As one long fascinated by the Manson story, watching this documentary movie was a mostly disappointing exercise. The slightly somnambulistic narrative is based on some painfully dodgy research (for example, a woman who is most definitely not Manson's mother is shown, despite what the soundtrack implies), and an equally unfortunate tendency to get rather 'cosmic', in the sense of trying to create an air of malevolent apocalyptic convergence and doom. To this end we learn from the opening preamble that 'the time-grid we know as August 8th to 9th has always been a magnet for events of savage purification'. The narrator lists the bombing of Nagasaki and the inaugural meeting of the KKK, but suddenly runs out of legitimate examples and offers such desperate toe-curling makeweights as the birth dates of Ed Gein and Unity Mitford, and the 1985 LAPD announcement of their pursuit of the Night Stalker serial killer. Thus he proves that the time-grid we know as August 8th to 9th hasn't been a magnet for events of savage purification at all. On a positive note, it is good to see the actual geographical areas in which the original events took place. Thanks to the makers for driving around the LA hills with the camera out of the window. Anyway, we're here for more than just some ultra-cheapo graphics and a stoned-sounding narrator reading out a b minus high school essay, because a large percentage of 'Charles Manson Superstar' is taken up with exclusive prison interview footage with the man himself. Don't get too excited, though. Speaking entirely in vague generalities, Manson has only one thing to say and that is 'I'm an old man. I don't want to talk about my crimes and I don't need the world's attention on me, so I'm acting the crazy-man so that you'll just go away and leave me alone.' Over the decades many a journalist has taken the pilgrimage to go poke Manson and see if he bites, and all they get is the same 'crazy Charlie' show. Ask him something specific and at best he replies with a foggy metaphor. At worst he just starts into one of his elaborately pointless rants and ends up moving the viewer to tedium. True, there are moments when one can discern the sort of sinister persuasiveness, charisma and even the fatal personal charm which could conceivably convince a group of damaged and drug-messed followers to commit bloody murder, but he's on screen far too often blathering away unchecked and the forced familiarity soon breeds contempt and eventual disinterest. Which, one is tempted to believe, is exactly what Charles Manson desires.
