It's Time to Ignore the "Helter Skelter" Thing, Already

I've been trying to make it through this six-hour (6x55-minute parts) gilded-turd documentary on Manson/Family, but with each "episode," it's gotten more difficult. It reminds me of why, more and more, I can't stand documentary films and the people who make them. Mainly, because of the musical score and "sound design," which often is either stylistically inappropriate, bad, distractive and/or annoyingly relentless – and always too loud. I'm stuck in the middle of the fifth part, the spooky drone-music calling attention to itself, and I already know how the story ends, so . . .

Other than that, the film is well-produced, with lots of great archival footage and valuable interviews with Family members and others – with too much adherence to the archaic, now-disproven official version of the story; dramatizations of “the girls” as a group inauthentically attired; a pace that is soporifically glacial, not helped by slow-speaking interviewees; lots and lots of reiterations of footage and voiceovers, which confuse the chronology and bloat the running time. The "Helter Skelter" race-war premise is overplayed, and the interviewed “expert” on the civil rights movement speaking as though authoritative about Charlie’s since-debunked plan to start a race war looks foolish. The actual amount of information in this film would warrant maybe three hours – not six, which would have been appropriate for such a documentary if it bothered to include modern-era research beyond repeatedly-mined veins of narrative for which the general public has settled for the past half-century.

Read my post about the Manson mythos here.