The Other Side Of Madness — The Other Side Of Madness( Blu Ray)

Released in the early ’70s The Other Side of Madness was the first film to be made about the Manson family crimes. It’s a haphazard if at points rather incoherent blend of re-enactments, courtroom action, and trippy hippy action- with moments of experimentation & darts into the avant-grade. Here on the Film Detective label is a new Blu Ray/ CD release of the film, bringing together a selection of extras and CD featuring two songs from the film. 

The Other Side Of Madness ( aka The Helter Skelter Murders) appeared in 1971, and was directed by one Frank Howard- it was his one and only credit. Though there are certainly moments of worth/ promise here, it’s fair to say it’s a film that is very sloppily edited/ put together- jumping between largely dialogue-less re-enactments, rather staged/ flat courtroom footage, hippy trippy drug-taking/ musical desert freak-outs, and more seemingly random footage, which moves between avant-guard/ LA City footage. 

I’m not sure how widely The Other Side of Madness was shown back in the ’70s, but really you need to have a good grounding in the Manson case- as if you’d gone into this film when it first appeared, you’d be both puzzled, maybe bemused & possible a little freaked out. As someone whose a fan of true crime in general, and fascinated by the Manson case- I found the film a messy, if at points effective film, that plays more like a statement of the time & drugged-out hippy culture, than a competent film about Manson, his followers and the killings they carried. Sure case facts are mentioned/ related, and these are largely done by the courtroom scenes- but more often than not these dift back to flashbacks, which often seem to have only a vague connection with the case. The murders themselves are left until around the fifty-minute mark in this one-hour twenty-minute picture- with the four killers- one man and three women stalking into the Tate–LaBianca house- and these are executed well enough with some nicely tense/ unsettling moments.  No one is named in the film, but clearly, the man is meant to be Tex Watson, and the person who plays him is one of the more effective/ better actors in the picture.
 
The rest of the film is made up of cryptic, at points non-sensical scenes with a Charles Manson look-alike and a group of stoned-out, jiving and nude hippies. Out in the desert psych-rock jam-outs with more trippy hippies, footage of downtown LA and Cielo Drive, and slight more bizarre/ experimental scenes, including a colour scene in this monochrome picture- showing a woman whose clearing meant to be Sharron Tate, dancing in a period setting. I’d say that director Howard attempt to give the film a tripped-out/ tripping vibe is admirable & effective at times, though it does start to feel a bit too long/ non-sensical for its good in places, and if it had been cut down to say just under an hour it would have been both more impactful and effective. Never the less it’s certainly a curio, and worth a watch if you have interest in the case
 
On the extras front, we get two short audio-only interviews with producer Wade Williams, which are not as the back cover claims a new documentary. One runs around fifteen minutes with Williams talking about how the film came about, and in the second talks about the deal he did with Manson to use two of his songs in the film- apparently, he spoke with Manson for around two hours, but sadly he doesn’t detail what was said. We get two original trailers for the film.
 
Inside the case we get a twelve-page inlay booklet- this features a new write up about the film by Alexander Tushinski, along with stills and press cuttings. We also get a CD reproduction of the 45 that was put out with the two Manson tracks on- these are "Garbage Dump", a sort of quirky acoustic strum along with Manson singing. And “Mechanical Man” which is a decidedly sinister churning psychedelic affair with clip-clopping percussion, layers of strummed guitar, layered male and female vocalising, and Manson doing lead vocals on top and sounding rather like the Swans Michael Gira. It’s great to have this CD added to the set, though it only lasts five minutes- surely they’ve could have put the rest of the film's soundtrack on this disc?!, as there were some rather good examples of psych-rock jamming on the score.
 
While The Other Side of Madness is far from the greatest, most effective, or coherent of the films made about the Manson family, and their crimes. It’s an enjoyable enough short of hippy-dippy freak-out, meet cheapy crime -come- court case re-enactment. So if you have either interest in the case, or enjoy where 70’s exploration meets- budget true crime cinema- you’ll be needing to pick this up.