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Underground cult filmmaker Jim VanBebber performs quite a striking feat with "The Manson Family," his long-labored epic on the most popular crimes of the last century--his film is neither police procedural nor rank exploitation, but a dog's-eye view of the hippie commune Charles Manson (played by Marcelo Games) presided over, and the brainwashed followers who carried out his horrific bidding. This territory has been mined--both directly and indirectly--in cheap splatter flicks and glossy TV movies, but VanBebber's tale is a kaleidoscopic hallucination drawn from fact that, incredibly, condemns The Family and their crimes while presenting them in graphic detail (the film has its fair share of orgies, drug use, and countless stab wounds), and remaining impartial throughout (he cleverly allows The Family's testimony to indict them). The film comes off as having a generally bitter tone toward the drug-fueled hippie culture in general. In a way, if Manson's followers brought an "end to a generation," its falseness would have brought its demise soon enough. While "The Manson Family" is filled with so many characters and quickfire edits it is often difficult to recall names, VanBebber makes the faces of the perpetrators and victims memorable, to the point where expressions and voices cause us to react, not the marquee names of the murderers themselves; reenacted with a total disregard for human morality (which is, after all, the mentality under which it occurred), the murder scenes possess a hallucinogenic terror (Pantera singer Phil Anselmo has a vocal cameo as 'The Voice of Satan') and intimacy that puts "The Manson Family" on par with Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salo: 120 Days of Sodom." In that classic, politicians and other men of power take a handful of children hostage at an isolated villa at the end of World War II, subjecting them to all variety of sadistic sex, torture, and murder; "The Manson Family" reverses that concept and examines the malleable minds of the have-nots in the hands of a man who was, at his core, a phony spouting philosophy no less riddled with B.S. than any of the other prominent acid-heads of the 1960s. Stylistically, VanBebber uses his experience directing shorts and music videos to give "The Manson Family" a strong feeling of documentary reality--a variety of film stock is employed to hammer down period accuracy (for both 1969 and 1996), interspersed with neon images of LSD sizzling inside heads and interview footage shot on video and grainy film; even the sped-up scenes of a modern-day Family plotting the demise of a TV producer possess an eerie, not-quite-earthbound silent film quality.In the end, "The Manson Family" avoids beating a dead horse and instead brings the crimes to light from a fresh perspective. It would be hard to say I "liked" the film--it is a harsh, escalating nightmare that plays by its own rules and is frequently disorienting, but is ultimately as hypnotizing as a guru preaching his unique philosophy to the flock.
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