Manson, 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.

Only us, Canadians, çan take a well documented fact of american history, make a movie with it, and completly screw it up big time. This thing is so bad on every aspect, that it is not even funny. This is so embarrassing. Good thing i just watched it on t.v. i would have feel really dumb paying too rent it or something. I just lost an hour and a half of my life that's all.

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

First off, if you're looking for realism, see Helter Skelter (1976) instead. This movie is not, nor does it attempt to be an accurate retelling of events.

The movie focuses on the Manson girl Leslie, and the young juror Perry. Perry is about to get married to a Christian girl, but is having doubts about Vietnam, his faith and the values his father has taught him. Causing him to question if Leslie should receive the death penalty, and if he himself would have behaved differently, had he been in Leslie's position.

The movie unfortunately is so badly made, that while it tries to be social commentary it ends up as being a parody. With a parody of a cult, a parody of a murder, a parody of an all American family, a parody of a Christian girlfriend, and a parody of a trial. The only 'real' people in the movie seemed to be Leslie and Perry. But given the subject matter, the meaningless slaughter of innocent people, the joke is either not there or it isn't funny.

I would call this movie a guilty pleasure. Kristen Hager and Gregory Smith both deliver a good performance, but they cannot carry the movie all by them self.

There's no indication anywhere that this film is a dark comedy, probably because no one would rent it. I don't personally feel like the subject matter should be made into a comedy, but some people might like that sort of thing. If I had known that this was a comedy, I would not have rented it. The acting is pretty atrocious, too.