The Manson Family Massacre

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.

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.

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.

A series of bloody fictional murders & nothing about the real crimes until a series of informational screens before the credits. A lot of mystical nonsense, I guess about a woman who bought one of the murder houses decades later wondering if it is haunted in some way. Confusing when it keeps jumping time. When a movie title appears to be about historical events you expect at least some degree of accuracy even though in Hollywood it usually seems verboten to portray things just the way they happened. I watched two movies about the BTK killer. Having lived in Wichita through all this, I was very familiar with the facts. One was unusually accurate with the lead looking & sounding so much like Rader it was creepy. The other was like this. Just used the BTK name & a series of completely made up gory crimes. I don't know why I didn't just turn off this film. Maybe it was just such a train wreck I couldn't look away. I don't review mediocre series & movies. Only the great ones & the real stinkers. Probably seen worse movies; just can't think of one right now!

This latest retread of the manson murders is more interested in following a musician living in the cielo drive house years after the tate murders with just a few long flashbacks to the familiar events of 1969. the film moves at a dreamy pace for the most part and seems to trying to ape polanski films like repulsion and the tenant but then come outbursts of brutal violence which skirt the borders of good taste. the story is like two films thrown together one about a musician losing her mind and the other a period biopic so the tone is all over the map sometimes. but some good acting and convincing violence prevent this latest manson offering from slipping into total mediocrity.