Creepy-Crawl Cinema: One Upon a Time in… Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

1969 feels pretty impossible to escape at the moment. All these 50th anniversaries coming thick and fast – moon landing, Manson murders, Woodstock, Brian Jones, Altamont – and now, man-of-that-particular-moment Peter Fonda passing away right on schedule, an exact half century after his image was pinned up on a thousand dorm room walls. Perfect timing then, for retromancer in chief Quentin Tarantino to chime in with the celluloid equivalent of a shiny collectible plate. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got some room on the sideboard.

I.

Like many movie fans, I could frankly spend all day here trying to unpack my mixed feelings about Tarantino and his work, but for the sake of both your sanity and mine, I’ll try to keep it brief.

As sophisticated, cine-literate readers, you will no doubt have realised long ago that all of Tarantino’s films are essentially set within a fantastical movie wonderland. They are films-about-films, indulgent thrill-rides with zero real world relevance, offering pure, dumb-headed escapism.

An obvious point perhaps, but one that is worth restating at the outset, given the persistent failure of many mainstream critics to comprehend it. (Honestly, how they can continue to toil away under the misapprehension that ‘Django Unchained’ actually has something to say about slavery, or ‘Inglorious Bastards’ about the Second World War, is beyond me.)

Though I can dig this superficial, ‘fantasy-land’ approach to a certain extent, I confess its appeal has worn pretty thin for me over the years, particularly when (as in the examples above) the Big QT finds himself romping around in the midst of subject matter which would conventionally seem to demand a certain amount of depth or ideological engagement. For a while now, I’ve been hoping that one day he might finally leave the play-pen behind and make, like, you know – a proper, sincere movie of some kind?

By gently weaning Tarantino away from his films-about-films universe and moving to a painstakingly researched, naturalistic historical setting that just happens to be all about the making of those films he loves so much, ‘Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood’ (man, I HATE that ellipsis) would seem to offer him the perfect opportunity to do this, allowing him to play his meta-textural, movie nerd games, but in a more grounded / ‘realistic’ context - one in which actions may be seen to have consequences, and in which characters might finally manage to acquire a second or third dimension for themselves.

Given that he basically fails to take up this offer though, instead delivering yet another barrage of defiantly shallow, crowd-pleasing nonsense, I think we can assume by this stage that he probably never will make the jump to the quote-unquote ‘next level’.

As such, this leaves us with a few things that we are just going to have to accept if we are ever going to enjoy any Tarantino movies.

Firstly, they will mean nothing. Any thematic framework or ideological intent detected within will be purely coincidental - probably just a by-product of all the cultural tropes being re-heated and played around with.

Secondly, they will be massively indulgent, typically containing upwards of an hour of entirely irrelevant material that he shot and kept in the movie just because he could. (We may roll our eyes, but hey, if it’s good enough for Fellini…)

And, thirdly, everything in his films will feel just slightly cartoon-ish and overblown. Comedy / character scenes will drag on too long, just to make sure everyone gets the joke. Serious/violent scenes will pretty much always fall off a cliff into OTT absurdity, just because, as all exploitation fans know, crazy stuff is cool, and cool = good. Pop-cultural references and tributes meanwhile will be so shamelessly foregrounded that they might as well be accompanied by a little QT popping up in a box in the corner of the screen ala a Japanese TV show, pointing to them and guffawing.

Once we accept these certainties and abandon the possibility that things may one day be otherwise, we can hopefully loosen up a bit and appreciate the fact that, taken on its own terms, ‘Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood’ is about the most purely enjoyable three hours of cinema that the 21st century has yet been able to offer.

II.

As someone who has spent a great deal of time living and breathing the storied mythos of Hollywood ’69 over the years, I’ll confess that I was pretty psyched about seeing this movie, and that – leaving aside the caveats outlined above – I was not disappointed.

Although the film is packed with things (small details, creative decisions, wasted potential) which irked me, each of them is balanced out by two other things (character beats, clever gags and references, likable performances) which delighted me. (1)

Yes, this makes for a large number of ‘things’ in total - but such is only right and proper for a picture with this kind of gargantuan run time. If you like films with ‘things’ in them, well strap in buddy, cos you’ll certainly get your money’s worth here. The frantic pace barely ever flags across 170-odd minutes, and new stimuli comes thick n’ fast with every shot. As an immersive ‘Where’s Wally?’ puzzle for a pop-culturally literate crowd to lose themselves within, this film is hard to beat.

As such, it is ‘Once Upon a Time…’s production design which is chiefly deserving of celebration. Barbara Ling [Production Designer], John Dexter [Art Direction], Nancy Haigh [Set Decoration], Arianne Phillips [Costumes] – take a collective bow.

There are, it is safe to say, few other living filmmakers who have both the resources and the inclination to retro-fit vast swathes of Los Angeles to conform to some mystic, rose-tinted dream of late ‘60s perfection, and the results Tarantino’s team achieve in this regard are magnificent – a triumph of “world building” equal to any of this century’s CG-enhanced fantasy epics, and a hell of a lot more fun from my personal POV.

Again and again over the past forty years, we may have seen movie directors pay teary-eyed tribute to the days when Americans could roar around guilt-free in massive, pastel-coloured automobiles, chain-smoking their way into an early grave as they negotiate a neon labyrinth of cinema marquees, movie billboards and fast food outlets…. but never has this celebration been rendered quite so exuberantly, quite so convincingly, as it is here.

As a result, moments such as the panoramic shot in which Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth stands on the roof of Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio)’s Cielo Drive house to fix the TV aerial, looking down over the perfectly rendered sprawl of the Hollywood Hills and down to the streets below, are pretty darn spine-tingling.

(The cinema in which I saw the film isn’t exactly what you’d call top of the line in terms of its A/V presentation, but even so, Robert Richardson’s 35mm photography, ripped through whatever kind of cutting edge HD processing brings it to our 21st century screens, looked *incredible*.)

Yes, brothers and sisters (but mainly brothers, let’s face it), this really WAS the promised land, Quentin seems to be telling us, and for a moment or two here and there, I do not feel inclined to disbelieve him.

The fact that Tarantino grew up in L.A. and was six years old in 1969 should probably be noted here, particularly in view of ‘Once Upon a Time..’s all-consuming obsession with syndicated TV, movie posters and radio ads. As you might well imagine, the film’s dense collage of movie nerd fan service is a joy to behold, at times becoming so dominant that it almost takes the movie into quasi-documentary territory, complete with voiceover narration and clip / poster-based alternate history recaps.

And, just as inevitably, I can’t help but love this stuff. Whatever high-minded reservations I may have about Quentin’s oeuvre, all I need do is think back on the fact that Rick Dalton’s calling card action movie was “The Fourteen Fists of McClusky”, or upon hearing Al Pacino (playing Dalton’s liaison with the Italian movie industry) describe Sergio Corbucci as “…only the SECOND BEST director of Spaghetti Westerns in the world” (in outraged, what-do-you-mean-‘who’ tone of voice), or indeed upon the clip of DiCaprio appearing in an Antonio Margheriti spy movie… and all is forgiven. I might as well be sharing popcorn with the fucker on weekend movie night.

(Incidentally, based on the audience’s mocking laughter, I think many of them must have assumed Tarantino was just making all this Italian b-movie shit up for giggles. Little do they know…)

III.

More surprisingly meanwhile, the film’s other great strength is its cast. In the past, I’ve often been surprised to read critics earnestly praising the committed performances of actors in Tarantino movies, given that the director doesn’t display much more concern for in-depth characterisation than if he were Michael Winner shuffling around the cannon fodder in a ‘Death Wish’ sequel… but, such is the paradox of an exploitation filmmaker who finds himself working with the kind of talent and resources usually reserved for critically-acclaimed Oscar-winners, I suppose.

Here though, the plaudits seem more justified. After all, ‘Once Upon a Time..’ is a long film which needs to retain our attention whilst holding back violent action or pyrotechnics until the final reel, and, as fictional creations with the chutzpah to get us there, Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth certainly make for a winning pair of protagonists.

An anxious, clumsy, floundering movie star and his vastly more handsome and confident stuntman / gopher, they’re clearly conceived as an odd couple in the age-old Jeeves and Wooster mould, but their relationship is believable, their interplay with the movie’s other characters is always fun, and it’s basically easy for us to settle in and have a good time with their assorted travails and misadventures.

DiCaprio’s performance may have a touch too much huffing-and-puffing Wellsian grotesquery about it for my tastes, but this suits his character, and if nothing else, he certainly succeeds in persuading us to anchor our sympathies to a guy who is essentially pretty pathetic and dislikeable.

Here, though, is a sentence I never thought I’d find myself writing in a Breakfast in the Ruins post: it is Brad Pitt who is the real revelation here. He is not an actor I’ve ever much cared for in the past, but what can I say, he really seems to have “grown into himself” in ‘Once Upon a Time..’, if that makes any sense?

Essentially representing Tarantino’s ideal of the time-honoured Hollywood hero, Cliff Booth is our requisite humble, taciturn working class guy who looks good, does good, and always comes out on top. And, somehow, Pitt manages to embody this storied archetype whilst also ringing true as a fully-formed and immensely charming individual, absolutely nailing that crucial “yeah, what a cool guy” feeling we all love to get from our favourite movie heroes.

Of all of the far-fetched notions which film’s script asks us to accept in fact, probably the most outlandish is the idea that this guy has apparently been hanging around on TV and movie sets for decades, and no one seems to have noticed that he radiates star quality like a goddamned lighthouse.

IV.

Backing up this dynamic duo meanwhile are a wide variety of equally talented supporting players, whose work in small roles and ‘one-scene-wonder’ parts enhances the film considerably. I don’t so much mean the inevitable big name cameos (Pacino, Kurt Russell), but more the younger cast members really… which brings us neatly to the thorny issue of the film’s portrayal of the Manson Family.

Again, I have mixed feelings about this. In script terms, the Mansonites don’t really serve much of a purpose here beyond providing some generic antagonists, parachuted in to liven up the final act of what would otherwise basically be a stress-free three hour “hang out” movie. Indeed, Tarantino seems entirely unconcerned with exploring the context behind the Family’s existence and activities, instead relying entirely upon his audience’s perceived familiarity with the historical background – an approach which worked just fine for me, but which could easily cause problems in terms of the way the film plays for a wider audience.

For instance, I watched the film with a predominantly young crowd, and when, in a beautifully rendered scene early in the film, we see Cliff and Rick cruise past a group of ragged teenage girls who are scavenging from a roadside dumpster whilst singing one of Charlie’s songs, I could almost sense a 50/50 split in the audience between those who shared my shiver of recognition, and others who had no idea of the intended significance of what they were seeing.

Throughout the film, references to the cult’s lunatic beliefs or to Manson’s psychological hold over his followers are entirely avoided, leaving us in a strange situation where the only message which can drawn from the text itself is that dirty hippies are inherently evil and murderous, and that Quentin Tarantino hates ‘em.

That said however, the pivotal sequence in which Cliff visits the Spahn Ranch after picking up a fictional (I think?) Manson girl named ‘Pussycat’ (Margaret Qualley - and yes, fear not, Tarantino’s feverish obsession with trying to wring comedic value out of terms for female genitalia remains undiminished here), is wonderfully observed, feeling ‘real’ enough, and crammed with enough esoteric detail, to satisfy even the most demanding of Manson obsessives. (2)

Although Tarantino has the scary, dead-eyed hippies swarm and diminish like Romero zombies at times, what really won me over here is the fact that most of the Mansonites (barring a witchy, passive-aggressive turn from Dakota Fanning as Squeeky, and James Landry Hébert as a redneck grotesque Clem) are disarmingly naturalistic. The fact that they play it calm, friendly and not overtly crazy is to me more unsettling than any quantity of ominous, horror movie shit the film might have thrown at us.

(In view of my speculations below, it might be worth noting that the kill squad, when we share some time with them in the car on their way to Cielo Drive, basically speak very much like 21st century young people; I particularly liked Sadie/Susan (Mikey Madison) exclaiming that, “I’m sorry if I’m not familiar with every FASCIST who was on TV in the FIFTIES”.)

Likewise, the decision to concentrate during the ranch sequence on Cliff’s need to ascertain the well-being of George Spahn (a splendidly cantankerous performance from Bruce Dern – notable here I think as the only cast member who was actually on the scene in Hollywood when these events went down) proves an inspired one. It’s dramatically interesting, true to Pitt’s character, and allows the film to shine a light on an element of the Manson mythos which has largely been side-lined in the past, in factual and fictional chronicles alike.

Thinking about how Cliff immediately zeroes in on the necessity of speaking to George (because I mean, of course this 40-something stuntman would be more concerned with checking in on an old buddy than with quizzing a buncha fuckin’ hippies about the finer points of their belief system) meanwhile gets me thinking about the extent to which Tarantino essentially frames this entire film through the prism of his protagonists’ worldview. (Admittedly, it could be argued that this is not too far removed from his own worldview as another middle-aged Hollywood dude, but… let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume at least a thin line of division, shall we?).

V.

Though the surface signifiers of the counter-culture – in the form of sex, drugs and long hair - may have been ruling the roost in Movieland by 1969, Hollywood nonetheless remained a world in which women were expected to be seen and not heard, and in which non-white faces were almost literally invisible. And, this is exactly what Tarantino gives us - reality filtered through the eyes of a couple of old school, movie industry bros, with no explanation or apology offered along the way.

For better or for worse, proceeding in this manner, without even a passing nod to contemporary standards of representation, is a ballsy move on the director’s part, and as usual, certain sections of the media seem to have had a hard time even comprehending it. In particular, articles such as this one, which criticise the director for giving Margot Robbie little to do beyond looking pretty in her role as Sharon Tate, seem to be missing the point entirely.

After all, the sad fact is that the real Sharon Tate was given little to do in her tragically foreshortened life, beyond looking pretty. She was the product of a culture that allowed young women few other avenues for advancement, and her portrayal in the film merely reflects this. Of course, we can always imagine that she may have steered her life and career in a more rewarding direction had she lived, but trying to retrofit this ultimate victim of the era’s chauvinist attitudes as a super-capable 21st century heroine would have seemed questionable to say the least.

Likewise, I’m happy to defend Tarantino when it comes to the movie’s other big bone of contention, comedian Michael Moh’s portrayal of Bruce Lee as an egotistical buffoon. In a complete reversal of the Robbie/Tate issue, I have no reason to believe that this is an accurate characterisation of Bruce Lee, but at the same time there is something very refreshing about seeing such a revered, untouchable figure get the bubble of his legend so crudely ‘popped’ and – the ultimate justification for anything in a Tarantino film – the scene he shares with Pitt is loads of fun. (I particularly enjoyed the perfect take-down of the old “my fists are registered as lethal weapons” routine.) (3)

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WARNING: Spoilers follow in the next few paras. This film has some nice surprises, so please do go and see it before reading the rest of this review.

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Whilst I’m generally cool with all this stuff though, I do fear that, whether by accident or design, the director’s willingness to court controversy and blow a few gentle raspberries in the direction of quote-unquote “political correctness” may be apt to lead him into some choppy waters here, should anyone choose to disregard my First Rule of watching a Tarantino movie above, and succumb to the cardinal sin of actually thinking about the damn thing for five minutes after the lights go up.

After all, QT’s personal/professional reputation only just made it out of the whole Miramax / Weinstein debacle in one piece, so, as much as I wish I could just turn my brain off and go with the flow, it’s pretty difficult not to detect a certain, uh, emphasis in the fact that the first movie he has made since severing those connections ends with the triumphant spectacle of two middle-aged Hollywood dudes violently murdering a couple of mouthy young women who wish to forcibly disrupt their comfortable, decadent way of life… y’know what I mean…?

In real life of course, we know that those women were the brain-washed pawns of a criminal lunatic whose practice of racism and misogyny dwarfed that of any Hollywood playboy, but, given that ‘Once Upon a Time..’ pointedly fails to address this and instead merely depicts them as a bunch of damn fuckin’ hippies who won’t get off Leonardo DiCaprio’s drive…. well, let’s just say that the potential for a very troubling alternative reading of the film is certainly there, should you insist on poking it with a stick.

Personally, I’m happy to leave it be. As I stated at the outset, I’d question whether Tarantino has *ever* set out to make a film with this kind of ideological subtext, and even if he did, I’d inclined to believe that this film’s violent finale should be read as heavily tongue in cheek – an intent clearly acknowledged by the young audience at the screening I intended, as they gasped and guffawed in “I-can’t-believe-he-just-did-that” style disbelief.

Basically, I think Tarantino chose to end the film this way for the only reason he has ever done anything in his films – because it’s cool, and funny, and will leave the audience feeling good. The bad guys lose, and DIE! Movies and the swell guys who make them triumph! Brad and Leo save the ‘60s, and a brighter alternative pop cultural universe opens up for everyone.

Which, come to think of it, is the only possible conclusion for a movie named ‘Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood’. Fairy tale ending meets Western ending meets po-mo inter-textural headfuck ending. Perfect.

It may be crass and ugly and contrived and stupid… but there’s a strange kind of beauty here too. Just like Hollywood, am I right?

Boom, great ending for a review! Cut and print!

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(1) I couldn’t find a way to slot this into the main text, but the only thing that seriously annoyed me about Tarantino’s direction here was his decision to include lengthy scenes of DiCaprio’s character performing his lines in a TV western pilot,  shooting them with gliding Steadicam, beautiful diffuse lighting, Leone-esque cutting between multiple angles and other things that would obviously NOT have been present in a 1969 TV pilot.

Basically he presents these scenes exactly as if they were part of one of his *own* Westerns, having apparently not yet got that bug out of his system, which feels both disruptive to this film’s period setting and indulgent in all the worst ways. Wouldn’t it have been a lot more interesting to pull back and take a verite / behind-the-scenes kind of approach to these TV-show-within-the-film bits, giving us a look at the detail of how shows like this were made, and of what the crew were getting up to as the actors did their thing etc…? Just a thought.

(2) The set looks pretty much like an exact repro of the photos I’ve seen of the Spahn Ranch, and I loved details like the pile of dune buggy parts, the sign pointing toward the ‘chop shop’, and the inclusion of a few surly, disengaged bikers, and even a guy done up like Bobby Beausoleil, in the background. Well done, team, well done.

(3) For anyone counting the beans re: the film’s representational issues, I’m fairly sure Moh is the only non-white actor in the cast who actually even has *lines* -- but again, I’d put this down to nature of the world inhabited by our viewpoint characters, rather than any reflection of Tarantino’s personal agenda.

Creepy-Crawl Cinema: The Female Bunch (Al Adamson, 1969)

Of all the material I’ve read (and listened to) over the years concerning The Manson Family, no chroniclers seem to have made mention of the fact that infamous b-movie director Al Adamson was actually shooting footage for several movies on the Spahn Ranch during the height of ‘Helter Skelter’ in the summer of 1969. (1)

In itself, there is nothing terribly surprising about this. After all, Spahn was a movie ranch, and it was still (just about) open for business. Sure, it was in a pretty seedy and dilapidated state, but where else would you expect to find a seedy and dilapidated filmmaker like Adamson plying his trade?

What is more interesting rather is the eerie similarity between the storyline of Adamson’s ‘The Female Bunch’ – in which a gang of outlaw women who deem themselves “rejects” from society live on a remote desert ranch, obeying the orders of a controlling central figure (Grace, played by Jennifer Bishop) who encourages them to torture and kill outsiders – and the actual events which were unfolding in the immediate vicinity of the movie’s shooting location.

Given that ‘The Female Bunch’ was shot more or less back-to-back with Adamson’s better known biker flick ‘Satan’s Sadists’, which seems to have taken inspiration from both the nomenclature and degenerate behaviour of the biker gangs most closely associated with The Manson Family (the ‘Straight Satans’ and ‘Satan’s Slaves’), one can’t help but wonder to what extent Adamson and his collaborators interacted with, or were at least aware of, the whole Manson freak show, months before it became headline news.

Is this something Adamson, or anyone else involved in these productions, ever discussed in interviews? Have any of the cast members talked about their experiences filming on the ranch? I’m sure there must be some stories here. (Perhaps Severin Films’ forthcoming documentary on Adamson might shed some light on things?)

By the early ‘70s of course, just about every horror or exploitation movie being made in the USA was drawing to some extent on the feedback loop of new fears and cultural archetypes arising from the Manson murders, but, just as summer ’69 also found Hollywood hipster Dean Stockwell incorporating some notably Manson-like elements into his portrayal of Wilbur Wheatley in AIP’s adaptation of ‘The Dunwich Horror’ (see my review for more on that), the notion that the bad vibes emanating from Manson were making their way into popular culture even before the whole story broke at the end of 1969, is fascinating to me.

So, although I’m certainly no fan of Adamson’s work (see below), I’m afraid I just couldn’t resist the temptation to track this one down and take the plunge. If my motives were impure, well, I’ll just let the lord judge me on that as a matter of heavenly routine, although I suspect that the experience of merely sitting through this damned thing was punishment enough.

To begin by stating the obvious then: anyone approaching this film in the hope of glimpsing some inadvertent verité footage of Manson-y type goings on will be disappointed. No obvious evidence of The Family’s presence made it into the film, no Manson girls were roped in as extras, and you certainly won’t get to see any of your favourite murderous reprobates hanging around in the background, waving to camera.

About the closest Manson-watchers will get to a thrill in fact is the realisation that the horses the “Female Bunch” ride throughout the movie are quite possibly the same ones that the Manson girls cared for and rented out to tourists as part of The Family’s deal with George Spahn (a duty they seem to have performed with surprising diligence, given the lack of concern they displayed for the well-being of their fellow human beings), along with a vague suspicion that the random automobiles which can be seen in the background of some shots may or may not have been Family run-arounds. (There is also a static caravan / trailer home visible in one shot – high excitement!)

The shabby corral buildings, paddock and barns around which much of the ‘action’ takes place are non-descript, bearing no outward sign of hippie witchery. Admittedly, the low light levels and the poor quality of the print makes it difficult to discern much detail, but, if it is possible for buildings themselves to actually look greasy, well, ‘The Female Bunch’ at least achieves this.

Elsewhere, the bar in which the women engage in a frankly disgusting drunken grope-fest with a bunch of sweaty-looking dudes during an excursion into “Mexico”, might perhaps have been shot within the café that formed part of Spahn’s standing sets... but it could equally have taken place elsewhere, perhaps even on a small sound stage. It all looks a bit too neat and tidy, to my eyes, although the footage of the actresses writhing around naked in the sawdust and spilled booze as the men paw them is authentically foul, irrespective of the production circumstances.

Meanwhile, could the film’s totally gratuitous shower scene have actually been filmed in the Spahn Ranch’s (rarely used) bathing facilities…? I think I see some kind of weird, hippie mural in the background in some adjacent shots, but it’s difficult to make out. The mind boggles (or at least kind of shivers and cringes a bit).

Leaving all Manson-related prurience aside however, one thing we can be certain of is that ‘The Female Bunch’ is a not a very good film.

This too, is unsurprising. As much as I wish I could celebrate Al Adamson as some kind of wild exploitation maverick, the truth is that, to date, I’ve never actually managed to enjoy one of his movies. As a cult movie fan, I realise that I’m required to watch them once in a while, but it’s more of a purgatorial rite of passage than anything else.

I appreciate how difficult it is to make a good film, but even so, to be as consistently bad as Adamson takes some singular kind of anti-talent. Even in his most ostensibly entertaining productions (such as 1973’s Jim Kelly vehicle ‘The Black Samurai’, for instance), I find myself frustrated by the wasted potential, as theoretically cool and crazy scenes are ruined by clumsy framing, muffed action/effects shots, amateurish editing and lifeless performances... and then interspersed with interminably drawn out padding sequences of, oh, I dunno, people riding around on horses in the dark, for example.

I realise that the ragged (presumably VHS-era?) transfer of ‘The Female Bunch’ under consideration for this review probably didn’t help matters, but even so, the quality of much of the photography in this film is extremely poor, even by Adamson standards. Much of the footage is handheld, with zooms and wobbly focus pulls used to cut down on set-ups, including a lot of that Doris Wishman type stuff where the camera drifts in close-up across characters’ clothing and boots whilst they’re speaking, but even more problematic are the lengthy day-for-night (or possibly just “shit, it got dark”) scenes, which are pretty much incomprehensible in their current iteration. (2)

It’s possible I suppose that a more sympathetic presentation of the film may save the day here, but I equally suspect that the insufficient light levels in these secenes may be baked into the original footage - providing one explanation perhaps for why ‘The Female Bunch’ sat on the shelf for two years following its completion. (The credited Director of Photography, by the way, was Paul Glickman, who went on to work extensively with both Larry Cohen and Radley Metzger. What gives, Paul?)

Given the wealth of extraordinary sights and sounds offered by the precarious wonderland of Southern California at the end of the 1960s (some of them, I hasten to add, literally round the corner from the sets used here), not to mention the surrounding areas of outstanding natural beauty, it seems extraordinary to me that Adamson could manage to make a movie this drab, featureless and ugly. But, then I recall my recent attempt to sit through 1971’s ‘Brain of Blood’ (I still wake up at night crying tears of pain), and think, well… yeah, of course he could.

On the plus side, the opening and closing segments (actually shot in Utah I believe), in which the film’s lead couple make their getaway in a red convertible whilst somebody in a light aircraft blasts away at them with a shotgun, comprise some pretty decent low budget action stuff, and some of the day-time horse riding footage is competently done, with some bright colours and classic Western-style low angle shots and such. (3)

Oh, and I quite enjoyed the theme song as well – ‘Two Lonely People’, a cool Tom Jones-meets-Lee Hazlewood style country-pop belter, performed by one Bruce Powers. (I did check Youtube to try to share it with you, but no dice.)

I’m guessing that ‘The Female Bunch’s largely undistinguished female cast must have been picked on the basis of their physical attributes, riding ability and willingness to get naked rather than their thespian talent, but nonetheless, The Russ Meyer-esque “hard as nails bitches” plotline at least helps the early scenes detailing the gang’s hierarchy and initiation rituals to remain somewhat entertaining, although the absence of even the slightest iota of Meyer’s talent, wit or bravado is sorely felt.

Notable amongst the assembled “bunch” is the flaming red haired, whip-wielding Aleshia Brevard, a performer who worked extensively as an actress, ‘show girl’ and Marilyn Monroe impersonator during the ‘60s and ‘70s, revealing only later in life that she was actually born as Alfred Brevard in Tennessee in 1937, before undergoing an early version of M to F gender reassignment surgery in 1962. (Thanks, IMDB!) Her character name here? Sadie. (Cue your spooky music cue of choice.)

Adamson’s partner (later wife), the ubiquitous Regina Carrol, also makes an impression here as the man-hating go-go dancer who first lures our naive heroine to the ranch, whilst heroin of another kind is regrettably on the menu elsewhere, as another gang member, “Sharon” (actress unidentified), is revealed to be a conniving junkie.

This leads to one of the most horribly skeevy shooting up scenes I’ve witnessed in ‘60s cinema, as she ties off with what looks like some kind of transparent plastic tubing before – rather unfeasibly - enjoying a rough bit of sapphic sex with another girl as the drug kicks in (cue kaleidoscope effects, and stripper jazz on the soundtrack). Perhaps it was just the fact that the performers look so tired and sweaty that creeped me out, but seriously, this was grim.

Viewers of ‘Satan’s Sadists’ meanwhile will recall that one of the main things which propelled that film toward the giddy heights of watchability was Russ Tamblyn’s startlingly sleazy lead performance as a psychotic biker, and happily he is on similarly fine form in ‘The Female Bunch’, essaying the role of a shiftless desert layabout who defiles the all-female sanctuary of the gang’s ranch after making a covert date with one of the girls.

Although he doesn’t get a great deal of screen time here, Tamblyn embodies the spirit of a leery, Mansonite scuzzball with worrying conviction, especially during the film’s overall creepy-crawliest scene, in which the women hold him down and carve a cross onto his forehead. Later, after vowing revenge, he also has the misfortune to suffer one of the most pathetic, anti-climactic “death” scenes I’ve ever seen in an American b-movie (seriously? “Pitchfork stuffed down the back of his pants, then he falls over, in long shot”? you’re really going to go with that?), but, we’ll take our yukks where we can get them in a movie like this.

Another thing that bugs me about Adamson’s films is his habit of digging up forgotten actors from the golden age of Hollywood b-movies… and then ensuring they remain forgotten by squandering their talents in demeaning, undignified roles that make you wonder why he bothered to track them down in the first place. Fulfilling this role in 1969 was poor old Lon Chaney Jr, who actually had the misfortune of making his final screen appearance in ‘The Female Bunch’. Though Chaney is given a lot more to get his teeth here into than in his mute role in Adamson’s ‘Dracula vs Frankenstein’ (filmed a few months earlier), the poor man was clearly in a sorry state by this point.

Playing an aging ex-stuntman, the only male whose presence is tolerated on the Female Bunch’s ranch, Lon’s character is, strangely enough, the only figure in this movie who is actually given an emotional arc or any kind of depth. He has been lured to the ranch as a result of his infatuation with Grace, but, now that her sexual favours have (understandably) been withdrawn, he has found himself bullied by her and reduced to a mere caretaker and domestic servant for the women.

The perpetual blundering sad-sack, Chaney fits this role like a badly soiled glove, and, though his voice is already ravaged by the throat cancer that would contribute to his death in 1973 and he seems to be having trouble walking, he nonetheless throws himself into the part with gusto. Nice work, Lon.

For better or worse, some of the footage of Chaney that Adamson presents here is unsettlingly candid. There are some lovely (though sadly curtailed) moments which find him regaling the girls with (apparently genuine) memories of his time working as a stuntman on westerns, but elsewhere, seeing him unshaven and watery-eyed, slugging straight from a rapidly emptying bottle of vodka whilst apparently unaware he is being filmed, is absolutely heart-breaking.

I mean… I don’t know, man. I don’t want to sit here passing moral judgement on some film shoot half a century ago, but I think they owed the big guy a bit more respect than that. Against all the odds, Lon was trying here. I wish I could say the same for Al.

Post-script:

Given its shooting location and storyline, one thing I find curious about ‘The Female Bunch’ is the fact that it wasn’t rushed out to cash in on the Manson hysteria in early 1970 -- unlike ‘Satan’s Sadists’, which was soon cleaning up in drive-ins with an especially lurid ad campaign promising “wild hippies on a mad murder spree”, “filmed on the actual locations where the Tate murder suspects lived their wild experiences”.

This is probably a result of the fact that, whereas ‘..Sadists’ was released by Adamson and his long-standing partner Sam Sherman through their fledging Independent International Pictures operation, ‘The Female Bunch’ seems to have been the result of a one-off production deal Adamson inked with Raphael Nussbaum (the director of 1973’s ‘Pets’ and eight other features I’ve never even heard of) and Mardi Rustam (the man who later fired Tobe Hooper from Tourist Trap / Eaten Alive).

Trivia on IMDB states that Adamson shot ‘Satan’s Sadists’ at short notice after “..a more expensive production that he’d been working on collapsed” – this one, presumably. Reading between the lines, I suspect there may have been a falling out between Adamson and his producers, but either way, when ‘The Female Bunch’ eventually appeared in ’71, it was jointly “presented” by Mardi Rustam Films and Dalia Productions (Nussbaum’s company), suggesting that those guys perhaps took control of the film after shooting was completed, preparing it for release at their leisure.

Whether Nussbaum and Rustam had more qualms than Adamson and Sherman did about cashing in on mass murder, who knows (the end credits on the film pointedly mention only Utah as a shooting location), but alternatively, perhaps by ’71 the Manson angle simply seemed like old news and didn’t occur to them. So, they went for the Peckinpah angle instead, I guess..?

I’m equally unsure whether this film did much for them at the box office (I doubt it), but they at least commissioned a great poster for it. Let’s close proceedings by taking a look at it and imagining how much fun this movie might have been, had circumstances been different.

----

(1) Some wag has actually added 11th August ’69 – the date of the Cielo Drive murders – as a shooting date on IMDB, but I think this can probably be discounted. Given how extensively the comings and goings at the ranch during that day have been chronicled by authors and investigators, I’m sure they would have found time to mention it if somebody was shooting a movie there with Lon Chaney Jr and Russ Tamblyn!

(2) Regular readers might well cry foul here, recalling that I’ve often praised Jess Franco for precisely this kind of off-piste camerawork, but I dunno, what can I say? If Franco (at his best) wields the camera like a visionary jazz player, Adamson and his operator by contrast feel as if they’re still thumping away in the basement trying to figure out the chords to ‘Louie Louie’. Which… actually sounds quite fun, now that I think about it? Note to self: music / cinematography metaphor needs work.

(3) It should perhaps be noted here that Adamson’s protégé John ‘Bud’ Cardos – future director of such solid b-movie fare as ‘Mutant’ (1984) and ‘Kingdom of the Spiders’ (1977) – is credited with “additional direction of action and continuity footage” on ‘The Female Bunch’. From my admittedly biased point of view, I will take this to mean that he directed the bits which are not terrible.

Pulp Non-Fiction: The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion by Ed Sanders (Panther, 1973)

I.

“Tex then told Sadie to scout the house for other people. She evidently climbed up the redwood ladder to look in the loft. And then she walked to the south, toward the hallway off which were the two main bedrooms of the house. In the room on the left, Abigail Folger lay reading alone. She looked up, she saw Sadie, and Abigail waved! Waved and smiled, and Sadie smiled back and walked away. Hi death.”
- p.233

Long ago, in my late teenage years, I decided it was time for me to overcome my natural distaste for ‘true crime’ subject matter and get the full dope on this whole Manson Family business, which I kept finding fearful references to in the ‘60s counter-culture books and rock biogs that composed the bulk of my non-fiction reading at the time.

A remaindered copy of Los Angeles County Assistant D.A. & Chief Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s exhaustive 1974 book ‘Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders’ certainly did the trick with regard to nailing down the essential facts of the matter (or, the officially recorded versions thereof, at least), but at the same time, the book’s mountain of dry, forensic detail raised as many questions as it answered, particularly with regard to the aspect of the whole business that most interested me – that being, the wider cultural and sociological circumstances that allowed these insane events to transpire in the first place.

When I learned of the existence of Ed Sanders’ ‘The Family’, I naturally supposed that an investigation undertaken by a member of The Fugs might shed a slightly different light on things, but sourcing a copy of Sanders’ book proved difficult at the time, and besides, I didn’t really have the stomach for reading two massive Manson tomes in quick succession.

Fast forward to 2019 however, and I’ve actually ended up with two paperback copies of ‘The Family’ (boring story not worth recounting here), so, with Charlie himself now finally six feet under and the ever-classy Quentin Tarantino apparently revving up his new, Manson-related movie for release to coincide the 50th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders… the time finally seemed nigh to actually read the damned thing. (1)

Before continuing, I should issue a disclaimer to clarify that I generally take a dim view anything which seeks to glorify and/or obsess over the activities of real life serial killers. In and of himself, Charles Manson was little more than a psychotic confidence trickster and pimp, worthy of no more interest or respect than any other creep who has ever made a career out of exploiting human misery.

What fascinates me rather is the frequently extraordinary nature of the marginal – and otherwise largely undocumented - worlds in which Manson moved, and the unique socio-cultural circumstances that allowed him to achieve such remarkable success (in psycho cult leader terms, at least) within them.

Manson’s followers have often been likened to locusts in terms of their tendency to hoover up cash, drugs, vehicles, food, crash-space and favours from anyone who gave them even the slightest opportunity to do so, but in the same way, Charlie himself strikes me as a kind of cultural locust.

In addition to his extensive and well-documented connections to the music and movie industries (which we need not reiterate here), the wider scope of Manson’s activities also seemed to encompass various other cult religious groups, assorted ‘hippie’ communities (including the core San Francisco scene centred around The Diggers, The Grateful Dead and the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic), several fringe Christian churches, Scientology and its shadier off-shoots, Anton Lavey’s comical Church of Satan, certain therapy / self help institutions, behavioural/hypnosis specialists and the formative roots of California’s New Age culture, along with the world of literary science fiction, prison sub-cultures (of both racist and homosexual varieties), college students and Berkeley activist groups, pirate radio broadcasters, underground and documentary filmmakers, the world of strip clubs, go-go dancers and ‘stag films’, outlaw motorcycle gangs, desert motor-racing enthusiasts, a wide variety of drug traffickers and manufacturers, the community of stuntmen and cowboys hanging around the Spahn Ranch, and even the culture of modern day gold prospectors and wilderness homesteaders whom The Family interacted with in Death Valley.

Excepting perhaps Dennis Wilson, I’m not aware that Manson ever hung out with any surfers (his activities being primarily directed in-land), and his virulent racism prohibited him from interacting with any black, Latino or Native American sub-cultures (despite his constant bleating about “Black Panthers”, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he was ever even in the same zip code as any of them) - BUT, that aside, it seems as if pretty much EVERYONE who has was cultivating a lifestyle outside of the square, mainstream norm in Southern California in the late 1960s was touched by the dirty fingers of Manson at some point, and the groups on the above list who had any credibility to begin with all found themselves degraded and damaged to some extent by the association. Meanwhile, he managed to feed something gleamed from every single one of them into the insane, indigestible gumbo of his eventual ‘Helter Skelter’ project.

II.

How did so many doors open for him? That’s the question that fascinates. Purely in terms of his attempts to infiltrate the entertainment industry, the fact that a character this unkempt, criminally-minded and evidently deranged could manoeuvre himself into a position one step removed from figures of such diverse cultural import as Doris Day, Kenneth Anger, Nancy Sinatra and Neil Young, is remarkable. Even if he’d never turned to murder, Manson's exploits as a kind of Sunset Strip Rasputin would remain intriguing to those of us with an interest in this particular historical milieu.

And happily, as the back cover blurb for Panther’s UK paperback of ‘The Family’ strongly implies, these wider connections between Manson and the cultures he managed to infiltrate is very much the subject that Sanders gets stuck into herein, striking an extremely precarious balance between credibility and sensationalism in the process.

At the outset, I was slightly worried that, given his own sub-cultural affiliations, Sanders may have been tempted to take a more sympathetic line on Manson and his cronies than Bugliosi, but rest assured, he goes even harder on them than the Chief Prosecutor, if such is possible, with his pejorative-heavy descriptions of the Family members betraying the anger of a man who has seen the public image of the movement he tied himself to warped and discredited by the actions of a bunch of kill-crazy goons.

As anyone who taken even the slightest interest in this stuff will be aware, attempting to research the wider activities of the Manson Family is liable to lead one pretty quickly into a bottomless Death Valley black hole of mis/disinformation, rife with missing links, random dead ends and irresolvable contradictions. For each verifiable fact that can be established about The Family, there are a thousand rumours, exaggerations and outright lies to contend with.

As Sanders outlines in his introduction, his method for dealing with this was basically to trawl through the testimony of anyone and everyone who interacted with The Family and proved willing to talk about the matter (indeed, the author implies that his hippie/yippie ‘cred’ allowed him access to deeper sources than the authorities were able to tap), and then to cross-reference these interviews against a map and timeline outlining (as far as is possible) the locations and activities of the killers, their associates and (where relevant) their victims. Basically it seems, everything that proved both interesting and not verifiably untrue made it into the book, leaving us to draw our own conclusions.

As we’ll discuss below, Sanders’ excursions into the further realms of speculation got him into no small amount of trouble, and the accuracy of more or less everything he throws into ‘The Family’ remains open to question, but, when you’re dealing with a set of witnesses who were likely various combinations of stoned, mentally ill, terrified, brain-washed and self-interested at the time of their testimony, I’d argue that he was probably right to retain as many of the “apparently”s, “allegedly”s and “it is reported that..”s as possible.

I do wish that Sanders had been a bit more forthcoming about his sources, and a bit more circumspect about the wilder rumours he offers up as ‘fact’, but at the same time, when it comes to defining the contours of the vast psychic maelstrom emanating from the undeniably grim realities of Hollywood, August 1969, I tend to think there is probably just as much value in hearing what people were saying about the events in their immediate aftermath, as in the cold hard facts themselves – and, so long as you can take him with a generous pinch of salt, Sanders’ book certainly provides an invaluable record of the former.

III.

“It seems strange that all of a sudden they got in to wearing black capes. The girls made Charlie one that reached to the floor. With a flourish Manson tried it on, remarking how no one for sure now could see him when he creepy-crawled. Mary Brunner had a black cape. Sadie had a cape. Squeeky, according to Danny DeCarlo, used to dye clothing black in a pot in the Spahn Ranch kitchen.”
- p. 185

If nothing else, the version of Charlie presented here was certainly industrious. Whereas you’d naturally expect a messianic cult leader to express hostility toward competing gurus, Manson, in keeping with his locust-like M.O., often seems to have actively encouraged the crossover of personnel and ideas between his ‘Family’ and various other groupings of fringe whackos, and Sanders’ book is particularly strong when it comes to making the case that the Mansonites were not an isolated phenomenon, but merely the most high profile symptom of a entire network of similarly demented (and potentially dangerous) groups who seemed to flourishing on the far outskirts of American society.

It is reported, for instance, that in 1968 Manson was present as a “guest of honour” at a bizarre trial / exorcism rite undertaken by some kind of homosexual “death cult” operating out of a commune house (the Waller Street Ashram, otherwise known as the “Devil House”) in Haight Ashbury. During this alleged event, a young man identified only as “Pussycat” – the former lover of the cult’s boss, one Father P., who is later said to have visited Manson at Spahn Ranch - was put through a series of gruelling ordeals to try to save him from a supposed demonic possession orchestrated by a deserter from the group. “Poor Pussycat,” quoth Sanders. (2)

The author also spends a full chapter outlining the eye-opening history of an outfit known as the Solar Lodge of the O.T.O., an illegitimate off-shoot from the branch of the famed Crowleyite magickal order, which seems to have mutated by the late ‘60s into a controlling personality cult masterminded by a woman named Jean Brayton, the wife of a USC philosophy lecturer.

Like The Family, The Solar Lodge made their home on a remote desert ranch, and there seems to have been a clear crossover of ideas (and, Sanders implies, personnel) between Brayton’s group and the Mansonites. Brayton is reported for instance to have also preached a gospel of hard-line racism, predicting the approach of an apocalyptic race war and telling her followers they would need to hide-out in underground caverns to survive the resulting carnage (sound familiar?).

The control Brayton and her husband exercised over their followers seems to have been even more sadistic and authoritarian than that practiced by Manson, but, thankfully, The Solar Lodge was put on ice in July 1969, when their leadership was arrested en masse on child abuse charges, after some horse traders who had visited their ranch called the police, having observed what investigating officers later confirmed to be a six-year-old boy chained up in a six foot square wooden crate and left exposed to the desert sun – which gives us some insight into the kind of outfit these particular creepos were really operating.

It should be noted however that, despite the publicity surrounding this ‘boy in the box’ case, Sanders’ claims regarding Manson’s connections with the Solar Lodge seem never to have been verified elsewhere. A brief web search reveals that the Braytons – who were soon back on the street and heading up another neo-Crowleyite religious order after initially fleeing to Mexico to avoid the child abuse charges – actually initiated legal action against Sanders in 1973, reaching an out of court settlement which ensured that the entire chapter related to the Solar Lodge was excised from future editions of ‘The Family’. Presumably, Panther’s UK paperback, dated that year, must have made it to the printers shortly before this agreement came into effect. Lucky me! (3)

In parallel with the Solar Lodge, Sanders also raises the spectre of a particularly shady motorcycle gang known as the Satan’s Slaves, whose members are alleged to have provided the connecting tissue between the Solar Lodge, the Mansonites, the Ku Klux Klan and something the author refers to as the “Kirke Order of Dog Blood” (seriously, don’t ask). (4)

“There are subjects associated with the Manson case that are so soaked in evil that the mere knowing of them is like a nightmare,” Sanders states later in the book, kicking off a chapter in which he addresses rumours of unidentified Satanic groups (presumably, but not definitively, connected to the quasi-mythical Kirke mob referenced above) carrying out animal sacrifice / blood-drinking / orgy rituals on several remote West Coast beaches in 1968-69. Pretty hair-raising stuff.

Sanders goes on to print verbatim the transcript of an interview with a young male Manson Family hanger on, who claims to have been present at the Spahn Ranch when a set of films – apparently made by another cult group – were screened, depicting both the killing of domestic animals and the apparent decapitation of a human female, carried out in ritual circumstances on a nocturnal beach.

To be honest, the interviewee sounds pretty out of it, but Sanders insists that the information he provided on other subjects proved reliable, so – make of this what you will. As far as I’m aware, nothing concrete on any of this has ever come to light in subsequent decades, so by this stage, it’s nothing more than another sinister, apocryphal underground legend to add to the ever-growing bonfire of such, any grain of truth lost in a long-forgotten vortex of misfiled missing persons reports and blighted, undocumented lives.

In fact, Sanders seems to have had a real bee in his bonnet about the possibly that The Family may have filmed some of their own crimes (presumably using the equipment they stole from a CBS outside broadcast truck in early ’69?), repeatedly hinting that certain “uptight persons” are holding back information from him on this subject to protect their own skins. Whoever these “persons” were, they must have done a pretty good job, because again, fifty years on, this hypothetical footage remains elusive, insofar as I’m aware. (5)

Amid all this shady occult networking, I was surprised to note that Sanders’ book entirely overlooks Manson’s widely documented connections to that most infamous of Scientology spin-offs, The Process Church of the Final Judgement. The details of Manson’s interactions with The Process Church became public knowledge so early in the game that they even made it into New English Library’s otherwise largely fictitious Manson book (which I wrote about here), so it seemed surprising to me that Sanders would have ignored such a rich vein of High Weirdness.

Well, guess what – the first edition copy of ‘The Family’ consulted by writer John Anthony Day for this review, published in The Harvard Crimson magazine in 1971, apparently contained an extensive (indeed, the reviewer claims, excessive) amount of information concerning Manson’s connections to The Process. But, Day also notes that Robert De Grimston, founder of the Process Church, had launched a $1.5 million lawsuit against Sanders and his U.S. publishers. So, consulting the entirely Process-free 1973 U.K. paperback, we can probably guess how that worked out. (6)

IV.

Sanders’ narrative becomes even sketchier, and even more queasy, when he occasionally turns his attention to the wider scope of The Manson Family’s crimes – unsolved category. Basically this consists of a grim run down of unsolved killings (primarily rape-murders of young women, with a weirdo/mutilation element) which were committed during 1968-69, at points when Sanders’ research leads him to believe that members of The Family were in the immediate vicinity.

As you can well imagine, reading capsule summaries of these cold cases – each of them a potential mini-Black Dahlia, just waiting for the True Crime podcasters to descend – is a grim business, and I’m actually not sure which possibility is more disturbing to contemplate; that Tex, Clem, Charlie and the gang were occasionally enjoying a brutal “boy’s night out” as they drifted hither and yon across the West Coast, or alternatively, that these killings actually had nothing whatsoever to do with the easy scapegoat of Satanic psycho-hippies, instead simply representing yr average, run-of-the-mill crime stats for a large American state over a two year period, the faceless perpetrators simply blending back into the mainstream ebb-and-flow of society and keeping their heads down. (7)

Of all the legally dubious claims contained within ‘The Family’ however, Sanders perhaps sails closest to the wind when he isuggests a connection between Charles Manson and the Esalen Institute, a storied and influential spa resort and spiritual / therapeutic retreat based in Big Sur, which survives to this day.

These claims centre around the admittedly intriguing fact that, a week prior to the Tate-LaBianca killings, Manson seems to have jumped behind the wheel of a stolen Hostess Twinkie bakery truck and spent a weekend tooling around the Big Sur area – entirely on his own, unusually, although he did manage to recruit a new Family member / sex slave / punching bag (a pregnant seventeen-year-old named Stephanie) along the way.

Sanders believes that Manson travelled to Big Sur to visit Esalen, and indeed, various rumours to this effect swirl about the lower depths of online Manson-ology. This is significant due to the fact that Cielo Drive murder victim Abigail Folger was a frequent visitor to the Institute, and Sharon Tate may or may not have also attended at some point.

The suggestion of a tangible connection between Manson and his future victims is chilling enough in itself, but once again, Sanders over-plays his hand by stating, apparently apropos of nothing, that both Folger and Tate were present at Esalen on the same weekend that Manson allegedly visited – a suggestion which I’m sure is contradicted by the official record, if not elsewhere in this very book.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the Esalen Institute have spent the past fifty years vigorously denying that Manson ever came anywhere near them (their statements on the matter have been pretty weird and contradictory however, but.. that’s another story), and indeed, Sanders reports that a cast iron veil of secrecy hangs over the whole affair, even stating that representatives of the Institute have issued what he describes as a “veiled snuff threat” against him, should he persist in pursuing the matter.

Was there another, subsequent edition of ‘The Family’ with the references to Esalen also redacted? I wouldn’t be surprised. (8)

Exactly how many re-drafts did the text of this book go through to avoid legal action, I wonder? Three, four? I mean, I’m guessing the Kirke Order of Dogs Blood were unlikely to put a call through to their lawyers, but even so, if Sanders took some of the stuff he reports here remotely seriously, he must have spent a few years in fear of waking up some dark night with the smell of axle grease in his nostrils and a curved blade pressed to his throat.

V.

“There was one heavy problem facing Helter Skelter. By early 1969, the West Valley Station of the Los Angeles sheriff’s department had in use Bell-65 two-man helicopters with powerful searchlights installed that could light up a city block from 1000 feet in the air. Manson had various plans to deal with these helicopters. One was to attack the helicopter with magic. Another method was to thwart the helicopters at night by taping the headlights of the dune-buggy battalion with black tape, leaving only a small slit to allow a thin ray of light to escape, hopefully undetectable from the air.”
- p. 124

There is much more I could go on to say about other aspects of ‘The Family’; there is so much rich, soggy flesh here to pile onto the bones of the crazed milieu Manson and his followers operated within. Not least, the significant portion of the book which Sanders devotes to outlining the vast auto-theft / dune buggy manufacturing ring orchestrated by the Mansonites during their final months of freedom - an operation which proved necessary simply to keep the cult’s membership mobile and maintain supply lines across the incredibly inhospitable terrain which Charlie seemed increasingly fixated on forcing his followers to inhabit.

As is implied by the book’s memorable sub-title, Sanders details Manson’s apparent dream of drilling his Family into a unit of full on, ‘Road Warrior’ style desert outlaws, undertaking armed raids on the small towns bordering the Death Valley national monument, carrying off food and women like some kind of motorized neo-vikings, and bamboozling the cops from their impenetrable network of underground hidey-holes.

Even if they’d been left to their own devices however, the chances of The Family achieving this level of self-sufficient barbarity seems remote. Another thing that becomes clear from Sanders’ book is that, far from their rep as ruthless killers, these hapless hippies – many of them nursing either young children or severe mental illness by the time Helter Skelter took hold – were simply not prepared for the hardship of the desert.

As food and shelter became scarce, as Charlie became more violent and demanding, and as lines of communication between various outposts started to fray, The Family’s vital biker allies disappeared, and tertiary family members began drifting away at a steady rate, several of them walking vast distances across the desert in the search of help.

When a combination of armed police units and National Park officials finally began carrying out raids and pulling the Mansonites into custody on grand theft auto and arson charges in September/October 1969, the roving miscreants are reported to have been in an appalling physical condition, riddled with sores and parasites and caked in mud to protect themselves from the sun, the girls having tonsured and shaved their hair into bizarre, Mohawk-ish arrangements….. a far cry from the heady days of '68, when Gregg Jakobson and his fellow “golden penetrators” would cruise over to the group’s latest Hollywood hang-out to enjoy a few sexual favours in exchange for vague promises of booking Manson in for another studio session.

Where might this trip have ended, if the authorities hadn’t moved in to put a stop to it? Would the whitened bones of The Family’s hardcore members and assigned assassins now be buried in the sands of some distant canyon, as survivors of the nastier end of biker/field hippie sub-culture mutter darkly of their legend, and probable fate?

God knows, it certainly would have saved the State of California a lot of time and effort, and given a few generations of “transgressive culture” assholes and neo-nazis one less incarcerated icon to look up to.

Crazy, man. Crazy.

A song for the closing credits:




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(1) I was initially shocked to hear that Tarantino (and, more to the point, the studio marketing bods backing him up) had decided to tie-in the release of their new movie with the anniversary of – uh - *a mass murder*, but cooled down after reflecting on Jello Biafra’s memorable answer to a question re: whether a Dead Kennedys concert on the anniversary of JFK’s shooting was in good taste: “well, the assassination wasn’t very tasteful either”.

(2) It is interesting to note that, despite his racism, misogyny and relentless enthusiasm for heterosexual congress, Manson never seems to have espoused any homophobic sentiments, having spent much of his of early life exploring the “other side of the tracks” whilst incarcerated.

(3) Those wishing to journey further down the Brayton / Solar Lodge rabbit hole are advised to begin here.

(4) Trying to google up some info on the Satan’s Slaves who were active in California in the mid/late ‘60s turns up practically nothing, beyond the knowledge that dozens of other motorcycle clubs have used the same name over the years (most prominently in the U.K.), and a reference to a California-based gang bearing that name who were “patched over” by (ie, incorporated into) The Hell’s Angels in 1978.

(5) Adult film fans with a stronger stomach for research than myself may wish to take note of the following paragraph, from p. 126: “Around this time [January 1969] Charlie and the girls made a pornographic movie by the swimming pool at 2600 Nicholas Canyon Road in the hills above Malibu. The producer, according to Los Angeles homicide officers, was Marvin Miller.” Your safety filter-free search engine of choice awaits.

(6) It seems ironic in the extreme that De Grimston should have filed for defamation against Sanders in the same year that The Process Church’s official magazine proudly published an article dictated by Manson from his prison cell, but Jesus/God/Lucifer/Satan moves in mysterious ways I suppose.

(7) The timeframe of Sanders’ book, it should be noted, discounts the inclusion of the several rather more compelling “officially unsolved” murder cases which sprang up in parallel with the trial of Manson and his co-defendants during 1970, including the violent death of at least one woman who severed ties with the remnants of The Family, and the mysterious disappearance of a controversial and reportedly incompetent attorney who for a time was representing several of the Mansonites in court… until he reportedly went on a camping holiday and never returned, delaying the trial for several weeks as a result. But, this isn’t a True Crime blog, so I’ll shut up now, and let you investigate further, should you wish to.

(8) If you’ve somehow found your way out of the other internet wormholes I’ve dumped on you so far in this post, take a leap into this one for everything you need to know re: Manson and Esalen. My own takeaway is that, compared to a lot of these rumours, the kernel of this one actually seems pretty plausible. 

I mean, it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that Charlie may have called on the Institute, either to try to connive his way in as a guest lecturer/visiting guru, or to audition for someone involved in organising Esalen’s annual folk festival, and that he may have subsequently kept quiet about it to salve his ego after the Institute - known for its tight security and elitest attitude - presumably just told him to get lost.

From there, is it too much of a stretch to suggest that, in the depths of his enraged, stoned/paranoid mind, he might have pegged the Esalen crowd as the same “type” he encountered when he scoped out 10050 Cielo Drive in search of Terry Melcher? And, a week later, Helter Skelter time? We will likely never know, but hey - it’s a theory. What’s that? Oh yeah, NOT A TRUE CRIME BLOG. Sorry.

Bloody NEL: Satan's Slaves and the Bizarre Underground Cults of California by James Taylor(1970)

"It happens. It has happened. It will happen again. The West has its spaces -- wide-open spaces. The fuzz can't be everywhere. The nearest police station could be a hundred miles away. A fire only shows for a few miles. Sound only travels a short distance before erasing itself in the atmosphere. […] Across the canyon, in the other hills, another group played out the last rites of a witchcraft ceremony -- and the orgy prepared to cut loose."
- p. 126

Following on from the Manson-ite speculations contained in my review of The Dunwich Horror earlier this month, not to mention the recent announcement that Quentin Tarantino intends to make a new Charles Manson movie (reaching cinemas in time for that all important 50th anniversary, no doubt),  this feels like as good a moment as any to pull this one off the shelf and give it a quick once over.

New English Library hold a well-deserved reputation as the sleaziest of UK paperback imprints, but even so, they really outdid themselves here with an example of pulp non-fiction at it’s most crassly exploitative, complete with an unaccredited publicity shot of the recently murdered Sharon Tate gracing the back cover.

Predictably enough, searching online for info pertaining to one ‘James Taylor’ who “tried to found his own religion” in “the ‘golden land’ of California” yields little, but regardless, we can assume that the whole ‘religion’ thing didn’t work out too well for the mysterious Mr Taylor, as the early months of 1970 seem to have found him taking a deep breath and banging out no less than 127 pages of prose for NEL, armed with nothing more than a few newspaper articles, a passable command of contemporary hipster patter and a vague memory of watching some horror movies.

As a result, I think we can safely claim that ‘Satan’s Slaves’ was one of the first (if not THE first) “Manson books” to hit shelves anywhere in the world – an achievement only slightly undermined by the fact that it is utter bollocks.

That’s not to say of course that it is anything less than a wholly enjoyable read for those of us inclined to read such a thing in the first place. Writing in a free-flowing, gonzo style that allows him to leave narrative strands hanging whenever he feels like it and switch subjects on a dime, Taylor initially sets out his stall with a bunch of vague “L.A. – city of evil” / Hollywood Babylon type think-piece blather, before giving a general “overview for the squares” of the expansion of California’s 1960s counter-culture from it’s Beat Generation origins through to the glory days of Haight/Sunset decadence.

Taylor then moves on to a few case histories of earlier L.A.-based religious hucksters (Father Riker, L. Ron Hubbard, Sister Aimee McPherson), all related with the “insider gossip” curled lip sneer of a mid-century tabloid expose. Adding to the general tabloid vibe, the author also throws in some great, entirely arbitrary, chapter headings like ‘NO HALO FOR SATAN’ and ‘INTERCULTIC BATTLEGROUND’, which I enjoyed. He also goes into great detail concerning the careers of certain cult leaders and religious organisations (eg, the ‘Bakar Ifna Temple’, ‘Charles Irish’) whose activities remain so thoroughly underground that a google search turns up nothing except references to this book.

More parochially, the supposedly California-dwelling Taylor also finds time to criticise the ‘blundering’ attitude of Britain’s Labour government in reforming the trade unions, and complains that the MBEs awarded to The Beatles are “little short of bribery”, for some reason.

Charles Manson himself fades in and out of the book’s digressive flow, with the paucity of concrete info available to Taylor at the time of writing sometimes becoming painfully clear. [Although the month of this book’s publication in 1970 is unknown to me, the author mentions several times that a date for the Family’s forthcoming trial – which began in June of that year – had not been set whilst he was writing.]

Interestingly, Taylor does reference the alleged connection between Manson and The Process Church of the Final Judgement, demonstrating that this idea (now a ubiquitous part of the mythos surrounding Manson) was already common currency even this early in the game. He also speculates, apropos of nothing, that Manson might have picked up some of his mystical hoo-doo by “meeting a Scientologist in prison”, so… there ya go.

Happily, when rehashing the available press cuttings starts to run thin, Taylor wisely decides to take off into the realms of pure fantasy, penning a number of lengthy, entirely fictional fantasias of Death Valley orgies and Satanic invocations whose blood-curdling content could have fitted right into some post-Manson hippie horror movie of the ‘Werewolves on Wheels’ / ‘I Drink Your Blood’ variety. At some point in proceedings, the author even seems to drift into an assumption that Manson and his followers were actual, card-carrying Satanists (see caption on the photo above), and he also alleges that Manson personally ordered the slayings of at least twenty five people in the Los Angeles area.

Needless to say, if you dig the particular aesthetic of this cultural moment, and if the extreme bad taste of the whole venture doesn’t put you off, ‘Satan’s Slave’ proves an absolute hoot, best enjoyed as a piece of somewhat factually-influenced pulp fiction.

[UPDATE: according to this paragraph in Tony Allen’s ‘Brit Pulp! The Fast and Furious Stories from the Literary Underground’ (Sceptre / 1999), ‘Satan’s Slaves’ was actually the work of frequently pseudonymous NEL scribe James Moffat, best-known for writing the ‘Skinhead’ series and various other young adult books under the name ‘Richard Allen’.]