LITTLE TO SEE HERE, FOLKS
It might be a dull time for new shows, but ‘Menendez Murders: Erik Tells All’ could provide a fillip, writes Matthew Vice
Geez, guys, don’t go pushing your upcoming shows on me all at once ... No? Well, perhaps July is just a dull month this year. That’s not to say that I didn’t receive any interesting show info at all. One of them is very much up my alley — Menendez Murders: Erik Tells All, on Crime + Investigation (channel 170) on Tuesday July 3 at 8pm.
KILLER SONS
Everyone knows about the Menendez murders, right? On August 20 1989 Lyle and Erik Menendez (aged 21 and 18) fatally shot their parents with Mossberg 12-gauge shotguns in their Beverly Hills home. They reported the murders themselves and pretended to be distraught, but apparently didn’t think that flagrantly spending their parents’ vast wealth might make people suspicious.
They were both arrested and charged with murder the following year and, after a long trial, were sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.
That’s the Cliffs-Notes version, but the trial was a media circus at the time, not least of all because the brothers’ defence tried to argue that they were driven to murder by years of psychological and sexual abuse. They’re both still in prison and both have married since. Married. I’m not kidding — convicted murderers managed to find women outside the prison willing to marry them. I swear, some people just aren’t wired right.
Menendez Murders: Erik Tells All consists of five episodes that were made last year, and what makes this stand out from other crime documentaries is that it includes narration by Erik himself — phoned in, of course.
I watched a sneak peek of it on Youtube and he says we don’t know the real story, because he’s going to tell it to us for the first time — not an unusual thing for a notorious criminal to say to the media decades after their crimes. What I would have done is get the story from his brother Lyle too, without telling Erik, because they were in different prisons at the time the doccie was made.
It would have been interesting to see how well their “real stories” line up. But we have only this one, so it will have to do. It also features interviews with dozens of people involved at the time, including Erik's psychologist, to whom he confessed.
CELEBRITY EGOS
Do you like Comedy Central’s Roasts? Enough viewers certainly must, because both the UK and South Africa have commissioned second seasons of the Roast Battle format, with Mexico getting its own first season of the show — thus boasts the press shpiel I received from the publicists.
So, if you’d like to see teams of local celebrities line up and take turns insulting each other, then on July 9 at 9:30pm on Comedy Central (channel 122) you can catch the start of Roast Battle South Africa season two, which we can expect to be bigger, better and hopefully more shameless.
John Vlismas is the roast master for this season, with Trevor Noah as the referee and Tumi Morake and Kagiso Lediga as judges. Some of the celebs we can expect to see in this verbal punch-up include Lihle Msimang, Casper de Vries, Nina Hastie and Mojak Lehoko.
DUMB, AND NO ATMOSPHERE
Let’s see, there’s got to be something else I can cram in here. Ah, here’s one, Flatliners, on M-Net, channel 101, Saturday at 9pm — oh wait, it’s the 2017 remake, not the 1990 original. I got excited for a moment there.
The original Flatliners was a weird, sci-fiish, paranormal-ish ghosty type of thing, dripping in atmosphere enough to get an Oscar nomination. It starred Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon and Julia Roberts as medical students obsessed with stopping their hearts so they could briefly die to investigate the possibility of an afterlife.
Oddly, my Bible Ed teacher in high school showed this movie to our class for ... some reason. The 2017 remake has Kiefer Sutherland returning for a different role, and apart from him, the only name I recognise is Ellen Page. Apparently it’s every bit as dumb as the original, but lacking the eerie atmosphere.