Leslie, My Name Is Evil

Leslie (Kristen Hager) is one of Manson family on trial and Perry (Gregory Smith) is interviewed to be one of the jury. He has to postpone his wedding as the jury gets sequestered. In flashbacks, the two characters journey through two different sides of America after the JFK assassination.

This is trying to be a surreal telling of the trial. It has some good potential but the director has no skills to pull off the surrealism. There is no style to it other than a faltering attempt at being off-kilter. It's clunky and poorly executed. This is like Oliver Stone without the filmmaking skills.

This movie started out okay. Until it cuts to a scene with the girls sitting out by a fire and talking about how they are from divorced families and looking for a purpose in life. It was so corny and stupid, I had to laugh. The rest of the movie has that feel. I think the guy who played Manson could have pulled it off well, had he gotten a good script to work with. I was waiting to see how they would portray him and knew it would be amusing. Just like how the media portrayed him. It was pretty pathetic how he was presented, like some demonic possessed god-man. In the first scene, he is up on a cross, like that is his normal thing to do. The script for this movie is awful, what were they thinking. It's almost directed like a play, not like a movie. A lot of this is also do to the terrible acting by the girls, some of it is okay, but when they speak, it can get very bad. I liked the real vintage clips that were inserted. A lot of the music was good, I heard The Black Angels, 13th Floor Elevators, good stuff. They portrayed the racist, pro-war conservatives pretty well. I think the movie had some pretty well done scenes. Just failed in executing the characters better, leaving you with a flawed feeling while watching it.

Leslie, My Name Is Evil told me the story of something I didn't know, or even care about. When making a film about the life of Charles Manson and his deranged followers, you'd except them to at least show some of the murders they committed, or detail how they came to devotedly pursue his weird teachings. WRONG. We only see the briefest of excerpts of the hedonistic life they led... and what is revealed is so crummily acted, written and directed most people with a smartphone camera and a few spare hours could do better. Check out the scene with the couple sitting in their car, while a 'sunset' in the background... a more obvious use of bluescreen you'll never see. Atrocious.

Nope, instead of highlighting on the more 'sensationalist' aspects of the Manson case, it chooses to focus on one of the jury members at the trial... a good Christian boy who's about to be married. He has a patriotic gasbag of a father, and a loving fiancée wanting to wait until after they're hitched before jumping into the bed. That's the problem... due to his lack of 'physical activity' he starts to fantasize over one of the accused, an attractive little she-devil called Leslie. His weird dreams about her and the way they stare at each other across the courtroom all have one thing in common: they are very, very boring. So are his escapades at home. And the little chats with his bride-to-be.

In fact, they seem to have taken everything of interest about this fascinating case, surgically removed it and left us with nothing but offal. Which stinks. As does this sad excuse for a movie. Coincidence? Probably not. 2/10

Maybe it's my fault for not reading the synopsis before renting, but the title and cover image lead me to believe this was going be a movie primarily about Charles Manson maybe in the vein of "Summer of Sam". What I was hoping to see was maybe a historical account of the events that took place surrounding the "Manson Family", instead it was yet one more movie seemingly priding itself on a sarcastic stab at morals & ideals of a "Christian Nation" when confronted with the horrors of war. The main character is a young boy who was brought up in a Christian home and pretends, & maybe tricks himself into thinking he is a Christian because its what his father expects of him and also what he must be to be with his girlfriend. The film is much more artistic, musical and lighthearted than you would expect for this story. I do not enjoy movies that portray such evil people in a less than negative light and so overall I did not enjoy this movie.

The beginning few minutes seemed promising, but it started to go downhill from there. The thing is, this director had no idea where to take this movie so it just fall short in almost every level. It's primary focus isn't Leslie or Manson, and the protagonist seemed to be one of the juror Perry. The directing and editing isn't really good and I lost interest really quickly. There just isn't anything interesting or entertaining about this flick. I recommend just watching a documentary over this crap. Yeah, this movie was suppose to be satirical, but I didn't find anything humorous about it.

3/10