Available
from Cult
Epics | Review by Pinky Royale
This
is a DVD issue of a long-lost low-fi Manson
film by Baltimore-4 director and Mondo-celluloid
archivist John Aes-Nihl that was recorded
between '74 and '79 and released around
'84.
The film follows the build
up of the Manson madness that erupted in
the last days of the decadent, confused
and unwashed '60s. It's a silent film shot
in home movie fashion and boasts a soundtrack
of never-before-released Manson Family tunes,
and also vibrates with a cappella farm yard
freak-outs, catastrophic piano breakdowns,
hair-raising saxophone explosions, and Moog-style
electronic twitters, among other things.
The cast is made up of men dressed as women
and women dressed up as men (don't fret,
some actors represent their own sex), and
portrays the infamous clan of misfits who
harbored an infantile fixation on weapons,
drugs, and group sex. Whoever told me that
the hippies went for peace, love, and happiness
was a shameless liar.
In order to fully appreciate
this film, you've got to stick your brain
in a time machine and travel back to the
70's, where horror was getting fucking weird
but not yet to such a point where the saturation
desensitized people. When discussing a film
about Manson, it's impossible not to drop
into an analysis of the times and the crimes.
Looking back on footage of
people saying that the Manson killings were
the most horrible things to happen in America,
30+ years later, is strange. In retrospect
and in comparison to the messes of Ed Gein,
John Wayne Gacy, et al., the whole scene
really just comes across as a quaint little
hiccup in the annals of social etiquette.
Sure, Manson and his kids were terrible
bags of shit, a collective stain on humanity
and basic human decency, and what they did
defies explanation and can't be excused,
but held up against some of things we see
in the papers everyday, well, let's just
say that what could shock us then and what
can shock us now are on different ends of
the spectrum.
Regardless of how you watch
this film though, you'll find that it dances
on a fine line between Baltimore-style camp
and shameless horror exploitation. The gore
is minimal and laughable when it does occur,
and the murders are sloppy Unsolved Mysteries
recreations, rife with bad acting and barely
concealed smirks.
Personally, I got a lot more
out of watching the movie with the director's
commentary activated. At least with that
I could learn various tid-bits of trivia
about the film. When it was released, Manson
was still a boogey man, a devil in a San
Quentin jumpsuit, but at this point in time,
he's gone from a figure to fear and loathe
to a figure that has been diluted and destroyed
by over-exposure and old age. His powers
have been diminished by the insidious magic
of commercialization... for every t-shirt
sold, for every sticker stuck on a guitar,
for every crap electro-industrial-doom-dance
band that has taken an unholy amount of
time researching, sanctifying, and praising
him, his image of wickedness and his power
to terrorize has been knocked down by a
degree, which has left him flailing weakly
in a shallow pit of mediocrity.
It's not a dig at him. There's
nothing worse than picking on a guy who's
locked in a cage, and has been for a large
percentage of his life. He did his thing,
an admittedly terrible thing, and now he's
paying the price. He obviously still has
things to say, and he's saying them when
he has the chance, but whatever power he
may have possessed at one time has been
depleted.
So watching this film, 21
years after it was made, 36 years after
the final crime, and considering its camp
approach to the subject, it's hard to take
it seriously. One can watch DRILLER
KILLER and still eek out a cringe and
a few "eeew"s, but that's because
people are still being done in by serial
killers in macabre and atrocious ways. Manson's
name will always be tied to death, sure,
but he was more than just a serial killer
(he wasn't even a killer, but that's for
another time), he was a face, a fin, a mile-post
on a generation hovering on the brink of
spiritual and mental collapse, a generation
that was born of hope and glory, and quickly
and without grace self-destructed into a
mess of depravity, Alzheimer's disease,
and STDs. That's where his allure lies,
as far as I'm concerned.
The disc includes a 1994 prison
interview that, unlike the film, will no
doubt be timeless because you get to see
this iconic demon for what he really is,
a fucking nut case. The questions are muddled,
but that's not a problem as you don't watch
Manson to know which questions he's responding
to, you watch him to see just how far around
the bend he's gone. Besides, 10 seconds
into any response and you forget what the
hell he was talking about anyway as he a
Shaolin Master of the Migrane-Inducing Tangent.
He either is transmitting secret messages
to some faux-masonic hippie cult or just
ass-over-teakettle insane.
Manson is an anachronism.
Enough has been written about his to where
we don't need to get into it any more than
we already have (OK, just a little bit more).
He's been in prison for decades, and in
his abundant spare time he has formulated
a shit-ton of theories, ideas, and questions.
Ample meditation time can be good for a
person, the problem is that his only sounding
board has been a cement wall, not the most
honest critic. Another problem, linguistically
speaking, is that he's been in prison for
so long that all of his slang is outdated
and incomprehensible, a confusing mélange
of hippie-speak and prison-speak. That makes
for some serious head-scratching every time
he opens his mouth. If he were to be released,
he'd be lost, a relic in a bustling world
that would no doubt infuriate him as they
would treat him as either a circus attraction
or a pop culture icon. My guess is that
he'd up on some reality show, like The
Surreal Life, or land his own show,
a la The Osbournes.
MANSON FAMILY MOVIES is a
good flick in that it acts as a time capsule,
for those that are interested in such things,
for those halcyon days when Throbbing Gristle
and Boyd Rice were dropping Manson's name
like pomegranates drop seeds. When serial
killer pop culture was blossoming and you
were either a nihilist fueled by fear of
a nuclear war, or a coke snorting money
whore fueled by fear of a nuclear war. It
also takes us back to the twisted DIY days
of Kenneth Anger, Lydia Lunch, Jim Thirwell,
and this guy, John Aes-Nihl. Back when Art
still had a lot of power, when it was easier
to shock, offend, and outrage people by
mixing equal parts of horror, absurdity,
and noise, throwing them all into a blender,
and puking out an end product that lives
on today, a legacy passed on from old freaks
to young freaks, like a blackened and crippled
heirloom.
