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Leslie (Kristen Hager) is your typical healthy American girl-next-door,
a model student, cheerleader, and a girl who loves her family ... but then
her father leaves the family, and she is seduced and impregnated by a
beatnik, only to be forced to abort by her mom (Tracy Wright). This
somehow breaks Leslie, she runs away from home, falls in love with hippie
Bobby (Travis Milne), a friend of Charles Manson's (Ryan Robbins), and
finally ends up with the Manson family ... before things got ugly. Eventually
though, things do get ugly when Bobby gets arrested for killing someone in
Manson's name, and to have his revenge on society, Charles has his girls
break into the Sharon Tate-household and kill all those present. Leslie
did not go with the other girls, but when Charles orders them a few days
later to kill the LaBiancas, Leslie insists on joining in ... Manson and
his family are arrested a few days later. Perry (Gregory Smith) is
brought up in a conservative household that seems to have jumped right out
of a Republican party pamphlet: It is patriarchally ruled, and all the
family members claim to be god-fearing while not seeing the least bit of
discrepancy in supporting the Vietnam war and the death penalty at the
same time. Perry falls in love with Dorothy (Kristin Adams), your typical
old fashioned healthy All-American girl, who considers herself a devout
Christian without understanding any of Jesus's teachings - but she figures
that as long as she goes to church every Sunday and doesn't have sex
before marriage, the Lord will forgive her everything else. Perry has
one problem, he doesn't want to go to Vietnam, even if both his father and
his girlfriend insist, considering it his patriotic and Christian duty to
protect the USA from the Commies (not that that had too much to do with
Vietnam, but whatever). Eventually, he finds a job at a chemical plant
though that can keep him from being drafted ... Eventually, Perry is drafted though as jury member for the Charles Manson-trial, and from day
one on he feels attracted to Leslie, and at least in her, he
doesn't see the demon the media has made the whole family to appear but an
actual human being, if a grossly misguided one. As the trial drags on ad
gets more and more bizarre, Perry feels more and more drawn to Leslie,
even starts having wet dreams about her. The trial also puts more and more
of a strain on Perry's family life, since in the light of the trial,
Perry's ideas start to differ more and more from those of his father and
his girlfriend. Finally, during deliberation, Perry is the only juror
who refuses to put Leslie on the electric chair - but finally he has to
give in to peer pressure from the other jurors and his father, and he does
what everybody tells him is the right thing, to convict a group of human
beings to death for killing a handful of other human beings. ...
and then he
finally starts his at Star Spangled Chemicals, the very company that
developed Agent Orange which over in Vietnam killed tens of thousands of
people ... Ok, I freely admit that above synopsis of Leslie,
My Name is Evil makes the film sound a bit heavy-handed in its
comparison of Christian believes to those who believed in Charles Manson,
and in its often forced upon parallels to the Vietnam War - but while this
may sound heavy-handed in writing, it is much less so on film, as it
consciously uses caricatures to bring its point across, in general plays
more like a dark comedy than a message film, and the extended courtroom
sequence that ends the film is directed like a farce from start to finish. That
all said, the film isn't perfect, it at times suffers from
over-simplification, and could have done without a few sight gags and a
bit more insight - but even the way it is now, it's simply fun to watch.
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find Leslie, My Name is Evil at adultvideouniverse.com
