Menendez: Blood Brothers

Menendez: Blood Brothers is brilliant. I was obsessed with this case growing up. I love that this story gave us something to ponder, what if they were telling the truth? It raises so many questions.

The acting is stellar. Courtney Love is great but Myko Olivier is outstanding in his role as Erik.

Great script and incredible directing.

seek it out on iTunes.

This movie is horribly inaccurate, has bad acting and feels very rushed. This has a lot of misinformation they would add things or not include important things they said. They also had horrible interpretation of the characters. They made the parents seem nicer than they were. They also made it seem like the mom was just being treated horribly and like she was so kind to them. They even made Lyle seem like a bad guy who initiated the murder and for no reason. Erik was also made out to be this amazing person who did nothing, I love and support the brothers but Erik did play his part in killing the parents and everything after that and they tend to just blame Lyle in this movie. I would not recommend wasting your time. If you want to learn about the case it's on YouTube.

OK. Please allow me to start of with a bit of a preface. I was very excited to see this. When all of the actual events happened was just a pre-teen. I remember seeing it mentioned on the news and parodied on the sketch comedy shows. For years i actually believed there were two more brothers. I thought the 2 pairs just swapped out whilst in court. I blurred the fiction with the available "reality".

So now that that's out of the way. As an adult i had begun to think about many of the odd things i accepted as truth from television. Of course one of those stories was the Menendez case. I had watched some videos on YouTube. But for the most part i was waiting for the big Netflix documentary. Instead we were handed a Lifetime movie. Not that all lifetime movies are bad. Just that the quality is mostly still lacking. But I was still excited and hopeful for the much anticipated airing of the Menendez Bros. movie. My wife was also anticipatory and anxious. Problem there is we work opposing shifts. anyhoooooo..........

After way too much waiting. My wife and i penciled in a time to sit down light some candles and share in the much awaited & limited commercial interruption.......... The movie starts and immediately i realize the acting talent was hired for looks and not actual ability. i grab an adult coloring book and begin to try to distract myself from the crap on my television. Yet over the course of those 2 hours i kept looking back at the screen. looking back in awe at the total lack of writing and acting talent that went into this so-called movie.

Hell maybe that's whats the producers were shooting for. something so bad people will watch just to see how bad it can be . But then again most of the reviews on here are saying its a 5 star movie. whatever.

Barlow

Lifetime films can sometimes be good but this one was a real stinker. The entire film relied on the younger brothers' Eric Menendez dreams in the form of flashbacks to tell a one sided version of what may have caused Eric and his older brother Lyle Menendez to kill both of their parents with multiple rounds from two (2) shotguns.

In this TV version of the murders of Kitty and Jose Menendez, the younger son Eric continually dreams that he is speaking with his dead mother while trying to figure out why his mother allowed his father to continually sexually abuse him, and he is torn between his guilt for aiding his brother Lyle in murdering their parents in cold blood, and his undying love for his dead parents.

After watching this version of the film one can only come to the conclusion that Eric and Lyle Menendez murdered their parents to end years of sexual abuse by both of their parents. The court documents are factual and the brothers first trial ended in a mistrial. The second trial the judge restricted both the evidence and the witnesses that could be presented which was Eric's lawyers entire defense and as a result both brothers were sentenced to life sentences without a chance for parole.

This certainly was an abbreviated version of the two trials and one would also think that the brothers were railroaded and that no one believed in their sexual abuse defense. Nothing could be further from the truth. The prosecutors proved beyond a shadow of any doubt that Eric and Lyle planned the murders (purchasing their shotguns weeks in advance using a friends stolen ID card without his prior knowledge) and tried to hide their sloppy crime of pure greed for their parents wealth.

This version was far too much "dream sequence" and simply just ignored the magnitude of facts for fictional dream sequences that painted a distinct visual picture of sexual abuse which purportedly justified the murders. If you want to see a better version(s) of the film see either the 1994 version Menendez: A Killing In Beverly Hills, and/or the 2017 eight (8) part mini series titled: Law & Order True Crime.

I was disappointed with this version of the movie as it was very cheesy. Courtney Love's character as the spirit of the murdered mom popping up to speak with her sons was so unnecessary. The made for TV series from 1994 is 100% way better: Menendez: A Killing in Beverly Hills with Edward James Olmos and Beverly D'Angelo.