Not So Fresh Carnage

Charles Manson is back— and past his expiration date.

I would rather prop me lids open Alex de Large–style for a triple-header of I Spit on Your Grave, Natural Born Killers, and Irréversible than endure this most hellish of Helter Skelter re-enactments again. Those films were much reviled for fetishizing the senseless ultraviolence they purported to detest, but at least this contradiction made for a decent argument on the car ride home. A decade in the making, the grind-house-influenced Manson Family (which runs Friday, Dec. 17–Thursday, Dec. 23, at the Northwest Film Forum) nudges the envelope further by gorily exploiting an infamous real-world tragedy. But after 35 years of Charlie Chic, even the intended serial-thriller audiences should find themselves not only desensitized but bored. If you prick us— incessantly—do we not yawn?

Family merely dramatizes Manson’s magical mystery tour from the tripped-out perspective of his now-aged followers, then provides a loathsome coup de grace: the Tate and LaBianca slayings in all of their gruesome “glory.” The mockumentary approach ill suits the material. First comes 80 or so mind-numbing minutes of exploitation auteur Jim Van Beeber’s surreal, rapid-cut, he-said/she-said/ Charlie-said blather (which is more than a little reminiscent of NBK‘s freakier, Peckinpah-inspired cutaways). Then the climactic stabbings are intended to drive home the base inhumanity of the Family’s actions, but instead come off like a series of icky, special-effects money shots.

This is not to suggest that Van Beeber’s work has nothing going for it. The shuffled-deck editing style is derivative, but certainly appropriate for depicting the Family’s LSD-fueled lunacy. He also installs an interesting framing device in which a modern-day, fictitious producer is delivered cassettes of the Family’s inane pontifications, then is stalked by a gang of Charlie-worshiping mall-goths in retaliation mode. While the subplot distracts us from the already confounding main narrative, it’s a much more terrifying and potentially topical angle than crapping on well-fertilized ground and pissing on the dead.

abonazelli@seattleweekly.com