SHOCK recaps the Season Premiere of AMERICAN HORROR STORY: HOTEL
American Horror Story: Hotel suffers from the same advantages and disadvantages that every season of AHS faces. I feel like a broken record. The show looks beautiful; everything from the sets to the makeup to the costumes is just sumptuous and exquisite. The performances are wonderful all-around. But the story . Like every other season, a strong plot line is missing. After five seasons, I have finally accepted that this is just the way a Ryan Murphy joint works. Just sit back and enjoy every episode on its own, don’t worry about plot lines that are never wrapped up. Its going to happen, and there is nothing I can do about it.
Hotel is set at a beautiful, yet dumpy Art Deco hotel in Los Angeles. In its heyday, the Hotel Cortez was a sumptuous ode to Hollywood glamour; now it is more akin to the Chelsea Hotel, circa 1979.
A couple of Swedish tourists, Vendela and Agnetha check in. They dont like the vibe and thinks it is a dump, but they already paid, so they take the room. When looking for ice, Agnetha comes across a pair of creepy, pale twin children who run and hide. She also sees a maid cleaning blood from sheets. Back in their room, the girls notice a smell that seems to be coming from the mattress. Stripping back the sheets, they see the mattress was cut open and stitched closed. They cut it open and a zombie (?) crawls out. Iris, the front desk clerk, upgrades them to a suite, room 64. Normally they dont rent that room, but Iris makes the exception. Unfortunately, Vendela passes out. She wakes at 2:25 when the clock radio goes off and discovers the two children are drinking Agnethas blood.
While the girls arent dead, this is the equivalent to the first kill in a Scream movie. We then shift gears to follow homicide detective John Lowe, who is investigating the grotesque attack on a pair of cheating spouses. They were attacked while having sex. The woman, on top, was impaled on a metal rod and had her hands nailed to the headboard. The man had his eyes and tongue removed, and his penis was glued inside his fuck-buddys vagina.
This murder may or may not be related to a series of violent murders that have taken place throughout the city. As many as 40 murders are attributed to this unknown psychopath, whose latest victim seems to be an award show blogger who was raped before being bludgeoned to death. The killer calls John and warns him that his next murder will happen at the Hotel Cortez in room 64. John heads there immediately.
The Swedish girls no longer inhabit room 64. It has been rented out to a whiny Sid Vicious-wannabe who is just looking for someplace to shoot up. As soon as he is high, a featureless, twisted figure appears in his room. The figure is a mad hybrid of a hairless cat and a circumcised penis, and it straps on a pointed metal dildo and rapes the junkie to death. Before he dies, Sally, a Nancy Spungen-wannabe shows up and insists he tell her he loves her. He does – but dies anyway. By the time John arrives, the room is empty and clean. John lays down for a minute, not noticing that the junkies body is beneath the bed. He falls asleep, and wakes at 2:25 to see one of the vampire children running from his room. John gives chase, but the child disappears.
Next we get to meet Lady Gaga and her boy-toy, Donovan. In the show, Gagas name is Elizabeth, but it is hard to separate her from her Gaga-ness. Thats not bad; in fact, Gaga is marvelous in this show. But Elizabeth is such a bland name for an exquisite character. There is good reason for it (it is clearly a nod to Elizabeth Bathory) but it still seems bland. Anyway, Elizabeth/Gaga and Donovan go to a cemetery screening of Nosferatu, where they meet an attractive young couple and invite them back to the hotel for a kinky, graphic foursome. The sex ends with Elizabeth and Donovan slitting the necks of their lovers, lapping up the blood, fucking amongst the bodies, then laying, post-coital, in a pool of blood.
Five years ago, John and his wife Alex took their two kids, Scarlett and Holden, to the Santa Monica Pier. John puts Holden on the merry-go-round and turns his back for a second to answer a text message. When he looks back, Holden is gone. They never found him, and Alex is starting to lose hope that he will turn up alive. She doesnt blame John for losing their son, but looking at John reminds her too much of her little boy. While Alex is at work, John and Scarlett go out for sushi, when John gets a text from Alex, begging for help. Her phone goes straight to voicemail, so John rushes to the address he has for her, leaving Scarlett in the car, with an officer watching her. John investigates the posh mansion (Alex is a concierge doctor) and the officer leaves Scarlett alone to follow something moving in the trees. Scarlett creeps into the house. They dont find the killer, but they do find his victims: two men, strung up over individual beds, with their intestines pouring out. The killer cloned Alexs cell phone to lure John there. He thinks the killer is targeting him so he moves out for a little while – and into room 64 of the Hotel Cortez.
In 1994, Sally brought Donovan to the hotel to shoot heroin. Donovans mother, Iris, followed them there and in a panic bribes the trans desk clerk Liz Taylor to get their room number. She is too late and Donovan has ODd on China white. Sally is high enough that she doesnt care, and Iris follows her out into the hall and pushes her out an open window. Sally dies in the alley below. When Iris returns to the room, Elizabeth is caressing Donovan.
In the present day, fashion designer Will Drake arrives with his son Lachlan. He has bought the hotel, and plans to live in the penthouse, and turn the floor beneath it into an atelier. Iris and Liz Taylor are in a panic, that they are going to be thrown out. Donovan is pissed because he is going to lose his room. Elizabeth, however, is a fan of Drakes designs and is excited to have some new blood in the hotel. While Donovan shows Drake some of the art Elizabeth has collected, Elizabeth takes Lachlan to a play room hidden behind a secret panel in the wall. Inside is a deco-mod room with classic video games projected onto the walls, jars of colorful candies, and a black leather circle of couches in the center of the room. A half a dozen pale, blonde-haired children play video games emotionlessly. Two of them we recognize as the vampire children. Elizabeth introduces Lachlan to one specific child: Holden.
