During a series of inventive attempts on their lives by assassins in mascot costumes, married divorce attorneys must find out who is seeking revenge for their combative and greedy legal tactics in this farcical whodunit.

SYNOPSIS:

For a brand, a mascot does nothing but trumpet identity. But for the person inside a mascot costume, complete anonymity is the diametrically opposed effect. There’s also something inherently humorous and yet a little creepy about these ungainly, unspeaking masked characters.

Mascot Murders, notwithstanding its title, mines these contradictory elements not for fright but for full-tilt farce as married but mismatched divorce attorneys Jenny and Johnny Johnson face repeated and varyingly outrageous attempts on their lives by assassins concealed within the fuzzy exteriors of various mascot costumes.

The couple interrogates an array of colorful suspects angry because they feel they got fleeced by the Johnsons in divorce settlements in which they represented their former spouses.

The couple mines for clues by bantering with such rogues as plumbing supply store owner Billy Bob Bobson, atheist bible salesman and son of a Baptist preacher and Jewish rabbi Jesus Goldberg, hunky fitness trainer Rip Rockman, blind portrait painter Leo the Lion Lorenzo, serial widow Alice Stumpf, ballet dancer Barre Bean, rock band vocalist Olive Martini, beer delivery truck driver Bud Weiser, hooker by night Honey Pot/school teacher Sister Redemption by day, librarian Bambi Bookman and grocery store produce manager Bubby Berry.

The Johnsons, along with their receptionist Penny Lane as collateral damage, face a cavalcade of outlandish homicidal assays by an army of mascots such as a groundhog, tiger, clown, dragon, armadillo, crow, dinosaur, orange, lion, clam, duck, honey badger, sexed-up dominatrix mouse, chicken, Clydesdale, bear, buffalo, pig, banana, apple, peach, melon, carrot, boll weevils, bull, shark, rat, King Neptune, St. Pauli Girl, Statue of David, Bruce Lee and bee.

The kill attempts are a smorgasbord of exotic extermination spanning the gamut of the inventive, the zany, the malignant and the absurd -- much too plentiful to itemize here.

Of course, there is the requisite whodunit surprise twist ending, concluding with the couple walking away from their practice and luxurious lifestyle to become anonymous as minor league baseball team mascots, a dramatic transition that punctuates all the madcap mayhem.

Mascot Murders is packed with jokes, with no reluctance to be silly or scatological. Quick-moving and often gleefully absurd and surreal, it achieves something of the feel of a live-action cartoon with its manic energy.

On a deeper context of underlying messages, Mascot Murders lampoons the façade of success, the absurdity of violence and the morality of a job.

MASCOT MURDERS