This obscure bush-league production takes many liberties in its illustration of the Manson Family, and the events surrounding the most notorious killing spree in U. S. history. If you can overlook the weaving of facts with fabrications, then you might enjoy this film for its stylistic peculiarities.
With deliberately one-dimensional black and white filming, it presents itself in an austere naturalistic quality faintly similar in tinge to THE HONEYMOON KILLERS(1970) . The depicted crime scenarios are surprisingly discourteous, their chaos and brutality punctuated by the film's lengthy lead-in, which is rather reserved and undemonstrative in contrast.
I doubt many will defend THE HELTER SKELTER MURDERS as a critically "good" picture, but despite its many easily observable surface blemishes, the innards illustrate an intriguing art-house anti-Hollywoodism, awkward and inexpert though it may be. The anti-drug screen-crawl at the end was strange, added, I suspect, to deceptively ennoble this project with a stirring and purposeful nimbus. Surely this was criticized as ill-advisable and crassly exploitive, racing into production as a horrified nation reeled in the wake of the in-fact events.
Odd...but oddly coercive. 5/10.