- Network: FX
- Series Premiere Date: Oct 5, 2011
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Critic Reviews
- Critic score
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Asylum dives right in on racism, homophobia and sexism, and wrings something emotional out of them.
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So far it works.... Asylum feels like a more focused, if equally frenetic, screamfest. It's also gorgeously realized.
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Asylum delivers a much more evocative nightmare gallery without losing any of the franchise's provocative, look-ma-I'm-screaming bravado.
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This new Horror Story is nearly as depraved, unapologetically over the top and engrossing as the first season was.
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It's to the credit of Asylum's writers, directors and cast that the emotional pain of the characters often feels as real as their uncertainty and terror.
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In its first two episodes, AHS returns as a creepy, spooky jolt of unpredictable storytelling.
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Does it add up to a coherent whole? Impossible to say so far. Asylum is, in its opening episodes, more energetic and impishly funny than its predecessor.
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Like a good scare? How about a bad scare? Or a thousand scares, good and bad and crazy? Season 2 of "American Horror Story," subtitled Asylum, is for you.
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It's truly troubling to watch as helpless, restrained patients are treated against their wills. Yet despite mumbling over and over during the first episode, "I'm done with this already," I had to see the second.
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The first episode teases an exciting dynamic, with the possibility of forcing viewers to root for one monster over another.
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Occasional PSA breaks aside, Asylum is all in great and occasionally gory fun, and the cast members deliver the over-the-top dialogue with a heaping topping of relish.
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The most interesting thing here is the show's willingness to take risks: killing off major characters, running about 18 different plot lines at once, incorporating racy psycho-sexual and religious undertones, asking more questions than it intends to answer.
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Less scary than freaky, it's deliberately unhinged-light horror about low camp, a showcase for scenery chewing and giddy blasphemy, an exploitation chamber piece.
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This is still a cheeky, trashy, nasty series, one that'll do or show pretty much anything if it thinks it'll get a rise out of you. But its sense of itself has become more refined.
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Not everyone's going to like this or other aspects of Sister Jude's story, which essentially does for nuns what the first season did for real estate agents. But it's the kind of cliché meant to appeal to parochial-school survivors of a certain age of which, yes, I'm one. And Murphy another.
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It's dark, big-top sadism, and we wait for a story to emerge. [5 Nov 2012, p.41]
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American Horror Story: Asylum reintroduces the first season's nightmarish craziness but also sets it within a coherent basic history. It helps too that the new cast appears to be so tight.
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Asylum has some good special effects, just not much of a story to hang them on.
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Ultimately, it's the exact same tedious show they've been making, under one name or another, for years now.
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The series remains a collection of moments (creepy, campy, revolting) and stock characters, designed more to provoke and earn the "TV-MA" rating than to interact.
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The bad news is that this potentially rich stew of frights and kink has been underspiced: Asylum, so far, doesn't have the energy or the over-the-top inventiveness that Season 1 eventually displayed.
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If Freddy Krueger married Regan from "The Exorcist," and they moved to "Shutter Island" with "Agnes of God" on "Friday the 13th," they'd all end up in this Asylum.
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Some of its imagery is arresting. But this is mostly a sorry, unfortunate and even contemptuous enterprise.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 644 out of 749
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Mixed: 54 out of 749
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Negative: 51 out of 749
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Oct 18, 2012What
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Oct 18, 2012
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Jun 26, 2013