Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story Review: Interesting But Without Intensity

After the shocking events that unfolded in Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Ryan Murphy’s anthology series Monster is back with the infamous Menendez brothers’ story wherein Lyle and Erik Menendez murdered their parents José and Kitty Menendez in 1989.

The biographical crime anthology series has 9 episodes, each with a runtime of around 60 minutes.

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story Review

Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch make for two very creepy brothers in this retelling of a very bloody incident that leaves us feeling… a bit all over the place. The thing with Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is that it grips you from the first episode and keeps you captive within the narrative of the story, taking us through the atrocities that Dahmer dished out against his unsuspecting victims, making us feel like we were almost looking in from the outside. The thing, however, with the second season is that it misses out on that tense action from the first season.

The second season is kinda goofy, with us following the Menendez brothers through their minds’ maze and understanding the stark contrast between what they are thinking and imagining to the reality of their situations. Although the first episode is thrilling and showcases the unemotional way in which the brothers murdered their parents, the next few showcase them exorbitantly spending money and living the high life, oblivious to how vulnerable they are in reality. There’s a drama in the series that feels a bit off-putting, taking away from the thrill in the eventual episodes.

The series tries to be foreboding, but it’s just so goofy sometimes that you jump out of any building tension and end up mildly chuckling at the insanity happening in front of your eyes. If you are aware of the facts of the case, you will know what lies awaiting the brothers and thus that won’t come as a shock. But the way the creators showcase these facts oddly runs out of steam sometimes. It, however, does a good job of bringing forth the mental issues surrounding the brothers and their thought processes, including how public opinion swayed around whether or not they are guilty.

Either way, it doesn’t help that big chunks of this 9-episode series are thoroughly boring and stagnant, with nothing happening other than people talking about random things. You want it to move forward and give us something truly horrifying that will give us nightmares, but it does such a shoddy job of keeping the pace that you lose interest and focus.

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Vulnerable performances by Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch make this somewhat of a complicated watch. This isn’t Evan Peters giving us nightmares, but Chavez and Koch play their roles honestly, making us feel confused about who these two young men are and what their long game is. The series picks up when we finally dive into the abuse allegations against José and that’s when you get the icky feeling in the pit of your stomach once more but the interest comes and goes from time to time. The tension among the parents and siblings is intense and makes for a great watch. The entire cast is fantastic and the relationship between the siblings and José makes for a thrilling watch and in the end you question who the real monster is in this scenario.

Final Thoughts

Monsters: The Lyle And Erik Menendez Story makes us question who to blame in this tragedy and who to believe. The series has its thrilling moments that leave a pit in your stomach but it doesn’t hold on to your interest in a way that the first season did. Of course, that one was surrounding an infamous serial killer, but there’s more subtlety to this story that probably doesn’t work, in my opinion, after the Jeffrey Dahmer season. In fact, you start to feel some empathy for the brothers towards the middle, taking away all the tnesion and not making us feel the raw sense of fear that we did in the first season. I also felt that 9 episodes was far too long and we meander around a bit too much to pad the runtime.

All in all, Monster Season 2 is an interesting watch, one without the intensity of the first season.

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