I enjoyed Hotel for about ten minutes. The first episode starts the season with an amusingly coarse receptionist, checking a couple of gals into a beautiful art deco hotel. The women (a pair of stereotypical Swedes) discover a flesh monster has been sown up into their bed, so the receptionist puts them up in another room; a cursed suite with considerably bigger problems.
It turns out this hotel is a front for all kinds of paranormal ghastlies who want to murder, eat, sodomise or toy with the guests. This isn’t so much a story about the clientele as about the ghosts who run the place. They have their own quirks and feuds, but they are stuck with each other for now. As soon as this gets established, my interest evaporated. It’s a return of the old American Horror Story problem, in that the show insists on being a family drama instead of an actual horror story. I should be used to that by now, four seasons in, but it’s the reason why I abandoned series 4 about half way through; it turns out bickering siblings make for boring television, even when dressed up in a lavish horror theme. The fact that these guys are always killing people doesn’t make them all too relatable or endearing either.
The only reason I even finished this episode was because just as I was about to abandon it half way through, we are treated to a loud, gratuitous, Lady Gaga led orgy; I share my Netflix account with a few other people, and the last thing I need is for them to start this show from where I left off, finding themselves confronted with spontaneous softcore porn. If people are going to find out I’m a pervert, at least they can do it stumbling across better material.
Speaking of perversion, that’s another gripe I have about this series so far. Sexual deviance is a recurring theme across each season, and it is almost invariably used to make the characters look ugly, frightening, unwholesome and evil. I get that horror and sex make for a powerful combination, but as I’ve already said, this isn’t a horror show. Instead it’s a show that borrows violent sexual imagery and tosses it into the kitchen sink with the soap opera, which creates a kind of kink-shaming, puritanical subtext to the whole thing. In a story with a modern setting, where Swedish tourists make jokes about bad yelp reviews, it feels like the writers need to get with the times.
It's a Graveyard Trash
I enjoyed Hotel for about ten minutes. The first episode starts the season with an amusingly coarse receptionist, checking a couple of gals into a beautiful art deco hotel. The women (a pair of stereotypical Swedes) discover a flesh monster has been sown up into their bed, so the receptionist puts them up in another room; a cursed suite with considerably bigger problems.
It turns out this hotel is a front for all kinds of paranormal ghastlies who want to murder, eat, sodomise or toy with the guests. This isn’t so much a story about the clientele as about the ghosts who run the place. They have their own quirks and feuds, but they are stuck with each other for now. As soon as this gets established, my interest evaporated. It’s a return of the old American Horror Story problem, in that the show insists on being a family drama instead of an actual horror story. I should be used to that by now, four seasons in, but it’s the reason why I abandoned series 4 about half way through; it turns out bickering siblings make for boring television, even when dressed up in a lavish horror theme. The fact that these guys are always killing people doesn’t make them all too relatable or endearing either.
The only reason I even finished this episode was because just as I was about to abandon it half way through, we are treated to a loud, gratuitous, Lady Gaga led orgy; I share my Netflix account with a few other people, and the last thing I need is for them to start this show from where I left off, finding themselves confronted with spontaneous softcore porn. If people are going to find out I’m a pervert, at least they can do it stumbling across better material.
Speaking of perversion, that’s another gripe I have about this series so far. Sexual deviance is a recurring theme across each season, and it is almost invariably used to make the characters look ugly, frightening, unwholesome and evil. I get that horror and sex make for a powerful combination, but as I’ve already said, this isn’t a horror show. Instead it’s a show that borrows violent sexual imagery and tosses it into the kitchen sink with the soap opera, which creates a kind of kink-shaming, puritanical subtext to the whole thing. In a story with a modern setting, where Swedish tourists make jokes about bad yelp reviews, it feels like the writers need to get with the times.