to each other or Manson.

The film is a complete waste of your time. If you are truly interested, read O'Neill's book and skip this incoherent trainwreck.

This is a cliff notes & non-investigative version of the events.

Have seen multiple other documentaries and books in which they stated Manson knew Melcher no longer lived at the residence.

Also, there were lots of other inaccuracies incl. The background on the things with Dennis Wilson & the Beach Boys regarding the studio sessions with Charlie & his family mates.

Yes there's a lot lore characters required to fill out this review. I don't deem it worthy or necessary to point out the boorish inconsistencies & the like to complete this review.

Manson a puppet for the state? Prove it in a real documentary & not a second-rate one for Netflix clickbait!

An enormous disappointment, CHAOS (based on the excellent Tom O'Neill book of the same name) barely scratches the surface of the incredible discoveries O'Neill made and the implications they have for the Manson case. This oddly short, 90-some minute doc, instead plays more like your standard true crime piece, with much time devoted to summarizing the murders themselves for anyone who hadn't yet heard about them. What about the story about how the victims of the Tate murders had the power lines cut when they were watching TV at Jay Sebring's home, the night before the murders - proving that they were not killed as a result of some mixup about Terry Melcher still living at Cielo? What about incredibly suspect names and connections like Reeve Whitson and Charles Tacot, or mobster (and associate of Jay Sebring) Charlie Baron? What about even Bugliosi's astonishing corruption, and incredibly vile acts of evil in his personal life, which hint at him being controlled via blackmail by higher ups? And on and on. This documentary is simply a joke and does not do justice to the true scope and horror of this case. It makes Wormwood look like an absolute masterpiece, and indeed at least that effort from Morris was pretty fair to the subject and didn't seem quite so neutered. This should have been easily a 3-5 ep miniseries; 90 minutes is just far too little for a story like this.

Oddly, I am a student of Manson and Tate-LaBianca. Have read all the books, seen all the documentaries, watched all the interviews. I consider myself knowledgeable about this topic.

I am also a student of Errol Morris, own Thin Blue Line, read his book on the Jeffrey MacDonald case. He's a skilled director and competent author. However, I really feel he has gone in to the high weeds in recent years and this documentary shows signs of it..

There is good archival footage here and the interview with Bobby Beausolei is quite educational and more than sums everything up. Stephen Kay's interviews are also illuminating. However, this historical incident has been discussed to death. How does one breath new life in to it? Explore a ludicrous theory that Manson and the Family were in cahoots with the CIA and were trained and used by the federal government to wage war against a perceived left-wing threat to our country. Sound stupid? Yeah, it is and doesn't really warrant attention.

I do strongly agree with the criticism of Bugliosi and his nonsensical take on "Helter Skelter." That theory is ridiculous. So in effect, Morris is being objective in presenting multiple silly theories.

While it is understandable why Charles Manson was regarded back then as having a supernatural charm and ability to influence his followers to commit unspeakable acts, the growth of knowledge into psychology, especially childhood trauma and personality disorders, in the past 50 years will easily dispel any conspiracy theory that arose in the 1970s following the murders. The roll-call of cultish personalities that followed Manson, such as Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite and David Koresh, is proof that there is nothing magical about their ability to indoctrinate those who are susceptible to their influence; they are all basically following the same set of rules used by the greatest con-artists.

At the start of the documentary, Manson is shown proclaiming that he is not a nice man, but his would-be followers insisted that he is; they needed to view him as "nice" and thereby safe, perhaps helped by his diminutive stature, so he admitted to "reflecting nice back to them". People like Manson wield enormous influence over some simply because their superpower is sniffing out the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of others, and using that to their advantage. This superpower is often the result of severe childhood trauma and/or neglect, where the child does not have any healthy adult role models to learn empathy from, and views other people as merely tools to survive and get their needs met.

A cursory search into Manson's childhood revealed an alcoholic mother who was ill-equipped to raise him, a biological father that he never knew, and a step-father who flagged the mother for "gross neglect of duty". It is therefore no surprise that Manson's life was characterised by anti-social and criminal behaviour. In an ironic twist, the people most susceptible to those like Manson, such as Manson's followers, are usually themselves lost children seeking the guidance and love they never received from their parents. This shared experience of childhood trauma, and subsequent trauma bonding, is why Manson had such a hold over those he sent out to do his bidding. Manson himself was a scared child faking bravado to face the big bad world; that he ran away after injuring Hinman, leaving Beausoleil to deal with it, and how he delegated the killings to his followers proved what a coward he truly was.

As Beausoleil put it, Manson was not a mastermind. Far from it, he was instead a broken child in a man's body, hateful at the world for thwarting his desires, and the murders were his misguided way of taking revenge and exerting his will. That the documentary failed to explore any of his psychology and childhood, as well as that of his followers, makes it incomplete because the conspiracy theories are ultimately not as compelling as the truth behind Manson's deranged machinations. The only thing I got out of it was that Manson was a competent musician and songwriter. Perhaps in a parallel universe, where he had better parents and childhood, he might have become a successful musician, adored by many, instead of this infamous trainwreck of a human being.

I don't know why Netflix chose to make this a 90 minute documentary. Netflix is the KING of stretching out a 60 minute story into a 6 part series and sucking the life out of it. Finally they have a masterpiece of source material in Tom O'Neil's book and Errol Morris is a master of documentaries and for some reason, they decide that they can cram a mind-blowing amount of information into 90 minutes? This is a good documentary but it will leave you wanting to know a lot more detail but for non-readers, they aren't going to want to delve into the book , even though it's really worth it. It just would have been nice to have so much more in this documentary.

Was it just me? Or did this 90 minute production feel as though it was hacked together and rushed out. I went on and on about Chaos, begging people to read it, it absolutely had me captivated, what a binge read, I don't think it translated well here.

Massively overproduced, it jumps from one theory to the next, not explaining anything in that process, if moves from cutaway to split screen interviews in the most erratic fashion.

Honestly just stick to the book instead, it truly is the most fascinating read, contrast that to this chaotic film, night and day.

Good luck if you can stick with it, I found myself skipping back to try and see what point they were tying to make.

There's clearly some interesting footage, but it's lost in a myriad of cutaways and shots.

Netflix, this sucked.

4/10.

Netflix's "Chaos: The Manson Murders" condenses Tom O'Neill's book into a fast-paced, 90-minute Errol Morris documentary, and while fans of the book may feel short-changed, we both enjoyed this movie. Morris keeps us engaged from start to finish, tapping into the enduring fascination with the Manson murders and the swirling eddy of chaos of 1960s America. The film explores the possibility of government involvement with Manson, but after a while, everything started to feel like a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, as I grabbed my tinfoil hat and put my mobile into the microwave. Yes, it could've been a docuseries, but instead of needlessly stretching it out, a tight, compelling feature-length take was the right call. Manson wasn't a mastermind, just a drug-fueled drifter who lucked into infamy.

I read the book earlier this year and found it to be a fascinating and well thought out read. When I stumbled upon this doc, I was intrigued but some flags went up when I saw it was a 90 minute, one episode event. I started watching it anyway and wow, what a disjointed slog this was. I'm not sure, but I'm guessing this director is a fan of baz lurman because it's all over the place and features way too many effects than what is necessary. The book flowed from point to point and is easy to follow. Here it's murders, Manson, girls, Haight Ashbury girls, Manson, Wilson, girls etc etc. It seems like there was no real order in putting this together. It's sad that this doc does not do the book justice. If you just watched this doc alone, you'd probably be turned off to reading it. Don't be. Skip this, read that.

I found it informational with facts and information i didn't know or have never heard before. I felt like this should have been a series with a deeper dive in some areas. I thought it was a weird call for what they did and how short some of the insight was, but maybe that's all they could come up with. Mind control with lsd, with possible government involvement. We'll im not a conspiracy theorist or anything, but that wouldn't suprise me if it was all found to be linked and true. Ill let all of you figure out the true answers and please let me know when you find out anything definitive.

Watched on Netflix on 3-10-2025.

A random, meandering documentary about the Charles Manson documentary by two men who talk at length with each other through the film, but don't give any adequate background to themselves except one, Tom, wrote a book some years back.

Other people feature in the documentary with no titles or just one title at the very beginning. So many people, archived footage, current footage, drop in and out, it's hard to track.

Tom introduces conspiracy theories involving CIA involvement but it's unclear if he believes them or not. The two men talk at length about names you have no concept of, details you've never heard of, all the while your trying to keep up.

Then at the end when it suddenly ends you realise why they named it chaos.

Frankly, I don't even know where to start.

If you chose the book as your first option, you made the right choice. Extremely long, boring at times, or almost always, difficult to follow, and from the beginning, it promises something that will never deliver: the supposed truth behind the Manson Family murders.

If you chose the documentary, you also made the right choice. Its brevity doesn't make it better than the book; on the contrary, it makes it more chaotic and absurd, more gratuitous. Its "journalistic investigation" nature, which in the book is disguised through interviews, is completely lost here, and it seems more like a History Channel program than a professional investigative work.

The comparison with alternative theory programs about the official history of any subject covered on the History Channel becomes even more evident when Tom O'Neill says, like Giorgio Tsoukalos on his shows, that he doesn't believe that the story told by the prosecutors who brought the case against Manson and his girls is true.

Basically, that's his argument, both in the book and in the documentary: he doesn't believe Manson manipulated a group of psychologically helpless and mentally immature girls to commit the atrocious crimes against Sharon Tate and her guests. And since psychological manipulation is something O'Neill believes is impossible, he prefers to explore the entire absurd and irrational, unprovable world of MK Ultra conspiracy theories, even though in doing so he insults the memory of the true victims, Sharon Tate and her friends, and attempts to present the manipulative killer Manson as a victim of a larger, hidden plan operating in the shadows.

O'Neill should be reminded that this strategy is not only insulting to the real victims, who didn't kill anyone. Manson cannot be presented as another victim of the evil shadow government that framed him for his mind-control experiments.

When specifically questioned by the documentary filmmakers, O'Neill confesses that he doesn't believe Manson was manipulated into committing the murders, into ordering them to be carried out. Why does he say this? Not only because he can't prove it, but because, just like in the book, he is actually the true opportunist, the con artist, the one who writes a book knowing it contains nothing but lies and lacks any solid evidence or testimony, which is what he accuses the prosecutor who wrote the book "Helter Skelter: The Truth About the Manson Family Murders."

As we say in Mexico, quoting a Chespirito character, "La Chimoltrufia," a ridiculously caricatured woman, O'Neill "como dice una cosa, dice otra" - "as he says one thing, he says another."

His absurd investigation stems from an almost ridiculous and laughable fact: he doesn't believe in the prosecution's theory. He believes that information was withheld, and that this information, hidden and buried under seven seals, contains the truth. Where is that information? Why doesn't he present it? Because as with every conspiracy theory, the absence of evidence confirms the evidence. If we don't see what we want or what we believe, it's not because it doesn't exist, but because it's hidden somewhere.

In the book, every time O'Neill follows a "lead" that could lead him to the big revelation, to a key witness whom a third party is talking about and knows, and whom he claims has access to privileged information, every time he follows that "lead," time and again, inevitably, the witness suddenly disappears, refuses to talk, "turns a blind eye," misses the appointment, etc. Why? Not because he's hiding something, or because the power of the CIA and the shadow government pressured him. Because he actually has no proof, because he's just someone else looking for notoriety, his five minutes of fame, just like O'Neill himself. But that "someone" knows deep down that he has no basis in fact to back up whatever he might reveal, because his testimony would be inadmissible in any court of law in the United States.

O'Neill's voluminous book is disappointing in every way, but primarily because it fails to deliver what the cover claims it will reveal: the truth behind the Manson Family murders. There is no other truth that hasn't been proven in a court of law, which is where things matter and count, not in the washed-out pages of a tabloid or in a nonsensical book.

O'Neill confesses at the end of the book what any moderately informed reader would know: that he didn't find the big truth that would refute the prosecution's case. Oh, but what about the royalties from the sale of the book and the documentary? There, the guy didn't even blink.

It's a shame that O'Neill is unaware of the psychological manipulation exerted by political cults (Hitler), religious cults, or pseudo-religious cults (Scientology) and is unaware of the brutal damage they inflict on their victims, which is sometimes impossible for them to heal or overcome, as one of the Manson Family girls confesses years after the events.

I'm sure that, like O'Neill, many believe these conspiracy theories: because they lie, they hide things, they didn't follow this or that lead, they didn't interview that key witness, or because they were slow to react, or because they released this or that person earlier, or because they took so long to arrest or interrogate them, without understanding the complexity of a true police investigation, which must be based on hard, tangible evidence, as prosecutors and the American judicial system themselves say, that is beyond a reasonable doubt. Reasonable doubt isn't that they didn't interview Juan Pendejo, or that they took so long to do this or that, or that they ignored what the parole officer did or didn't do, said or didn't say, or whether he scratched his butt with his index finger or his thumb, as O'Neill repeatedly claims. None of that is evidence of anything, except for people wasting their time on peripheral matters that have nothing to do with the only real, tangible fact. There was a gruesome murder in 1969 committed by a group of girls sent by Charles Manson in revenge for not getting a recording contract. That is the concrete, undeniable fact. Was the CIA, the FBI, or my uncle who went bald half a century ago involved in that crime? The answer is "NO."

Manson was the mastermind behind a heinous and vicious crime. He wasn't a victim. He got what he deserved: to live like a dog and never see the light of day again. That's the least he deserved. There's no mitigating factor in his atrocious behavior.

What O'Neill is up to is as heinous as what Manson did, but at least it's not a crime, a crime that deserves jail time. He only deserves our contempt. That's all.

I'm an armchair expert when it comes to the Mason murders. I've seen the original movie many times, I read the book and I even saw the famous Tom Snyder interview when it first aired. So as far as that stuff goes, I thought director Errol Morris did a pretty good job telling the story of the Manson Family. "Chaos: The Manson Murders" skips a major beat when it spends too much time on author Tom O'Neill's nutty conspiracy theory. My favorite part of O'Neill's time in the movie is when he admits that the only problem with his cockamamie theory is that he can't prove it. I almost died laughing. Why am I listening to it then?

Despite what many summaries or reviews of this documentary claim, this is not in any way a direct cinematic restaging, or simple endorsement of, Tom O'Neill's theories about the Manson murders. O'Neill, who first came to the Manson murders as a journalist on assignment around 1999, was provoked by several under-explained events in Manson's biography to conjecture that Manson was influenced by, or made an agent of, yes, the grandaddy of conspiracy theories in US History, MK Ultra. O'Neill studies this interval: Manson was allowed to violate parole in 1967 in Southern California and move to San Francisco (effectively transferring his probation from one city to another), where he became, with young women alongside, a frequent customer of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. From this history, because there was some evidence that government researchers in the effects of drugs on young people were occasionally (it's not clear how often or in what capacity) in the clinic, O'Neill sought connections between Manson and US government officials overseeing mind control experiments involving LSD-- and all of O'Neill's claims involve over-amplified conjecture in key places.

I was at first ambivalent about this film's use of hyperbolic music and the scrambling of images (esp. Of textual evidence) into chopped and hard-to-parse cubist collages (if one pauses the video, the documents, e.g., letters from probation officers in 1967, can be read). While I first thought this was a cheap way to get suspense and bluster into the film, the method rates as true to the level of doubt and fantasy this history still compels, especially as told by O'Neill.

In Morris's film, the affable and bright O'Neill is on camera and has plain opportunities to lay out concisely exactly what the salient, empirical evidence is for Manson being an operative, or a close or distant student of, or a vicariously influenced lunatic in any way related to MK Ultra and all O'Neill can come up with is essentially "I'm just sayin'-- I can't identify direct lines of conspiracy between the United States government and Manson but, wow would it be interesting if there were huh?" So while Morris does not debate O'Neill (direct, antagonistic debate is rarely Morris' style), this is in no endorsement of O'Neill's theories or methods.

The better part of this, as an exploration of "what the hell inspired these crimes?" is in Morris' (phone) interview with Manson fellow traveler, Bobby Beausoliel, then an LA musician, convicted of murdering Gary Hinman, an event which occurred about two weeks prior to the notorious Tate/ Labianca murders. Beausoliel says, look, I was part of this crew: let's strip it down to its "bare bones." After the murder of Hinman, (which he claims was drug-deal-and-debt-related), Manson wanted to make sure that his crew would not rat him out for the Hinman murder and thus made them complicit in even larger crimes. But the motives for the bizarre Hinman murder itself (he was a close friend of Beausoliel's), and its relationship to the later massacres, is still fuzzy. Beausoliel's status as an un-reliable narrator (parts of his his accounts of the Hinman murder sound like Jon Lovitz on a 1989 SNL) justifies some of the frustrating-but-realistic "we aren't going to fully answer many questions here" quality of Morris' movie. The theory about race wars in Vincent Bugliosi's account of Manson was (Beausoliel says) just a kind of rhetorical sauce that Manson added to motivate the culprits and to make the crime scenes confusing, but here too O'Neill's categorically disbelieving the Bugliosi explanation (Bugliosi argued in "Helter Skelter" that the "this will start a race war" theory was actually primary in the motives, not just added hokum from a gang leader) and also claiming that Bugliosi's theory is mendacious and designed to sell books, ends up sounding like a projection of O'Neill's interest, and repressed doubts about, marketing a lurid hypothesis *onto Bugliosi*--and this projection actually seems to be one of the core sources of drama in Morris' film. I don't indict either O'Neill or Bugliosi for trying-and-failing at times to support what they think are compelling theories, but O'Neill's dismissal of Bugliosi as a con-man seems silly when all O'Neill has in retort is literally a conspiracy theory with missing keystones.

As a documentary, this is excellent.

A topic right up the alley of Errol Morris.

It incorporates seldom heard interviews, with behind the scenes photographs and accounts.

However, writer Tom O'Neill (on whose book this film is based) posits a hypothesis- that Manson was an MKUltra trained operative, who was- not only protected by the state- but tasked with breeding chaos for the purpose of achieving COINTELPRO-style objectives, with the Black Panthers as the target- though...he doesn't really offer any sort of evidence to back it up.

Rather, merely offers up the theory as conjecture.

Which, is a bit disappointing, to say the least.

What the documentary does well, however, is offer context to what, otherwise, comes off as Manson's incoherent ramblings.

In fact, it kind of acts to humanize Manson, by bringing him back into the realm of normalcy.

Despite his sort of mythic status in pop culture legend.

This isn't to say there isn't something to O'Neill's hypothesis, mind you.

Because it certainly isn't beyond the realm of possibility.

Hell, you could argue it's actually the most plausible explanation.

It's just...he doesn't do a very good job at offering up any sort of evidence to support the claim.

So all it is, is effectively a very intriguing conspiracy theory.

But just because it's a conspiracy theory...doesn't mean there isn't any Truth behind it.

So, watch it...and make of it what you will.

Because, at the very least, you get to indulge in Morris' masterful documentarian form.

Which is always a master class, in it's own right.

7 out of 10.

Tell me you're a conspiracy theorist without telling me you're one. Reading other reviews, I'll assume the book is better but seriously, it has to be at least more complete. This documentary attempts to draw a line connecting the San Francisco parole office through several branches of the Los Angeles police and court system to the FBI, with all levels of government in between, in a plot to brainwash 60s youth into violence using Manson. All of that in 90 minutes which results in a hodgepodge of interviews and clips bouncing all over the place and really answering nothing. Stir in some clips of Ruby killing Oswald and "The Manchurian Candidate' and this looks like something Oliver Stone made in junior high school.