By Haley Cullingham

Sitting down on a rainy day at the Rhino with writer and director Reginald Harkema, I have images of blood-soaked sex orgies, campy pitch-perfect scenes of sixties nostalgia, and a trio of hauntingly hypnotic sexy smiles swimming in my head. Triggered by a misheard Pink Mountaintops lyric, Harkema crafted an addictive account of a Manson-like murder, a pure-as-the-driven-snow schoolboy jury member, and a cadre of gorgeous lost souls. He calls it Sisterhood of the Travelling Hippie Death Cult Murderesses, but you can just call it Leslie.

“We filmed a summertime California period piece in Toronto in November,” Harkema says, from under his long mop of blonde hair, which he’s threatening to shave off in preparation for his next film, a tale of two Vancouver punks in the ’70s. “I’m so fuckin’ sick of hippies.”

Harkema has spent the last few years entrenched in hippie mythology. Armed with a copy of Helter Skelter, he journeyed deep into Manson country, and discovered one of the young women involved in the Manson murders, Leslie Van Houten, looked eerily like…his mom.

Both women were Dutch-American, born around the same time. “So the question was,” Harkema says, “how does someone like my mom become a hippie death cult murderess?”

The answer? Her parents get divorced, she has sex on the edge of the Pacific (or the Scarborough Bluffs, whatever), is forced into an abortion, falls in love with a musician, and ends of in the back of a van with two gorgeous cult followers who take her to a barn where a sexy dude who looks like her dad is hung up on a cross, draped in the American flag. Meet Charlie. Exit Cheerleader.

The incredibly powerful performances of Kristen Hager, who plays Leslie, and Tiio Horn, who plays Katie, another Charlie-phile, are what make the film sing. While they were courting big time players like Kristen Stewart to come on board, Harkema was so mesmerized by these two women he says he was “praying for stars to turn down the roles.” The girls are charismatic, sexy, and a little terrifying. They sit in a pop-art court room, eyes blazing, crosses burned into their foreheads, faces twisted into chaste smiles. The male protaganist, Perry (Gregory Smith), sits on the jury and has no idea what to do.

The other side of the film follows Perry, and all-American boy, and his bible-thumping girlfriend Dorothy (played to sugarcoated perfection by fantastic Toronto actress Kristin Adams). As the trial of Charlie’s girls pushes back their wedding date, sexual and cultural tensions mount between the two. They grope underneath cars, beside Vietnam war protests, and in aquariums, and the longer he waits for Dorothy, the more Perry fantasizes about Leslie.

The film captures sixties political and cultural tensions, as well as aesthetic quirks, perfectly. It’s an incredibly hypnotic, hilarious, and disturbing feast of youthful insanity.

Leslie, My Name Is Evil Opens May 21st