I always wanted to own a hotel.  No joke.  Keep it clean and nice, offer good service, and people will give you money to use something you already have.  A hotel room is there whether someone is in it or not, so you aren’t paying extra to let someone stay unless you give them lots of free stuff when they check in.

Something free like a weird, smelly, actually alive corpse guy who happens to be sewed into the mattress of your room at the Cortez Hotel in Los Angeles, the setting for the fifth (and so far my third fave) installment of American Horror Story.  Hard for me NOT to like something that is so Art Deco.  Although this season was inspired by the grisly real-life events at LA’s infamous Hotel Cecil, I was bummed to read that AHS built a six story hotel for the shoot, because I wanted it to be a real place so I could blow all my money visiting it.  The detail is extraordinary.

The cast?  Well, for some reason I thought the first three dudes in the show were the same dude.  How handsome do you have to be to even get into that place?  Even the guy from True Blood who shaved his head and wears a dress is pretty handsome. Stupid L.A. And compared to the women in the show so far, the dudes are WAYYYY better looking.

I will give you the recap in a blockquote so you can avoid spoilers if you want.  Hopefully this becomes a thing.

• In 1994 a junkie (Sarah Paulson) who looks like she stopped going to the beauty parlor in 1986 brings a handsome dude into the Cortez Hotel to do some drugging.  Kathy Bates is watching this go down from a car and she ends up going into the hotel to try to find out what room they are in.  Denis O’Hare (bald and in a dress) tells here is is a no-tell mo-tel but she decides to go to the bank machine for more bribe money. She gets to the room and confronts junkie Sarah Pauslon.  Handsome (Kathy’s son) is passed out or something.  Sarah leaves, but Kathy Bates was mad and pushed her out the hallway window to her death. When she goes back to the room, Lady Gaga is cradling the handsome dude’s head.
• In 2008 (or 2010) another handsome guy is with his wife and two Aryan children at the Santa Monica Pier and he takes the little boy and puts him on the merry go round.  Then he screws around with his phone and wouldn’t you know it, the kid is gone!
• In present day, two Swedish chicks rent a room in the hotel from a much older Kathy Bates.  They do not have a nice experience, and the finding some partially decayed dude in their bed was one of the best parts!  Eventually they get messed with and murdered by Kathy Bates (who is a regular person), Sarah Paulson (ghost) and Lady Gaga (vampire who runs the hotel as her own castle).
• Lady Gaga and Kathy Bates’ son (who is a vampire now) go to a movie in a cemetery (a real thing they do at Hollywood Forever cemetery in LA!) and bring home some other pretty people and kill them.
• It turns out that the guy who lost his kid is a cop who has some weird murderer after him.  He is married to Chloe Sevigny, who is a doctor.  He goes to the hotel to follow up on a phone tip, has typical ghostly happenings and, after his family is menaced at another house by the same murdering creep, the handsome cop leaves his wife and daughter so they won’t get hurt (which is stupid but whatever) and checks into the Cortez.
• Oh, and some other handsome junkie checked in and ended up getting super raped with a metal….thing worn by a weird gimp with turkey skin for a face.  And a DIFFERENT handsome guy is buying the hotel and Lady Gaga shows his kid to this cool room with ghost vampire kids in it and giant Tetris games and one of the kids is the one who disappeared from the merry go round.

I think that’s enough for one episode.  As of now, Lady Gaga is not bad at acting, not that it takes a lot for me to be impressed but the lack of Emma Roberts is troubling.  Too many handsome guys for me to keep track of so one of them needs to…buy a distinctive hat.  There were other things (like the maid who thinks you get blood out of sheets with steam) but I am going to stick to the main weirdness.  It’s AHS – if you try to hit everything you would go crazy!

Maybe that’s the point.  If so, then let’s all go crazy together as this is episode is close behind Coven as my second fave and has the potential to pass the original!

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Categories: Reviews

Tags: AHS, American Horror Story, Hotel Cecil, Los Angeles, Television, tv