Amazon Prime’s Hunters Embraces Grindhouse Style | TV/Streaming

“Hunters” opens by laying down the gauntlet of intensity, making sure you’re ready for what’s to come. It’s 1977 in America, and a young woman comes to a BBQ with her husband and recognizes the homeowner, played by Dylan Baker, as a powerful Nazi from a concentration camp. He denies it as she starts to shake and point. As she gets louder, he reaches under the grill, grabs a gun and shoots everyone, including his three children swimming in the pool. After all, he couldn’t have his cover blown.

Yes, “Hunters” is about Nazis in America, but this is no “Man in the High Castle” sci-fi. Instead, it's a B-movie imagining of how the most powerful members of the Third Reich worked their way into U.S. culture, impacting politics and even helping us get to the moon. After the terrifying prologue, we meet Jonah Heidelman (Logan Lerman), a young man whose grandmother (Jeannie Berlin) is killed by a mysterious stranger. Looking into why someone would want his kindly grandma dead leads Jonah to her secret life as a part of an elite group of Nazi hunters led by Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino). Meyer and his team, which includes colorful characters played by Tiffany Boone, Josh Radnor, Saul Rubinek, and Carol Kane, have been hunting the Nazis who escaped Germany, torturing and murdering them in creatively intense ways. In the premiere, a woman is gassed with Zyklon B in her Florida shower. In a later episode, a suspected Nazi is literally fed shit. Another Nazi’s eardrums are burst by Little Richard played at top volume. “Hunters” is often viciously creative, satisfying the same vengeful adrenaline that films like “Basterds” and the movies that inspired it into existence once did.

It's also a thriller with multiple players converging not just on the same hunt but on a major upcoming event that seems designed to start a Fourth Reich. Lena Olin plays a power player who can clearly impact U.S. politics; Dylan Baker returns several times, doing a wonderful send-up of Americana seen through the eyes of a monster. And there’s more! As if that wasn’t enough, there’s a dead-eyed sociopath of a Nazi soldier (Greg Austin) who is hot on the heels of the hunters and an FBI agent (Jerrika Hinton) who starts to realize that America has a Nazi problem after the aforementioned shower murder gets dumped in her lap. It’s a lot for one show.