#Kitty menendez movie
#Kitty menendez tv

His horrified sons are huddled together outfitted with huge life vests while Kitty, with a flawless face of makeup, looks on in horror. The camera cuts to a half-crazed Jose Menendez pummeling a small shark on the deck with a baseball bat again and again and again. By most accounts, the ferocity for excellence is true to life, though it was reportedly tempered more with love than the vitriol attributed to him in the film. Menendez was a taskmaster who maintained high measures for his sons that he bluntly and aggressively articulated.

The elder Menendez’s obsession with success comes across in his own coming-up story, from paying dues as a dishwasher to calling shots as an executive, but it’s also evidenced in the pressures he puts on his sons to be high performers. In an opening scene, after Erik loses a tennis match, his father scolds, “If you’re not going to be the best at something, don’t bother doing it at all,” then bluntly tells Erik that he’s not good enough. One thing is for sure: the Menendezes are not offered up as sympathetic characters to be liked or pitied in this retelling of their tragic story. Was Jose Menendez that horrible to his kids?

Here, five WTF moments from Menendez: Blood Brothers, fact-checked.

#Kitty menendez movie

For all of its creative lackluster – the script reveals nothing we haven’t read or heard about the case already – the movie makes viewers sit with the uncomfortable reminder that two parents gave two sons access to the best and finest of everything and died at the ends of two loaded shotguns because, the defense would have you believe, of their family secrets. The new Lifetime movie lays bare the dysfunction of the family that even loved ones only subjectively knew with Courtney Love in a serious turn as Kitty Menendez, a heavy drinker emotionally programmed to overlook the indiscretions of her husband at the expense of her sons. Most recently, the Menendezes have been the subject of a special two-hour episode of Snapped in 2016.

#Kitty menendez tv

Now that Lyle and Erik Menendez have spent more time in prison than they did in freedom, their story continues to be fodder for filmmakers and folklorists alike, inspiring multiple TV movies and docudramas. The defense claimed their clients put an unequivocal stop to years of alleged physical and sexual abuse. The authorities said they were trying to speed up getting their hands on their inheritance money. That didn’t stop Lifetime from trying to do just that in their new made-for-TV-movie, Menendez: Blood Brothers, which recounts the circumstances leading up to that day.Īt the apex of media fascination around the case, the storyline was irresistibly juicy: two handsome, wealthy young men execute their mother and father in one of the most notorious double-murders in American crime history. Two decades since they were sent to separate institutions to serve life sentences without the possibility of parole, there’s not much new information to unearth and reveal about the murderous pair. As their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, watched TV in the living room of their Beverly Hills mansion on August 20th, 1989, the brothers ambushed them with shotguns, killing them with a collective 15 bullet wounds.

In the nearly 30 years since Lyle and Erik Menendez became recognizable names, the infamy of their parricidal crime has not lost its ability to magnetize interest.