The Charles Manson-as-Evil-God Horror Shocker The Resurrection of Charles Manson Is Quite Possibly the Dumbest Movie Ever Made
Holy crap is this movie ever insane, terrible.
The Resurrection of Charles Manson
In the decades since his crimes shocked and titillated the world Charles Manson has become a comic figure, an outsized cartoon of malevolent counterculture narcissism forever yammering on about some messianic bullshit.
Manson is a clown. Manson is fool. Manson is a crazed caricature. Manson is a songwriter and musician of questionable talent. What Manson is not, and has not been for a good long while, is scary.
The wild-eyed, swastika-loving cult leader’s crimes may be violent and abhorrent but Manson himself lost the ability to scare us long ago. He’s now a figure of fun and frivolity, like Freddy Krueger, Pennywise and John Wayne Gacy.
Manson may be a tragic figure on account of all the death and suffering he caused but he’s a comic figure as well. I suspect that part of the reason that Quentin Tarantino made a movie about Charles Manson that boldly but correctly gave him next to nothing in the way of screen time is because he knew that if he showed Manson doing his patented beatnik hippie free associative death spiel audiences would laugh at him rather than find him terrifying.
I know we as a culture enjoyed a long, deep, cathartic laugh when Charles Manson, that old dog, got engaged not long before his death to what I can only imagine is a charming and big-hearted young lady but the engagement ended once he discovered that she was only marrying him so that she could make a mint renting out his skeleton to various traveling circuses after his death.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if somebody is only with you because they want to exploit your corpse as a star attraction for a traveling carnival, then your relationship is not built upon a sturdy foundation and will most likely fail.
I’m sorry if that sounds harsh or unsympathetic but you should get married because you love someone and want to spend the rest of your life with them, not make money off the public’s sick fascination with their depraved legacy.
The astonishingly misguided new horror psychodrama The Resurrection of Charles Manson makes many, many mistakes. Its biggest and most hilarious miscalculation is its bizarre, inexplicable conviction that it could revolve around a family that worships Charles Manson the same way the Flanderses worship Jesus, and feature many scenes of the bad guys imploring Charles Manson, their Lord and Savior, to help them in their time of need, and inspire fear rather than guffaws.
The Resurrection of Charles Manson casts Katherine Hughes as Tianna, an ambitious young actress obsessed with scoring a plum role in an upcoming movie about Charles Manson and his family that promises a more positive take on the oft-maligned murderous maniac.
For the sake of production values, Tiana heads to the desert with a boyfriend played by Josh Plasse to shoot an appropriately cinematic and aesthetically pleasing audition video for the role.
Our male and female leads are in very different places in their relationship. Our deluded and gullible hero thinks that Tiana is his soulmate and the woman of his dreams and wants to propose to her so that they can get married, have children, and spend the rest of their lives together.
Tianna, in sharp contrast, sees her boyfriend as acceptable enough for the time being but nothing more. To paraphrase my favorite book AND movie, she’s just not that into him. She seems more concerned with her precious Charles Manson movie for reasons that will eventually become apparent.
Incidentally if you do not want the plot of THE STUPID FUCKING MOVIE WHERE THEY LITERALLY WORSHIP CHARLES MANSON LIKE A GOD then stop reading now and immediately sign up for a paid subscription for this Substack. Or just stop reading. But honestly, I would very much prefer it if you stopped reading and put a little money into this newsletter’s account.
Things are off from the very beginning. For starters, the couple rents their airbnb for SEVENTY dollars when it is vast, gorgeous and looks like it should be in Architectural Digest and cost a thousand dollars a night.
That has nothing to do with the events at the film’s core but The Resurrection of Charles Manson has so little going for it that I could not stop thinking about how the couple got the deal of the century and nobody even seems to notice.
In his meanderings, Plasse’s character encounters a hippie space cadet who is supposed to be a newfangled variation on the evil countercultural freaks of the Manson family but instead recalls both Jesse Camp and Pauly Shore in ways more comic than terrifying.
This lunatic turns out to be Tianna’s brother. For it seems that Tianna has a terrible, idiotic secret. She is the daughter of Robert (Frank Grillo), a cult leader who preaches that Charles Manson, that excessively verbose idiot Bob Odenkirk parodied brilliantly on The Ben Stiller Show, is literally God. As in, the big guy. The dude in the sky with the big white beard. The Most Holy, Blessed Be He. Numero Uno.
These Charles Manson-worshipping California cultists want to bring about the second coming of their diminutive and rambling deity. But in order to resurrect Charles Manson they need a body to act as a conduit for his epic return.
Tianna has a secret reason for bringing her beau to the desert to ostensibly help her shoot her big audition tape: she wants the big lug to serve as the vessel for Charles Manson’s resurrection.
I should probably state here that at no point in The Resurrection of Charles Manson does anyone acknowledge, even for a single solitary second, that there might be something silly or ridiculous, or even comic about seemingly sane human beings praying to CHARLES MANSON or trying to engineer a comeback for the little man with the great big propensity for evil.
Because The Resurrection of Charles Manson, alternately known as Man’s Son, never concedes that its premise is only slightly less impossibly lurid than that of They Saved Hitler’s Brain it never stops being funny when the characters worships the most hilarious of all American monsters.
Grillo, who, in a striking non-coincidence, is also the father of the film’s 26 year-old-old director Remy, looks great in tailored suits but is utterly defeated by a screenplay that never stops trying to make the concept of Charles Manson as an evil God scary and never succeeds.
The elder Grillo is the big name in the credits but he’s in the film for maybe ten minutes, at the very beginning and at the end. Otherwise this low-budget zero of a non-shocker makes less than nothing out of nothing.
The Resurrection of Charles Manson is just barely a movie for reasons above and beyond an insanely brief, but not brief enough runtime. The shameless exploitation movie ends with two and a half minutes of Tianna driving that serve no purpose beyond running out the clock so that the movie clocks in at 74 minutes instead of 72.
This makes a terribly convincing argument against Nepo babies.
The Resurrection of Charles Manson is even stupider and more insulting than its reputation would suggest. I’m torn between wanting people to see it so that they can share my pain and we can talk about it and feeling like no one should ever have to see it, ever, on account of it being uniquely god-awful and more or less unwatchable.
Zero Stars out of Four
I still contend that if this were 20, 30 years back when Smilin' Chuckie was still alive, his presence MIGHT be still scary. But unlike, say, Jack the Ripper or the Zodiac Guy (who might be Ted Cruz), Manson was a known quantity basically from day one, which takes a lot of the scare factor out of him. He just can't haunt like those epic figures, no matter how the Boomers try to make him an icon.
Manson isn’t scary. Squeaky Fromme and her ilk, the type that have been so easily manipulated into being murder puppets, are scary.