WOLVES AT THE DOOR

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

There's a central problem at the heart of John R Leonetti's real-life home invasion thriller, and it's the choice of tone. There's absolutely nothing wrong with making movies about True Crime: films have been made about Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Henry Lee Lucas and Dennis Nilsen, but generally (and quite rightly) they've tended to the nasty and disturbing rather than the glossy and superficial. This one goes completely the other way, opting for easy horror movie thrills with little hint of reality. And it feels uncomfortable watching a recreation of the last hours and brutal deaths of real people crafted as a mainstream multiplex slasher.

In this instance it's the Sharon Tate murders (no mention is made of the LaBianca killings the following night) by four members of the Manson Family in August 1969. And Wolves At The Door makes no secret of the Manson connection: it bills it on the front of the DVD, it boasts "Based on a true story" in the opening captions in that typewriter font that screams True Story! at you, it uses the victims' real names, and it even closes the film with TV news footage of the aftermath and an actual clip of Manson himself. Sharon, Abigail, Wojciech and Jay are relentlessly terrorised by the four unnamed, wordless killings, escalating their sadistic games from noises off and knocking on the door to violence and murder.

To paraphrase, "Entertainment equals tragedy plus time". Where (or when) is the historical line to be drawn? Maybe we feel easier about making glossy, pulpy horror movies about Jack The Ripper (From Hell) because the actual events happened so long ago, while any producer taking the same cheery exploitation tone about more recent cases would be accused of grotesque bad taste. That's what they've done here: it's still too soon. Even though for the modern (younger) audience the Manson Family are further away from them historically than the Second World War is from me, it still feels like tacky exploitation of the most tasteless and most badly judged kind.

The killers are barely seen, out of focus, in shadow or silhouette or otherwise unrecognisable as individuals (they're not even billed in the end credits), behaving like horror movie monsters with a sometimes illogical ability to be in just the right place to leap out at someone they couldn't possibly have known would be there, or ghosting up behind them for no good reason beyond the thrill for the audience. John R Leonetti knows how to time a jolt and assemble this stuff together efficiently enough, with several decent horror movies on his CV as either director or cinematographer, but he's misjudged the tone completely here.

It's a pity because they could so easily have made pretty much the exact same film in pretty much the exact same way, just changing everyone's names, moving it forward a couple of years (so you can still have the same fashions, decor, hairstyles and music) and ditching any reference to Manson. And the result would have been far more palatable: a standard home invasion thriller with nostalgic period detail for the popcorn multiplex audience. On that level, were it a piece of fiction, it would be a conventional, solidly mounted Own Brand suspense movie that's over and done with in less than 70 minutes. But when you so clearly and unashamedly base it on real people, you have a duty of respect to those people and their horrific experiences, and Wolves At The Door absolutely abrogates that duty. Made (or at least copyrighted) in 2015 and only now getting a UK release.

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