Amazon Prime Video released a new R-rated trailer for the Joran Peele-produced series Hunters, featuring Nazi-killing mayhem and Al Pacino gleefully torturing former members of the Third Reich. The series, which debuts on February 21, 2020, follows Pacino’s Meyer Offerman (a Jewish matchmaker) and his diverse team of Nazi Hunters living in an alt-history version of New York City in the 1970s. Offerman’s team learns of hundreds of Nazis, hiding out in the U.S., planning to create a Fourth Reich.
Hunters was created by David Weil, who produces with Peele, and will also serve as the co-showrunner alongside executive producer Nikki Toscano. Amazon gave the idea a straight-to-series order, a sign of confidence from the streaming service. Peele, who also produced the 2019 reboot of The Twilight Zone for CBS All Access, wanted to bring Weil’s inspired-by-real-life concept to life from the moment he read it. “When David Weil first shared The Hunt with me, I immediately knew that we had to be involved,” Peele said when Hunters was first announced. “It’s cathartic. It’s noir. It’s frighteningly relevant. It’s exactly what I want to see on television. I am thrilled to be working with Amazon in bringing this incredible vision to the world.”
A new red band trailer for Hunters, posted to Prime Video’s YouTube, reveals just how brutally Peele’s executed Weil’s vision. The new trailer teases the show’s stylish approach to ultra-violent Nazi-hunting and allows Pacino to grumble about the “bunch of Nazi f**ks” before mercilessly executing them. The images that follow feel as violently savage as some of the kills in Prime’s The Boys, everything from impalement to testicular blow-torching is on the menu. This isn’t to say the Hunters don’t have deserving victims; aside from the fact that they’re Nazis, the show’s bad guys are featured engaging in some violent acts of their own. There’s even a quick shot that implies some weird Nazi ritual involving human blood and milk. See for yourself below:
Hyperviolence aside, the series comes from a personal place for Weil, who told a TCA panel earlier this year that he wrote the series as a “love letter” to his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Weil sees the series as a way to continue his ancestor’s fight against Nazis, especially with the current “rise of anti-Semitism and xenophobia.” Although the story of Hunters may be fictional, there were real people who hunted Nazis in Europe, such as the group that captured Nazi Adolf Eichmann, as seen in 2018’s Operation: Finale. There were also real-life Nazi-hunters in the United States, a collection of historians, investigators, and prosecutors whose goal was to revoke the citizenship of Nazi war criminals who had schemed their way into the country.
Hunters definitely seems to have taken some cues from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards, especially in the Nazi-dispatching department. It also doesn’t look like the series will humanize the Nazis, as some have accused Taika Waititi’s “anti-hate satire” Jojo Rabbit of doing. Plus, in addition to Pacino, the series boasts a fantastic cast, including Logan Lerman, Carol Kane, Kate Mulvany, and Saul Rubinek. The combination of Weil’s powerful story, Peele’s knack for social commentary, and that extraordinary cast Amazon Prime Studios looks to have a massive hit on its hands.
