TUBI-WEEN HANGOVER: THE MANSON FAMILY MASSACRE (2019) NO STARS

The Manson Family Massacre is one of the worst films I have seen during my year of watching (almost) nothing but movies on Tubi.  It jumps around all over the place so much that you never quite get your bearings long enough to make sense out of any of it.  The fact is, I don’t think there was ever a chance of this being any good, even if the editing wasn’t so… ahem… helter-skelter.

The film is set in 1992, with a recovering addict musician trying to write new material at Sharon Tate’s old address on Cielo Drive.  Then there are flashbacks to Tex and Manson fucking around with some criminals to organize a half-assed drug deal that naturally goes wrong.  Meanwhile, the musician has odd nightmares and visions, and she’s convinced they are connected to the house, so she goes to see a psychic.  Eventually, the Manson murders play out and the musician also comes to a predictably untimely end.

I knew this was going to be bad right from the opening credits scene that rips off the photo flash sound effects from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  It only got worse once the back-and-forth narrative, complete with title cards straight out of a fifth-rate Tarantino knockoff was introduced.  It’s almost like two different movies stitched together and heavily padded with nightmare sequences that add zilch to the proceedings.

I understand the temptation of wanting to make a Manson movie.  The murders are a fascinating subject ripe with possibilities.  Heck, even if you went the straight-up exploitation route, it could still deliver a powerful kick if the material was in the right hands.  At least it tries to do something different, albeit with spectacularly awful results.  Too bad the ‘90s scenes never intersect with the ‘60s sequences in any meaningful way, other to state that the house rests on a “negative energy fault line”.

A drunk British guy gets the best line of the movie when he derides the musician’s song as being “as deep as Danzig!”