10050 Cielo Drive

As much as it doesn't reference it early on, it's quite obvious this is a retelling of the Sharon Tate murders from the 1960s by the Manson family. The fuller details can be left to somewhere else, and this story has been infamous but influential.

This film takes the story but sadly it's a torture porn lite retelling pandering to those who shouldn't be pandered to. It really only focuses on the murder and nothing else, which leaves it all to be vacuous. Bankrupt in a moral sense, and it's in poor tastes as it's based using real people.

I'm no prude but there is pure fiction and reality, and this abuses that line. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is just fiction and well made at that, with some nods to the Manson murders. Wolves at the Door is a gratuitous take on the whole thing but exploits for gain by focussing really on the deaths alone of real people without anything to add to it all.

In fairness, the acting is good, the settings are fine and I enjoyed the soundtrack. Maybe if they avoided the Sharon Tate element and pushed it to another period with other characters and fattened out the story a bit more, we'd have had a more acceptable film. Yet they didn't do that, so we have to take it as it is.

It's one I'd say avoid, despite admitting that it is well made. Just not for me, but more for those we should not be encouraging.