The Manson Family Details

Fifteen years in the making, maverick director Jim VanBebber's legendary micro-budget horror (originally titled Charlie's Family) is an ultra-graphic and often powerful examination of the 1969 Tate—La Bianca slayings. This manic meditation draws on court transcriptions from the murder trial and restages interviews from the 1972 documentary Manson to reconstruct the Manson Family's infamous attack on director Roman Polanski's house, which left his pregnant wife — the actress Sharon Tate — and four others dead. Although it offers an occasionally fascinating, if over-talky, account of commune life — all free love and acid trips — the amateur acting and deliberate evocation of the 1970s exploitation Z-movie style severely hampers the director's choppy, celluloid orgy. Be warned, many will find the gore-drenched detail of the replicated homicidal attack beyond the pale.

A film begun in the late 1980s and shown as a work in progress in the late 90s in the hope of raising the money to finish it, which was not managed until 2003. The approach ranges from rough-edged semi-documentary to the style of underground movies and lo