Series Style slitting the throat of Substance and drinking its blood...
... while cool music plays.
With Hotel, American Horror Story gets closer to crafting an actual story than the previous two seasons. While it is still bogged down with flaws, the pros outweigh the cons this time.
This year we are greeted to the Hotel Cortez in Los Angeles. A grand art deco palace, the Cortez was originally built in the 1920s to feed the nefarious owner's addiction to murder. In 2015, It now feeds the Countess, a mercurial diva made immortal by an ancient virus compelling her to drink human blood. Needless to say, it is home to many ghosts and ghouls, and attracts just as many weirdos.
The second story is about Detective John Lowe's hunt for The Ten Commandments Killer — leading hm to delve into the hotel's dark history — while desperately trying to hold his family together. His story slowly merges with the other.
There are three things the creators seem to be going for now: 1) style over substance, 2) larger than life characters and 3) black comedy over dramatic horror. They have succeeded massively with the first. The second and third, not so much.
It's a shame too, because Hotel began with perhaps one of the most unique lineups of characters this show has had. However, they all quickly devolve into shallow, amoral murderers, as with previous ensembles. And then they're all given an Esoteric Happy Ending.
I will say this, the show knows how to hook you with a season premiere. It's just the resolution where it usually fizzles out; even the more well-rounded finales like Murder House and Asylum had flaws. This one might be the most contrived and unsatisfying, though. Coven had a better ending.
Some pluses:
- A lot of creative, macabre ideas with the hotel setting.
- Evan Peters utterly owned this season as James Patrick March.
- Lady Gaga can act!
- Liz Taylor, though another self-centered asshole, was a moving look at the plight of a trans-woman.
- A few fun scenes featuring past AHS characters.
- Killer soundtrack.
Despite all of the fun it offered, the pacing is way off, there's no one to root for, and, In the end, nothing really comes of any of the potential they built up for the entire season.
In summation, a hugely entertaining season with a rather lame ending. I'll probably be back for next year, though.
Series Much better writing, but still comes up short.
After the snooze fest that was "Freak Show", "Hotel" features perhaps the best writing demonstrated by American Horror Story so far. It's much more consistent in quality, with most plotlines being satisfactorily resolved, characterization being much more consistent, and less goofy moments that interfere with the tone.
This season features some of the most memorable characters the show has ever had. The Countess and James Patrick March are devious villains who are a joy to watch, and Liz is given a very touching character arc.
Unfortunately, there was so much focus on the characters, it feels like the season sometimes neglected the horror aspect. The show does an uneven job of balancing character interaction and terror, with a lot of episodes not being scary enough, even if they're still interesting. I was disappointed at the lack of more visceral monsters, and the Addiction Demon is criminally underused. Normally, I love seeing monsters in action, but the Addiction Demon's introduction was so horrifying that I constantly dreaded when he would reappear. Unfortunately, he's confined to the background for almost the entire show, and all that anticipation amounts to nothing.
Even if it's better than what came before, the show still has writing problems. The relationship between Liz and Tristan comes out of nowhere, and is a black mark on Liz's otherwise fantastic character development. The revelation of the Ten Commandment Killer's identity is both contrived and cliche, and takes the character in a completely different direction from what they seemed to be building them up for.
All my praise for the show disregards the last episode. It's clear that the writers became too attached to the characters, to the point that they forgot the kind of show they were writing. The finale is anticlimactic and completely at odds with the rest of the series. It's not the first time the show has had such a strange last episode, and it's an unfortunate trend.
While I still get entertainment out of the show, by this point I don't think the writers are ever going to find just the right balance of good writing and genuine horror that the series needs.
Series 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.