Reviewed by Alicia Glass 

The Second entry in the Monster series on Netflix, this one tells the story of Lyle and Eric Menendez, privileged brothers in Beverly Hills who in 1989, killed both their parents. 

This entry to the Monster series, from Ian Brennan and the infamous Ryan Murphy, is considered especially controversial, given that both the main subjects of the show, Lyle and Eric, are still alive and in prison. It’s said the actors who played the Menendez brothers initially tried to use the shows’ fame to bring attention back to the real-life Menendez brothers in prison, going on 30+ years now, as part of Kim Kardashian’s efforts for prison reform. But we also have to bear in mind that while this chapter of Monster is based on real-life events, the show is of course sensationalized for the sake of viewer entertainment. Break out your ancient Milli Vanilli CD and let’s get into this! 

When we first catch up with Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) and Eric (Cooper Koch), they are heading to the widely-televised funeral of their parents, of course in a limo, and Lyle is insisting they be let out not in the back loading dock, but right in front where all the press and everyone else clamoring for a piece of the Menendez family can see them. Both Lyle and Eric manage to give cringe-inducing eulogies, but Lyle really takes the cake when he insists on having Milli Vanilli’s “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” played as a tribute to his mother. 

And that kind of sets the tone for the entire show, folks. Practically everything both the Menendez brothers do is cringe-worthy and a thinly-masked layer of fake, whether it’s the much more gentle younger brother Eric doing weight-lifting ostensibly as a form of something in his life he can control, but in actuality it’s a sop to his quite secretive homosexual urges, or Lyle spending insane amounts of his parents money to not finish college, start and never-finish many business ideas, and constantly brag-talk at top speeds about the fame, and yes, money, his next big ambition will bring. 

Despite their apparent wealth and affluence, the Menendez parents are no diamonds and pearls either. Jose Menendez, played masterfully here by Javier Bardem, was born in Cuba and emigrated to the United States, where in his adult life he was a powerful businessman in the entertainment industry, serving as an executive for RCA Records and CEO for Live Entertainment. But the giant house in Beverly Hills, the expensive cars and pastel tennis shorts notwithstanding, Jose Menendez is a terror inside his own home. Having made himself from nothing, he has great demands of his two sons, especially since he has toss all kinds of wealth and influence to their dreams, and somehow, his kids are still screwing up. But children learn their actions from their parents, and in later episodes the show alleges that Jose himself was abused, perhaps even sexually, by his own father back in Cuba. And in a few incredibly well-acted and thus very hard-to-watch scenes, Jose abuses his own children, perhaps even sexually. Definitely mentally and emotionally, at least. 

Then there’s Mary-Louise “Kitty” Menendez (Chloe Sevigny). Part of the advertising blips for the show has a scene with Kitty talking to her therapist, about how she hates her boys, how her children are terrible and she wants very little if anything to do with them. And that folks, is pretty much Kitty in a nutshell – she has mental issues that no-one wants to address, even in therapy; she drinks like a fish despite being on multiple medications; she mentally and emotionally abuses both her children quite regularly, and it is alleged pretty clearly that Kitty had to have known and not condemned or tried to stop the sexual abuse from the boys’ father. The show does make it seem as though Kitty and Jose were in real genuine love at some point, but Kitty never wanted to be a parent, and quite frankly, she never should have been. All the wealth and affluence the Menendez family outwardly enjoys Kitty seems to kind of expect as her due, and it never did a damn thing against the monsters in her own mind, anyway. 

So the Menendez parents have been, let’s be real here, executed in cold blood, and the brothers initially blamed it on the Mob. And while Lyle is running himself ragged trying to spend a ton of money for the outwards appearance of somehow both wealth and mourning, while chasing his fathers changes to his Will, the softer brother Eric is suffering nightmares and recurring visions of what he, what they both, did. And in a disastrous but kind of understandable move, Eric contacts his old psychiatrist, Dr. Oziel (Dallas Roberts), to make a confession he mistakenly thinks falls under the “psychiatrist-patient privilege” clause, which is to say, Dr. Oziel can’t use any patient information disclosed to him in legal proceedings, or risk losing his license and practice. 

For some reason, this is set in the 1980’s after all, Dr. Oziel becomes terrified for his own safety after Eric’s confession and proceeds to ignore patient privilege, to blurt the news to his quite unstable mistress, Judalon (Leslie Grossman), who immediately gets herself all tangled in the mess too. We knew at some point the news would filter from psych-doc to the police, but the circuitous way it did, the involvement of the psycho mistress and others, is a circus farce and makes you wish the doc would face some kind of charges too. Despite knowing and treating Eric for years now, Oziel hasn’t actually met Lyle before, and his manic energy certainly can be intimidating. But if patient privilege didn’t exist or is blatantly ignored, what’s the use of telling the whole truth to a head-doc in the first place? 

Lyle’s desperate race to keep up appearances, especially concerning his damnable toupee, in prison is laughable, but also clearly pathetic. Skewed priorities make Lyle argue about dimes for phone calls and needs for special kinds of shampoo and skin creams with his lawyers, rather than confessing to familial abuse over long years. And poor gentle Eric, of course imprisoned and away from his overbearing brother for likely the first time in his life ever, is oddly left alone by the much-bigger prisoners, instead making friends and possibly a lover with an openly gay man on the inside. 

Both brothers seem to experience a kind of awakening to their new lives on the inside after the sensational trial and conviction, finally relinquishing control to someone other than their abusive parents in a kind of strained relief. And though Eric seems content to stay on the inside and lift weights and just exist, Lyle continues to try and stay relevant so that he’ll continue to receive attention, ostensibly the good “I’m gonna get laid by female fans” kind and not the “psycho fans who wanna hear about which model shotgun was used to blow Jose’s head off” kind. 

Even after all this rigamarole, very little credence to both brothers’ allegations of mental, emotional, and most especially sexual abuse, is given. The idea that a powerful person in the entertainment industry would hide years of sexual abuse and misconduct was, back in the 90’s at least, something to hide, be ashamed-of, and disbelieve, on general principle. But here in the 2020’s and beyond, we are taking our celebrities to task for their past actions (some of ‘em anyway), and no veil of forgetting shall be laid over the gross things they got away with decades ago. These days a good deal of the world at least tries to talk about things like mental health, all manners of abuse, and the trustworthiness of our doctors and therapists. Though it still hasn’t done the real-life Menendez brothers much good, as they are still languishing behind bars. 

Decide how you might have reacted to such things, watch Monsters: The Lyle and Eric Menendez Story on Netflix now!