Sept. 6 – “Manson” is a sort-of documentary by American International on the murdering Charles Manson Family of California.

It’s at the Kensington and Towne, rated “R” and twin-billed with the rerun “Wild in the Streets.”

“Manson” uses television film clips, press photos, interviews with cult members, with cellmates of various murder-team members, with hangers-on around the fringe, with the prosecuting district attorney. It moves uncertainly, and doesn’t seem to have a firm point of view.

To its credit, the film avoids some available shots of the murder scenes in all their grisly gore, and tries to get into the minds of some of the young cultists.

To its discredit, it goes in for some pretty low-grade restaging of Manson Family life on the ranch, young hippie types bathing discreetly in the nude, gathered in communal dance and so on.

You must know the story, not long out of the papers or off the tube.

Charles Manson was the acid-ladling guru on an abandoned film ranch outside Los Angeles. He sent his girl and boy subjects out to kill with knife and ax, and they did it for no other reason than that he told them to.

Manson’s own reasons were more complex, having to do with a black revolution which he would aid, with the Machiavellian idea that it would fall through ineptitude into his own hands.

Among the results were the horrifying Los Angeles murders of actress-model Sharon Tate and her guests, and then of a neighboring couple in apparently random blood-letting.

So American International and the producer — it’s billed ostentatiously as “A Laurence Merrick Document” — give us a valiant roundup of whatever they could collect.

But they just don’t have enough related material, and they never get inside the one killer who counts, Manson himself.

We see him, in an interwoven mosaic of film and stills already familiar to us. But he doesn’t speak, and we don’t know any more about bun now than before.

By JOHN DWYER