"Manson's Missing Victims" is a documentary type film that is like some sort of knock off episode of "Forensic Files". It talks about the Manson Family, and the possibility that there were more people killed than what Charlie and the gang were convicted of. While in many ways, I do think that there is the possibility that more people may have been killed at the hands of Manson Family members, the way this film goes about it is all wrong.
The film latches onto the fact that people like Sandra Good and others stated that The Family killed as many as 33-35 people. This is something that is found in Vincent Bugliosi's book "Helter Skelter". The film doesn't look at missing persons cases, unidentified bodies, or mysterious deaths from the time period. Instead, it focuses mostly on Paul Dostie, and his admittedly cute dog Buster, and how they go about digging for dirt samples.
While Buster was a trained dog that could sniff out human remains, or the aromas that may test positive for human remains, this is never truly connected to the Manson family whatsoever. Much of the film is speculation, and leaves the viewer to just think, "WHAT IF THE MANSON FAMILY DID KILL MORE PEOPLE OMG". The film does the typical Manson-sploitation thing, where they put more onus on Charlie and the murders, and not people like Tex Watson, who did the actual killing at Tate-LaBianca.
The film talks a little bit about some of the victims that were murdered, such as Gary Hinman and Shorty Shea, though once again, you're never given any names to potential people that would be buried in the Manson haunts. What was admittedly interesting though, was how this film stated that Hinman was killed in a drug deal gone bad, which is something that has been constantly debated, depending on what source you read (such as Helter Skelter).
They are seen at places such as what used to be Spahn Ranch, though the dirt samples taken in the film are never talked about. We never saw what the results were. The film showed that, prior to filming, they had gone to the site of Barker Ranch to do some digs, but there were ultimately no results.
If you've read Dianne Lake's book, "Member of The Family", you might remember that these digs resulted in nothing. Lake wrote at the beginning of her book how she was contacted by Dostie, after laying low about her past for decades. In a way, her book was a "spoiler", that nothing ever happened, but it was interesting to see what the film even talked about. I suppose that they really had nothing to go off of, and had to pad out the video in some way.
People like Debra Tate, Stephen Kay (his name misspelled), Vincent Bugliosi, and even Tom O'Neill were interviewed, but they don't give any real information. It was interesting to see O'Neill in the film, as this was 11 years before his book "Chaos" came out. I suppose that he was the one that supplied the bit of information about Fillipo Tenerelli...though the film didn't talk about his death at all.
To me, the video would have been better if they talked about mysterious deaths that might have had something to do with the Manson Family, such as Reet Jurvetson (Who at the time may have still been unidentified), Marina Habe, and others. Granted, this is before many of the small threads we can read about on the internet were around today, so some of these names may not have been in thought at the time of actual digs.
Overall, a useless film, that doesn't bring anything new. It was more amusing watching what was yet another Manson film, that had nothing to do about Manson at all. To me, movies like these very obviously use Charlie's name for the sake of popularity, and nothing else. There is no substance.
I gave this 1 star on letterboxd.
