October Horror 2013: 17 - American Horror Story: Asylum

I don't know what I was expecting when I first went to watch American Horror Story.  I picked it up at the tail end of our 2011 viewing season (Which ended with The Last Winter, which also stars Connie Britton), and it surprised the hell out of me.  The show was weird, weirdly sexual, started off bizarre but reality based and then started throwing in ghost story elements.  And the amount of what they were able to get away with showing, considering it was a TV show on FX, was amazing.  Which isn't even to say it was gory or had a lot of nudity, since it didn't really have any of that.  But the situations were definitely more extreme than what normally is allowed on TV and the direction and shots they use allowed them to convey that a lot more was really happening than what they were showing.

That tradition keeps up in fine form in the 2nd season of American Horror Story, subtitled Asylum.  I like that they've gone for an approach similar to a stage theater company where the majority of their cast from the 1st season has returned, but they are now playing different characters in a totally different and unrelated story.  Season 1 was centered on a strained family moving across country into an old house with a horrific reputation that their realtor didn't disclose.  Season 2 takes place mostly in an asylum, called Briarcliff, run by the Catholic church in the 1960s.  Our main cast involves 2 nuns, a mechanic wrongfully accused of the murder of several women including his own wife, a psychiatrist, a lesbian newspaper reporter, a woman properly accused of axe-murdering her family, and a mad doctor played brilliantly by James Cromwell.

On the framework of the daily workings of a mental ward they hang a story that involves demonic possession, the Angel of Death, Nazis, feral mutants, freaking Aliens, and a serial killer who makes furniture out of his victims.  And an almost uncomfortable amount of sex.  Ooze is the word but not really in a good way.  And again, they do this on TV...all created by the guy who also came up with Glee.  Dang.

We were generally only watching 2 episodes of each series, but this show got incredibly compelling and we've watched all but 2 episodes.  The pacing seems to drag a bit towards the end of the series and one episode even includes a musical number that I'm not sure if it's brilliant way of illustrating a character's perceptions or just a ploy to eat 5 minutes.  There are a lot of plot lines to follow, and it's a very strange show...not confusing, just strange.  Season 1's story is much tighter and more focused than this which has a tendency to go all over the place, but it's still fun.  Well worth the time.

October Horror 2013: 16 - Sleepy Hollow

Sleepy Hollow is a currently airing TV show on FOX, starring Nicole Beharie, Orlando Jones and Tom Mison along with recurring guest spots from Clancy Brown (WOO!) and John Cho.

The show aims to be a modernization and serialization of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which tells the story of Ichabod Crane, a schoolteacher, and his ill-fated attempts to propose marriage to Katrina Von Tassel.  After a night of ghost stories, Ichabod is chased down by a Headless Horseman...the ghost of a Hessian mercenary killed by a stray cannonball during the Revolutionary War.  The Horseman does not vanish over a certain bridge as per legend, and instead supposedly kills Ichabod with a thrown, decapitated head.

We watched the first two episodes of Sleepy Hollow in which Ichabod Crane, a former British schoolteacher, has defected from Britain's army and joined George Washington in the fight for American Independence.  While on the field of battle he faces a hulking mercenary wearing a terrifying mask.  He decapitates the soldier, but is mortally wounded and soon passes from his injuries.  250 years later he wakes up buried under some weird waxy mess and dirt in a cave, and stumbles on to a highway where he's nearly run over by a truck.  At the same time, a headless horseman has risen from somewhere, and murders Sheriff August Corbin at a farm.  Ichabod partners with ...Abbie Mills.  Dear god, we went from watching Harper's Island with an Abby Mills to Sleepy Hollow with an Abbie Mills.

Anyway, Crane and Mills become unlikely allies in what is revealed to be a plot to bring about some sort of apocalypse.

I like this show after 2 episodes.  They have fun with the man-out-of-time shtick Ichabod is pulling and counter balance it with a lot of really well done and spooky supernatural surrealism.  I really like the demon's appearances in mirrors, it's crazy looking.  The show's been renewed for a 2nd season, though I dunno how much life there is in something with this sort of premise, it could be fun to watch it evolve.  It's quite entertaining.

October Horror 2013: 15 - Harper's Island

We started watching Harper's Island quite some time ago, maybe even over a year.  Harper's Island aired for 1 season in 2009 on CBS.  It's rare to see a TV show that aims to tell a single coherent story without aims for a second season.  So we've seen most of the episodes, for the October watching season we watched late-season episodes Seep and Snap.

So we've got a mystery-thriller TV show starring Christopher Gorham and Elaine Cassidy among ~23 other characters and partial-season guest stars.  The story is set in a small island community, to which Henry Dunn and his fiancée Trish Wellington return for their wedding.  In each episode between 1 and 5 characters die.  For the majority of the show the killings are taking place in secret and the wedding part is not aware of them, until the climactic and very public murder of Richard Burgi's Thomas Wellington.  Each episode is an onomatopoeic hint based on how victims die in each episode.

The setup of the show was initially interesting based on setting up all the characters and resurrecting old tensions as people who grew up in an insulated community, but left for greener pastures suddenly come back.  There's some initial interest, also, in the sub-plot of the murder of Abby (Elaine)'s mother by John Wakefield many years before, but they harp on it so much it gets old and begins to feel like an obvious red herring.  I haven't finished the show and also remain unspoiled, so I don't know if it is.

Aside from the mystery, if you're invested, there isn't much to hold interest and the show is in a weird situation where it's best to watch in a marathon, but too long to watch in a marathon.  There are so many characters it's hard to keep the plot in mind as time passes between episodes and there's no recap.  It's still well made and fun, so if you like the idea of murder-mystery over an entire season of TV, check it out.