Dang-Blasted

Daymare Town -- Unwanted Souls Down an Uncharted Street

Picture a map of all the games you like. An atlas with land masses, oceans, towns and cities. Ignore that each game exists in its own universe; mash them up. Here’s Raccoon City. There’s Midgar, on another continent...and over there, the ruined vistas from Gears of War. Look up on a clear night and you’ll see Rainbow Road. Now, turn your eyes across the sea. Somewhere out there is the archipelago that make up the Myst series. Myst Island, Riven, Tomanha, Serenia and its stupid hippie mushroom tombs -- they’re all accounted for. But a map has edges. What’s past them? What exists where the video game atlas goes blank?

Maybe it’s Daymare Town.

Once again, we’re diving into the mind of Mateusz Skutnik, Polish artiste of many mediums. You may remember my post about Submachine, an incredible little game series that may be reaching its conclusion soon, although it’s the sort of project that never quite ends, or shouldn’t. Skutnik’s done plenty of other stuff, and I’ve been wanting to discuss my second-favorite game series of his, Daymare Town, which you should totally check out and play. For free. Or buy it, because supporting artists is a good thing to do. Especially when they can create something so weird, eerie, unique, and impossible to forget once it’s over. When they fill in that blank space on the map, banishing the void with ink and whimsy. And bad dreams.

The Submachine games are not known for their bright colors, but they’re freakin’ Katamari Damacy next to Daymare Town, which takes bleakness to a whole new level. It’s a world of scribbles and shadows on an off-white background, like doodles in an old sketchbook, which may well be where it began. Once again, we have the profound sense of isolation that characterizes much of Skutnik’s work. His worlds are lonely...but Daymare Town itself is far from uninhabited. You’re never alone, but you never feel welcome. Daymare Town is composed of narrow, crooked buildings with yawning black entrances. The town’s inhabitants tend to be small, furtive, tangle-haired homunculi, though many of them defy such an easy description. They regard you with suspicion, and while some of them can help you, none of them are your friends. There’s no music here, just the howl of wind. And there’s only one goal: to leave. Find the exit. How hard could it be?

The gameplay of Daymare Town is very familiar. Simple point-and-clicking from screen to screen, as you collect items that you’ll use elsewhere to open new pathways, or solve the very particular problems of the townsfolk -- a thankless job. I would not call the gameplay flawless. As with many adventure games, these fall victim to Skutnik’s particular brand of logic. Just like in Submachine, or the Myst series, this world defies conventional reality. You can step inside a painting, conjure a hot-air balloon from thin air, summon a skeletal giant from the desert sands, you name it. This is all wonderfully fantastical, but it makes a lot of the puzzles deeply illogical, until -- you guessed it -- there’s nothing left but to try rubbing every item on every potential item-using-spot. There’s also a bit of pixel-hunting -- meandering the cursor all over the screen to try and find stuff -- but because the art style is so minimalist, it’s rarely difficult to miss even little things like coins. Still, making it through the Daymare Town games without consulting a walkthrough is...impressive.

I don’t mind. The atmosphere is what matters. Daymare Town is a very creepy series. It’s nothing like a conventional horror game, but it gets under your skin. A lot of it seems inspired by vaguely Scandinavian folklore, gnomes and trolls and the like. Maybe Daymare Town is where bad little boys and girls are sent when they don’t eat their asparagus. The first game plunks you down in the titular town and all you can do is begin to explore, to creep into the slanted, skewed buildings and find what you find. Who are you? How did you get here? These questions may have answers (the protagonist is eventually revealed to be a black-clad chap with haggard features; Roland Deschain, is that you?), but Daymare Town defies all explanations. Once you “escape,” you merely find yourself in Daymare Town 2, yet another labyrinth of streets, mocking you. Sadly, the series got more complicated than it needed to be. Daymare Town 3 is quite ambitious, introducing a tedious mercantile system and sidequests. I normally love sidequests, but in this case, they’re way too hard to grok (poison the guard captain? Why the fuck would it occur to me to do that?), and it’s impossible to do them all anyway because two of them require the same item and there’s only one such item in the whole game. My anal-retentive side screams in anguish at such oversights.

Daymare Town 4 is pretty cool, though. It takes you out of the town and into a wasteland of cliffs and dunes. It’s more fantastical than the previous three, and more detailed, and I love imagining Skutnik hunched over his drawing board (or his tablet; let’s be realistic here), conjuring such unforgettable places and creatures. There are more sidequests, and way more items than you’ll actually need, but while the third game committed the cardinal sin of a limited inventory, the fourth one hands you a gigantic backpack that can hold all the useless junk for you. Of course, sifting through the junk, trying to find the items that actually matter...not so great. I still say these games could benefit from better puzzle logic. But, then, logic has no place in Daymare Town. It’s devoid of context. It just is. If the Submachine was a dumping ground for all things forgotten, Daymare Town is the repository for everything, and everyone, unwanted. And you yourself don’t want to be there, because once you become a citizen, you’re trapped. You’ve lost yourself, just like all those scampering, trollish little wretches that lurk in the alleys and doorways.

Games like this evoke so much, and I wish I had a fraction of Mateusz Skutnik’s talent when it comes to creating worlds. What Daymare Town lacks in coherent gameplay, it makes up for in vision. Yes, it gets frustrating when you’re stuck in a rut and nothing in your inventory seems useful. I can’t always claim that playing these games makes me happy. (Except maybe for Daymare Cat, a spinoff platformer that weaves the austerity into joyous music.) But everything about them entices me. I can’t help being attracted to the blank space on the map, and wanting to help fill it in. That said, I’m glad Daymare Town isn’t real, because such a joyless, freaky, cryptic labyrinth of lost souls should not be wished on my worst enemies. Except maybe for that one guy. Fuck that guy. I’d send him to Daymare Town and let the shadows devour him.

Not you, though. You’re cool. And that’s why I invite you to appreciate the games I love. Wander my map.

Myst Review Series

Myst• Riven• Myst III: Exile• Myst IV: Revelation• Submachine• Kairo• The Talos Principle• The Dig• Daymare Town• Fez• Tri: Of Friendship and Madness• The Witness

My, my. I have been looking forward to this.

Back in 2013, I wrote a post about The ABCs of Death, an anthology of (mostly) horror-themed short films. I found it to be quite enjoyable, albeit with deeply unreliable quality control. Some of the shorts delighted me, some were “meh,” and others made me want to track down the filmmakers and stick their heads in urinals. I guess it’s inevitable that this concept become a franchise, so here we have ABCs of Death 2! Yes, I’ve been excited for it, but also nervous, because the law of diminishing returns almost always applies to horror film series. To my wonderment, ABCs of Death 2 is at least as good as its predecessor and possibly better. I bet the latest brat pack of filmmakers used the first film as a guide for what not to do; there’s less tedium, less “meta” bullshit, less poop jokes, and more clever ideas. Why, I hardly hated any of the entries! Certainly nothing ruined my good mood like the piss-awful “T is for Toilet” from the first film. Progress!

So. Once, again, 26 directors (or directing teams) from all over the world are given a letter of the alphabet and tasked with crafting a bite-sized film of five minutes or so, dealing with death and/or horror. No rules beyond that! This series may turn out to be a godsend for all the aspiring filmmakers whose names and filmographies I cannot be arsed to look up. Let’s break down the deadly twenty-six!

SPOILERS may follow.

A is for Amateur
The anthology begins at quite a clip! We find ourselves in a neon, modern-day Noir-verse as a bearded assassin sets out to bag his target. But, as with many of these entries, there’s a twist: we get a montage of the assassin seemingly making the kill, and then the film backtracks to show how, in reality, he royally fucked up. The frenetic editing confuses, but serves to set up the blackly funny payoff, and the alphabetic title (which comes at the end) makes us chuckle. B+

B is for Badger
A newly-built chemical plant is wiping out the local badger population? Wherever might this be going? Not to creature feature gold, I fear. It was a nice move to feature an obnoxious nature show host, but we know exactly where the story’s going (nom nom!) and when the money shot comes, it’s disappointingly low-budget. My thirst for mutant badgers is unquenched. B-

C is for Capital Punishment
See, I much prefer it when a film, even a gory one, aims to do more than shock. In this case, no dice. A kangaroo court of angry men plans to execute a guy they think is a murderer, but when the victim turns up alive, can they abort the beheading? No happy ending ensues. It’s too gory and too nasty-spirited, and has no point beyond gore and nasty spirits. C

D is for Deloused
I won’t bother trying to explain this one, because it doesn’t try to make sense...but it’s freaky and brilliant. Depicted in eerily fluid stop-motion animation, it opens with a man murdered by undead captors, but I’m only scratching the surface. A sentence like “There’s a clown-faced demon in the giant louse’s anus and it eats heads” sounds like William S. Burroughs’ darkest, druggiest ramblings. But there it is. A short film this unsettling and surreal doesn’t leave your thoughts quickly. A-

E is for Equilibrium
A pair of shaggy-maned louts are shipwrecked in paradise and living the carefree life. A beautiful woman washes up on their beach and teaches them some manners, but then the triangle erupts into jealousy and violence. This is presented as a comedy, but the final scenes are honestly kind of sexist, albeit in a self-aware manner. Maybe. B-

F is for Falling
Not a horror film, more a statement. A female Israeli parachutist is stuck in a tree and pleads with a gun-toting Arabic youth. Things don’t go well, and although the ending surprises, it leaves you feeling kind of sad. But is that all it’s trying to say? That the strife between Israel and Palestine is sad? We knew that already. This one needed to either take its concept further, or leave out such an obvious “moral message.” I believe it would have had greater impact. B-

G is for Grandad
What a weird little film this is, in part because both its stars have random Axl Rose haircuts. They are a snobby young man who’s living with his grandfather, and said grandfather, who seems stuck in the past but has sinister designs on his grandson. It’s all a bit muddled; we just want to see the young douchebag get his just desserts. We do, along with a pointless final “shock.” Sleepaway Camp did it better. Next. C+

H is for Head Games
Bill Plympton is an animator whose obsession with facial trauma is prominent here. In his instantly recognizable style, we see a man and woman kiss...which turns into a full-fledged war between their facial features. And I mean WAR, quite literally. It’s creative enough, although Plympton already used this premise with his 1988 short, “How to Kiss,” and it worked better then. B

I is for Invincible
This one tries too hard. A bitter group of grown siblings attempt to murder their mother for her inheritance, but nothing will kill her -- not stabbing, immolation, or decapitation. It’s implied that the poor woman’s under a curse of some kind, and I wish they’d developed that idea more instead of just flinging fake blood everywhere. The Gothic imagery is cute, but not redeeming. C-

J is for Jesus
Did I say “tries too hard”? Change that to “tries so hard it suffers a hernia.” Fuck, is this heavy-handed. A gay man is bound and subjected to a rabid Christian exorcism. Want more? The victim displays stigmata, his captors have demon faces, and then his murdered boyfriend returns as a ghoul and kills them. Boo hoo, religion sucks and gays are persecuted. Yes, I myself am gay. That doesn’t mean I like being hammered over the head with childish depictions of homophobia. The cure is more love, not ghastly revenge fantasies. Fun fact: Some guys I know from high school submitted a film, “M is for Messiah,” in which a guy was eaten by zombie Jesus. I’d rather have watched that. D

K is for Knell
But what’s this? A genuinely scary and well-made entry? Yay! It’s my favorite of them all. A woman witnesses an oily black orb appear in the sky, turning everyone around her into murderers. It’s beautifully shot, with outstanding use of color and an eerie sound design. It’s mysterious, but has no need to explain itself. There’s something about Eastern Europe that seems to inspire great horror filmmaking (see also: “R is for Removed” from the first anthology) and this is no exception. A+

L is for Legacy
I was happy to see this one here, because African filmmaking is too often overlooked. That said, I was unable to follow the plot. I guess it’s about a human sacrifice that goes awry and summons a demon, but I’m not too sure. Most of the dialogue’s in English, to no avail, and the ending is botched. Still, its old-school special effects and bold visual style win points, and remind us that making movies is not a first-world exclusive. B

M is for Masticate
This one’s stupid, yet oddly lovable. For most of the film, a hairy guy with freaky eyeballs and pee-stained Tighty Whities is barging down the sidewalk, randomly assaulting people -- in super slow motion! I will say that the short has a great sense of timing. It’s obviously a joke, and the punchline will make you roll your eyes. (Hint: What freaked us all out in May of 2012?) I guess if you’re gonna be juvenile, go for broke on style. B+

N is for Nexus
Two Gothy types hurry to hook up on Halloween, and, along with a few other characters, hurtle towards a lethal traffic accident. I bestow the “style over substance” label upon this entry. Everything foreshadows the accident, and then the accident happens, the end. A story needs more than that. However, the filmmakers make good, creative use of camera mounts and editing, and succeed in making Halloween itself look grungy and unnerving.B

O is for Ochlocracy (mob rule)
You shouldn’t need to explain your title. Still, this entry comes bearing a great idea. A zombie plague hits Japan, a cure is discovered, and the zombies put the non-zombies on trial for the “murders” they committed during their survival. I believe this might actually happen if a zombie outbreak occurred, and the short wisely lets its premise do the talking, no gimmicks needed. It’s both funny and horrifying. A

P is for P-P-P-P SCARY!
Fuck that title. I hate that title; it’s the world’s biggest cheat. The film ain’t bad, though. It pays tribute to early-20th-century comedy, shot in purple-tinted monochrome and starring a trio of stammering, beaky-nosed jailbirds who have escaped. They encounter a man in the dark...but is he a man? I won’t spoil what happens, but it manages to be surprisingly creepy, given the overall humorous tone. A worthy homage indeed; I just HATE THAT TITLE. A-

Q is for Questionnaire
A lot of these entries have top-notch editing, and “Q” is no question. A guy falls victim to one of those “Instant Intelligence Tests” under a pop-up tent on the sidewalk. And “falls victim” is the right term; the man’s test is intercut with him having his brain surgically removed. For science? You’ll see. Besides the good editing, this one’s got a good soundtrack, with the victim’s horrid fate punctuated by the happiest, jauntiest music that ever felt totally inappropriate. A-

R is for Roulette
Three people sit in a basement, in formalwear, playing Russian Roulette. It’s a mysterious premise, and we spend the runtime waiting for the solution. When it comes, it’s maybe too obvious, but still neat. A pretty basic entry that features good acting and very good tension. B+

S is for Split
Oh, man, another good idea brought to amazing life. We’ve got a guy in France calling his wife at home in England, and their chat being interrupted by someone breaking into the house. The filmmakers use split screens to show us the husband, the wife, and the intruder simultaneously. I love it. The style would have been enough, but the plot also throws a couple killer twists in our face. I wanted to howl with glee at the final reveal. I’d watch a whole movie like this! Make it happen? Please? A+

T is for Torture Porn
...But not how you picture it. We see a sleazy porno audition, a lovely woman being treated with casual cruelty by the male film crew. Will the creeps get what’s coming to them? Yes, they will, but their exact fate is, shall we say, vague. This concept has been done plenty of times before, and better. Bonus: Sit through the anthology’s end credits to see a “continuation” featuring The Human Centipede’s very own Laurence R. Harvey! Uh.....yay? C

U is for Utopia
All together now: The future is cold and loveless, everyone is beautiful, and the imperfect are horribly persecuted. It’s every dystopian sci-fi ever, and here it goes again. However, the lack of originality is made up for in stylish filmmaking, as well as the disturbing fate of the poor schlub who doesn’t fit in with the Barbies and Kens. They didn’t reinvent the wheel, but they gave it a good polish. B+

V is for Vacation
This one’s a lurid and sorta interesting “depths of depravity” study. Shot entirely via smartphone, it features a guy calling his girlfriend from his sexy vacation spot. Then the guy’s drugged-up buddy snatches the phone and shows the girlfriend what they’ve been doing for fun. It’s cruel, its last-minute descent into bloody murder feels forced...but I can’t deny it’s effective at being distasteful. B-

W is for Wish
I laughed at this one, then felt a tad guilty. It begins as a 90s-style commercial for action figures, starring two bright-eyed boys who long to enter the toys’ world. They do, and discover it to be a grisly, violent war zone that only becomes more fucked-up. That’s the joke. Are ya laughing? I did laugh, as I said, so I suppose this succeeds, even if it’s sooooo mean. B+

X is for Xylophone
I imagine a lot of hair-pulling from whoever gets assigned the letter X. These guys just said, “Fuck it,” and went with the most obvious X-word. The result? A cute little girl whales on a toy xylophone, to the agitation of her grandmother, who looks like Wednesday Addams going through menopause. The moppet meets a grisly fate, and the film ends on a sustained note of...well, it’s more awkward than horrific. “Hey, look, gore! Can we be done now?” C+

Y is for Youth
I worried the anthology would pass by without any Japanese weirdness. Last-minute save! A teen girl composes angry texts aimed at her dysfunctional mother and stepfather. Her words become trippy revenge fantasies in which the adults are murderized by their own mistakes. Mistakes such as a giant hamburger monster. Just roll with it; it’s so bizarre and random that it passes tasteless and arrives right back at entertaining. Thanks, Japan. B+

Z is for Zygote
Unlike the first ABCs of Death, this one actually ends on an awesome entry! A man leaves his pregnant wife alone with a medicinal root that will delay childbirth. Thirteen years later, the husband isn’t back and the woman has a cheerful adolescent child...who is still trapped inside her womb. This fairy-tale-from-hell logic leads to one of the goriest scenes I’ve ever witnessed, but the film manages to be touching despite the body horror...and then ends on a note of sublime creepiness. Bravo! When they make the next one, whoever gets Z should watch this and take notes. A

And I’m sure they will make another one, because The ABCs of Death has turned out to be a gift that keeps on giving. I have no doubt they’ll find more filmmakers eager to put their visions up! I will happily keep watching, because this sequel quite possibly topped the original. Though I will dock points for its annoying theme song (a creepy little kid going “lah-lah-lah” for about eighteen fucking hours), which got super old as I sat through the credits to see if that really was Tom Felton in the “C” entry. (It wasn’t. Duh.)

But who cares about framing devices? Gimme more horrific and creative short films! Bring ’em on! Now I know my ABCs; next time won’t you scream with me? There, I wrote the third film’s tagline.

PART TWO: RED DRAGON

There was once a hungry fox who noticed a succulent bunch of grapes hanging high over his head. Craving the grapes, the fox did everything in his power to knock them down, but failed. Finally, disappointed, the fox went on his way, muttering to himself that he’d never wanted those damn grapes in the first place. What I’m saying is, some people will write lots of flowery paragraphs about how three seasons of Hannibal were enough, about how the show needed to end while it was still strong and undiluted, how we’re fine without any more, really. They are lying. And though I’m trying to be mature about this, FUCK, I AM NOT READY TO LET GO. I’ll maintain my vigil over the grave of this wonderful show, hoping for a hand with perfectly manicured nails to pop from the earth, clutching a fondue fork.

The final six episodes took Thomas Harris’s first Hannibal Lecter novel and made it into a vivid epitaph -- for now, anyway. There was no last-minute rescue by some other network. It hurts. It hurts bad. But I’m happy to report that the Red Dragon story arc married all the show’s best elements. It wasn’t sluggish like the first half of the season; enough material was packed into the six eps to make it almost feel like a season in its own right. It did justice to the novel (mostly) while bidding farewell to its cast of partially devoured souls drowning in the crimson allure of Dr. Hannibal Lecter. It still wasn’t quite as good as this show has been in the past, but it sated my hunger until the next course, which I must believe will come in time.

Hannibal, the man, is a construct. A series of elegant puzzle-box layers surrounding an unspeakable core. He is all artifice, all facade. Red Dragon gives us a killer who is the opposite: all emotion, all pain and id and physicality. That’d be Francis Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage), dubbed “The Tooth Fairy,” who murders happy families. A man so bizarre and inhuman that only two men and one blind woman can make anything out of him. The men are Will Graham and Hannibal himself. Three years have passed and Will has fooled himself into thinking he’s normal again. He has a wife, Molly (Nina Arianda), who nurtures him while knowing in her heart she’ll never quite have him. Hannibal, meanwhile, previously gave himself up to the FBI for shits and giggles, and now resides in prison under the cold, watchful eye of his onetime lover, Dr. Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas). Hannibal’s cell is more like a vast, luxurious study; even in captivity, he requires comfort. Jack Crawford wants Will to assist on the Tooth Fairy case, and Will is yanked back by the hooks still buried in his psyche.

The Red Dragon arc has a lot of ground to cover. It hits all the beats from the novel -- the tiger, the flaming wheelchair, the dentures -- and at times it felt like a checklist. The show continues its knack for surprising Lecter fans, often by swapping out one character for another. Alas, that Red Dragon couldn’t have taken up an entire season, a recurring tale mixed in with other material for thirteen episodes. Instead, Hannibal returned to its crime procedural roots somewhat, while also running with its dream-images of grisly beauty; it gave us the best of both worlds. You see, Francis Dolarhyde is transforming in his mind, giving way to an entity inspired by William Blake’s watercolors of a savage and sexualized dragon-man. Armitage, best known for playing Thorin in the Hobbit trilogy, portrays Dolarhyde as a man attempting to move and speak through constant, excruciating pain -- the pain of being a monster in human skin. He has a raw beauty (he looks a little like Robert Patrick’s T-1000) and a haggard, harelipped scowl, and in his debut episode, he conveys all we need to know without uttering a word. He thinks he’s impregnable, until he meets Reba (Rutina Wesley), the blind woman, who refuses to judge him. The possibility of love and tenderness cracks Dolarhyde’s human suit before he’s ready, allowing Will and Hannibal to slither in.

All things come back to Will and Hannibal; Dolarhyde is simply a catalyst to bring the two star-crossed antiheroes back into each other’s orbit. Hannibal has less to do in these episodes; cozy in his cell, he pulls a string here, nudges a chess piece there. Will, Crawford, and Alana find themselves scheming amoral schemes in dim rooms, and Will comes to accept he’ll never be free. He was doomed from the moment Hannibal saw him as more than a curiosity. But how does it all end? Oh, it ends. The season/series finale is an ending, to be sure. It could also be a beginning. The Red Dragon arc abandons the source material to focus on its three main players, and what follows can only be called a consummation of sorts. I won’t spoil it. But it puts Will and Hannibal in a place from which they may never need to return. And it finally, finally, allows Will a position of dominance, of control. Meanwhile, we get more-or-less satisfying cap-offs for other characters, including a truly shocking and pitch-perfect revelation concerning Dr. Bedelia du Maurier. The show even continues the dark running gag of inflicting copious bodily harm on sleazy Dr. Frederick Chilton (Raúl Esparza) without actually killing him. Dry chuckles. (In the book, tabloid journalist Freddie Lounds meets a ghastly fate; on the show, Lounds, gender-swapped and played with amoral relish by Lara Jean Chorostecki, was too good a character to sacrifice.)

Yes, the ending is an ending, and still, Will’s final decision is sure to be debated. (And the post-credits scene with Bedelia may be dismissed as a tease for a phantom Season Four, but still wraps up her character pretty well, when you think about it.) I will wait for more forays into this universe, but in the meantime...thank you, Bryan Fuller, for never, ever compromising. Thank you for using your final season to craft two very different, sumptuous tales -- even if you did rush the story along in the process. And thanks to the cast! Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy have woven the narrative around their relationship and will always be linked in my mind. I love how Laurence Fishburne took Jack Crawford from angry doggedness to bitter acceptance of man’s evil. I appreciate Dhavernas’ Alana Bloom, who was really annoying in Season Two (“I am sleeping with him, therefore I refuse to hear a word against him! BAWW!”) before undergoing a killer metamorphosis. And I have plenty of affection for those two wiseass forensics guys played by Scott Thompson and Aaron Abrams. (They have names, but from the beginning, I have lovingly thought of them as Thing One and Thing Two.) Finally, I tip my hat to the late, lovable Beverly Katz (Hettienne Park); I hope your thinly-sliced corpse turns up in a modern art museum.

Thanks to all. And I will wait patiently until the players find a time and a place to reassemble. In the meantime, my consolation prize: Fuller is working on the American Gods TV show, a project which has my full attention. He’s going to make it beautiful and epic, and, God, do I hope it won’t sink in the tide of bullshit on TV. Yes, I am grateful that Hannibal got three seasons when it could have only gotten one. Yes, its story can be over. But it doesn’t have to be. A show this unique, this ambitious, defies TV Land. Wait with me. Sit at the table and chat with me while the next course is prepared. It takes a long time to make a meal, but the result is all the more mouth-watering.

A toast to Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Long may he simmer.

5.1: Checking In

--What. The FUCK. Did I just watch.

--Yeah...sorry, anyone who was hoping to hold onto their sanity. Did you think I wasn’t gonna recap American Horror Story this year? I may not have unpacked its luggage in advance, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t check in. And hopefully the previous sentence is the only hotel-themed analogy I will use during Season Five. As October began, I experienced the same old tingly excitement of knowing AHS was about to punish my senses. I’m a bit more jaded about this show than I once was. But it remains a juicy guilty pleasure if nothing else. Will Hotel be the season that pumps a fresh dose of mojo into the proceedings?

--Probably not! Still...shall we?

--I can already tell people are gonna haaaaaate this season. In part because people hate every season. Look at any year of American Horror Story and you’ll find an angry subgroup calling it the worst. Murder House was a repetitive soap opera with zero likable characters. Asylum was a bleak, pretentious sobfest. Coven was an embarrassing clusterfuck that used gallows humor to try and hide its lack of coherence. And Freak Show was basically Glee with mass murder. So sayeth the hater brigade. The premiere episode of Hotel was a total fever dream. A love letter to Kubrick that included a severed nipple in the envelope. Nothing made much sense. Everything was fisheyed and queasy. Our latest malevolent locale, the madly Art Deco, trapped-in-the-past Hotel Cortez, defies all logic, or so it seems. Is there method to the madness?

--I sure as fuck hope so, because while I dug the sumptuous production values (great music, too!), I found the Hotel Cortez to be almost too horrific. It doesn’t even seem like a real place that became bad; it seems like a giant man-eating plant disguised as a building. It sits in the midst of Los Angeles, awaiting its victims, first represented by a pair of Swedish blondes who met the sort of fate you’d expect on this show. The Hotel Cortez has no wifi. Its elevator doors are clearly waiting to lop off a dick. Behind the front desk is Iris (Kathy Bates), an ill-mannered toad of a woman in giant eyeglasses who seems to hate...well, a list of what she doesn’t hate would be shorter. The hallways curve upon themselves and are patrolled by freaky little ghost children. The chambermaid is Mare Winningham (never good news on this show), and is probably a ghost as well. Peeps are sewn up in mattresses. Room 64 seems to be a locus of dark energy, especially in connection with 2:25 AM? Maybe? The Hotel Cortez is evil.

--And that’s my problem. It’s almost too much. Not only is the building evil, so is everyone who inhabits it on the regular. Iris may take no joy in forcefeeding raw organs to gibbeted victims, but does anyway. Her coworker is a bald gender-bender known as Liz Taylor (Denis O’Hare), who straight-up don’t give a fuck, and is already more entertaining than all three of O’Hare’s previous AHS roles put together. And then there’s Sally (Sarah Paulson), a trashy, predatory drug addict. A fellow junkie, blonde and ditzy and played by Max Greenfield, checked into Room 64 and wound up sodomized to death by this season’s freaky-monster-who-probably-won’t-last-past-the-first-four-episodes. Said monster has Elmer’s glue for a face and wears a drill-shaped strap-on, and Sally watched with a mix of relish and tears as the blonde ditz met his icky fate (or did he?). Sally remains a mystery, but I’m still super elated by how well Sarah Paulson can vanish into a role when need be. Emmy win? Maybe? Finally? Sally and the demon vanished very quickly when Detective Lowe barged in, which should have been a big hint that...

--What? Detective Lowe? Sorry; it’s hard to recap this damn show in a coherent manner. While the hotel is Kubrick on acid, the outside world is bearing witness to a low-rent version of Se7en. Detective John Lowe (Wes Bentley) investigates a pair of canoodlers glued together and nailed to a bed, and something clicks. He’s seen this before. There’s a serial killer a-serial killing. Every fictional detective has to have either a tragic past or an unhappy home life, and Lowe has both. He’s on great terms with his daughter, Scarlett (Shree Crooks...kids these days have weird names), but his wife, Alex (Chloë Sevigny), is distant. Their son, Holden, vanished at a carnival in 2010. Good to see Sevigny again; her ill-fated sex addict in Asylum was lame, and I hope Alex will prove to be more interesting. Anyway, the killer’s taunting Lowe on the phone, pointing him to the Hotel Cortez and then to a third murder, and we don’t know what the murders have in common yet (well, we do, but the show hasn’t officially called it), but Lowe has left his family and checked into Room 64 himself. Possibly with more than one motive.

--Okay, okay, okay, but WHAT ABOUT LADY GAGA? She’s the whole reason I put this season on my Cautious Enthusiasm list. Considering her overexposure in the show’s promos, is she a cool thing to have, or an awkward gimmick? Well, she plays The Countess, who may or may not be the hotel’s owner, but is definitely a vampire. Yep, a vampire. AHS hasn’t done vampires yet, and I’m sure they wanted to avoid cliché, so they ripped off Byzantium instead: this breed of vampire bleeds its victims with a spike-nailed glove. The Countess and her prissy boytoy, Donovan (Matt Bomer), were seen seducing another couple at an outdoor showing of Nosferatu (ho ho ho), engaging in a pansexual threesome, and turning it into a blood orgy. I can’t tell if Gaga can act or not, since all she has to do is be sexy and aloof. So far, so decent, I suppose. Also, backstory: Iris is Donovan's mother. Iris remains at the hotel to be close to her son, because back in 1994, Donovan died of an overdose, thanks to Sally. Wait, what? Iris then shoved Sally out a very high window. Wait, WHAT?

--I hope this doesn’t mean what I think it means. The blonde junkie and one of the Swedish babes also appeared to die and then return to life. Are they just doing Murder House again? Really? You die in the Hotel Cortez, your spirit is trapped there? If so, that is such a blatant act of recycling that I cannot forgive the showrunners. Hotel certainly seems to be hyperlinking itself closely to Murder House. Because who should waltz in but Marcy the bitchy realtor (Christine Estabrook), and I’m okay with this particular return because Marcy is the BEST THING EVER. I love her. I do. She was selling the hotel to a well-groomed fashion dude named Will Drake (Cheyenne Jackson), who has an annoying son named Lachlan (Lyric Lennon...kids these days have WEIRD names) and who is quite taken with The Countess. So was Lachlan, after The Countess showed him a secret room full of ghostly kids, gumball dispensers, and decades-old video games. It would’ve been hilarious if Lachlan had whined, “No Call of Duty?” But it mainly served to confirm that one of the ghost kids is Detective Lowe’s son. Are we surprised? And if some invisible owner is selling the hotel to Drake, does that mean The Countess is not herself the owner?

--Dunno. It was a lot to process. I’m really annoyed that they seem to be using the exact same ghost gimmick from Season One, but maybe there’s more going on than we’ve been shown. We certainly haven’t learned everything. Like, there was that big dude with weird headgear, and a reference to something bad in Room 33. And the poor person inside the mattress, and the eerie maid. And we have yet to see Angela Bassett, Evan Peters, and Finn Wittrock. (I’m already pretty sure Peters, who plays the Hotel Cortez’s original builder, is also the serial killer in the present day.) Yeah, this ep left me plenty baffled. And oddly tickled. It was so lurid and attention-starved. There was enough sex to almost be softcore porn. There were so many murders than I can’t believe the LA police haven’t descended on the hotel by now. But I got the sense that the hotel runs on dream logic. Don’t think too hard. Just hold on for the ride.

--People will hate this season. I bet they’re already tearing it apart on forums. But maybe the Hotel Cortez will messily give birth to something, not profound or all that original, but certainly memorable. I’m ready to witness the birth. So far.

5.2: Chutes and Ladders

--OH MY GOD EVAN PETERS. I have been waiting SO LONG for this damned show to give him a good role again. Stop trying to make him the “everyman hero.” He does psychopaths! That’s his thing! And now he’s back in top form, having an unholy blast, elevating Hotel to new levels of excess. Keep the momentum going!

--Have the episodes gotten longer, or is it just me? Can’t complain, I guess. This ep was rather expository but featured some decent plot momentum here and there. We should, I suppose, be discussing the difference between ghosts and vampires. Ghosts are...well, yeah, I delivered a tongue-lashing last week about reusing the gimmick from Murder House. But now that I’ve thought about it, every season of AHS has the same rules in regards to spirits. You die in a particular cursed location and your ghost remains there for good. Except on Halloween, when you may roam. Coven implied this with both Spalding the butler (killed; ghost trapped in house) and the Axeman (ghost trapped in house until returned to life by magic), and Freak Show had Edward Mordrake (ghost free to wander on Halloween Night only). Now there’s Sally, who can’t leave the hotel and who is responsible for sewing undead dudes into mattresses. Except, the two Swedes seem to have died for real. Huh.

--Maybe it’s a vampire thing? The vamps of the Hotel Cortez are a mix of tropes both traditional (they don’t age; sunlight is bad for them) and newfangled (no fangs. And no pun intended). They’ve hit the nail on the head in regards to immortality: it gets boring. The Countess admitted that the only time she really comes to life is during the bright, brief periods of decadence America goes through now and then. During the late 1970s, she was queen of the disco, feeding off the night, off sex and drugs and reckless pleasure. And now...could Pandora’s Box be opening again? Will Drake used the hotel to stage a trashy, trendy fashion show. Among the models was Tristan Duffy (Finn Wittrock, yum yum), a glamorously horrible meth-gobbler, a glittery trainwreck waiting to happen. The Countess smelled Tristan’s rage, his jaded first-world frustration, and knew he was her next partner in grime. Thus did Donovan get the heave-ho, as well as a rude lesson: vampires don’t love. They only lust. Eh, I’d rather have the hypnotic Wittrock over the whinging Bomer. No offense.

--Drake’s show also set the stage for a couple more plot-related thingummies. First, we met Claudia (Naomi Campbell?!), a pouty Vogue-head who’s all set for ghastly and gruesome ordeals, I’m sure. Secondly, Lachlan Drake, who’s made the hotel into his own personal Super Mario 64 castle, took Scarlett Lowe to visit a basement swimming pool where The Countess’s four little children of the damned sleep in stylin’ coffins. Scarlett recognized her baby brother, Holden, and visited him later, snapping a haunting iPhone photo and freaking her parents all to shit. As if her dad didn’t have enough to brood about!

--Best line: “C’mon, let’s stay in! We can binge-watch House of Cards!”

--Normally it bugs me when a show (or a movie, or a book) rams a social agenda down our throats. But I fucking hate the anti-vaccination movement. I hate it in ways I can’t articulate. I literally equate it with child murder. So I was very happy when Alex delivered an outraged rant to a lady whose kid was down with the easily-preventable measles. We need more of this.

--Detective Lowe, meanwhile, is sinking into the strange malaise of the Hotel Cortez. Sally got him to open up about his alcoholism (he’s seen things, man...he’s seen things), and then he got a package containing an Oscar trophy that had previously occupied the anal cavity of a dead blogger. After hearing the hotel’s backstory (more on that in a sec), he connected the dots. The Ten Commandments! They are the basis for this string of murders. We’ve seen Thou Shalt Not Steal (dead thief), Honor the Sabbath (dead migrant workers), No False Idols (Oscar up the butt), Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery (lovers dead in bed), and Honor Thy Father and Mother (discount Menendez brothers). Five more to go, and I wonder if any of our cast of weirdos is gonna end up a victim. And who is the killer?

--Well, I called it last week. Now I may have to backpedal. While galumphing about the hotel, Tristan met an unsettling man with an icky little mustache and an accent suggesting Howard Hughes by way of Tom Hardy’s Bane. The man dragged a bound woman onto a bed and shot her. Later, Iris gave Lowe the whole sordid tale. James March (Evan Motherfucking Peters!), a self-made oilman, built the Hotel Cortez specifically to be a staging ground for his endless, savage need to murder the shit out of people. Secret rooms. Chutes for disposing of corpses. March made H.H. Holmes look like Big Bird. He hunted for new ways to kill, often while wearing that steampunk headgear we glimpsed last week. He was assisted by the maid, Miss Evers, the Harley Quinn to his Joker. His office? Room 64. When the police came a-knocking, March and Evers killed themselves, forever stamping their mad phantoms into the hotel’s woodwork. And it was March who began the Ten Commandment killings. Ahh, but how can he have continued them in the present day, being a ghost who can’t leave the hotel? And was The Countess really his wife, or are we misled?

--So the mystery deepens, and my current pet theory is that the modern-day killer is none other than Alex. Wouldn’t that be a great twist? As a private doctor, she can be in many places, and Lowe did get a text from the killer via Alex’s phone. Occam’s Razor! But we’ll see. Drake is also a decent suspect (did he buy the hotel because he hero-worships March? Hmm). And it’s kinda nice how, so far, we don’t have any utterly pointless subplots. Eh, but I’m sure they’ll be along soon.

--Two episodes without Angela Bassett is a crime. A crime, I say. It’s hard enough to deal with the loss of Jessica Lange and Frances Conroy. I get it, Ryan Murphy: you have a thing for hot white guys with dark hair. You’ve packed this season full of them. But I need a diva fix! Lady Gaga can wander through as many random clumps of marble pillars as she wants, but I’m getting fidgety for Bassett. Don’t make us wait.

5.3: Mommy

--“Hi, Mommy.”

--Not “mother.” Mommy. This episode cracked open the case files on two women who lost their sons early and never got over it. Iris and Alex have plenty in common, including their helpless selfishness: He’s my son, no one else can have him! The difference is, Alex was a good mother, and she knows it, and Iris is a shitty mother, and she knows it. But both their children are now monsters, and both mommies may be heading down that path. Alex got an effective opening voiceover; we saw her dealing more with the dynamic duo of Anti-Vaxxer Mom and Measles Kid, and you could tell she was screaming on the inside: You did this to your son! HE’S YOUR SON! After losing Holden, Alex tried to kill herself once...that we know of. Now she wants a divorce, because she won’t admit that pushing her family away just agitates the wound. Never forget that AHS can be really powerful when it tackles simple human drama.

--Still, supernatural drama’s okay too. Claudia sure didn’t last long. Did they cast Naomi Campbell just so they could show her in a sexy nightie? (Hey, she looked DAMN good.) Without much preamble, the blonde junkie dude (I think his name is Gabriel?) exploded from the mattress, perforated Claudia to death, then collapsed in the arms of a startled Detective Lowe and later flatlined in the ER. Dafuq? I thought he’d already died and become a ghost! What is going on here? I demand an explanation, and I’m also okay with Claudia sticking around as a haunt. Just saying.

--The Hotel Cortez is giving Drake a serious case of blue balls. After March and Evers whined about their favorite murder-floor being renovated, Tristan sashayed to the penthouse suite, seduced Drake (bisexuality is the norm this season, and I’m not complaining), and was just about to kill Drake when The Countess silently stopped him. Later, it was The Countess’s turn to nearly get Drake’s rocks off and Tristan’s turn to cockblock. Poor Drake; guess his evening ended with a box of Kleenex and WellDressedDudesWithTheirDicksOut.com. The Countess revealed to Tristan that she lost all her dough to Bernie Madoff (this show uses famous people like punctuation marks) and she’s now planning to pull off a classic: marry Drake for his money, then axe him. Witness the return of the patented Finn Wittrock Demon Grin. He’s so onboard.

--Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness. The Ten Commandments killer’s motto seems to be, “Go big or go home,” because his/her latest deed was to murder the entire staff of a gossip site and nail their tongues to their desks. Slurp. Lowe’s at his wit’s end, not helped by the fact that he keeps getting quasi-seduced by Sally and her pointy-dicked buddy, definitely not helped by Alex and her folder o’ divorce papers. To the list of possible Ten Commandments killers, I must add Tristan (unlikely, though, as he only recently learned about March) and Liz Taylor (no one suspects........the BARTENDER!). But I still want it to be Alex. Because I’m sick.

--Donovan is not a character I like very much, and it didn’t help that he hates Iris so much he wants her to die. Model son, huh. But Iris isn’t much better, as she can’t admit that children grow up and become adults. Neither one of them is in the right. And it hardly matters, because I’m more interested in Angela Bassett. Aww, yiss. She snatched Donovan off the streets for a bondage and exposition party. She’s Ramona Royale, a Blaxploitation queen in the 70s. When that dried up, Ramona met The Countess and became her vampire lover. When that dried up, Ramona fell for a studly rapper and tried to vampify him, but the rapper and all his homies got murdered by a jealous Countess, leaving Ramona thirsty for revenge. She banished Donovan upon learning he’d been dumped, and I sure hope we don’t have to wait three more eps for her return. Bassett is, of course, just playing the same role as ever (a sassy, dangerous diva who gnaws on her dialogue like rare roast beef), but in this case, I reeeaaaally don’t mind.

--You could argue that The Countess is also an overly controlling mother figure, which is why it gave a nice jolt when Ramona revealed her notion to kill The Countess’s four little children of the damned. And our other hapless mommies suffered unusual plot twists as well. Alex stormed out of Lowe’s room after spreading the blue-balls virus, was snarked at by Claudia’s ghost, and then ran smack dab into Holden. Rather chilling was the utterly blank look on Alex’s face: she loved Holden so much that she instantly knows he’s...changed. Meanwhile, Iris enlisted Sally’s help in committing suicide, swearing she wasn’t gonna stick around in ghost form. But Iris proved death-resistant enough to linger until Donovan, who’d gotten some wisdom from Liz Taylor, burst in. Unable to revive Iris in the traditional way, Donovan opened a vein and fed her his blood. Iris is now a vampire. The Countess will be mad. Probably because she thought all vampires had to be thin and sexy. Now Iris is gonna want to raid her wardrobe.

--Speaking of which...in one scene, The Countess wore what looked like a church organ on her boobs. And during the Madoff flashback, she was dressed like Cruella de Vil on African safari. Is costume commentary my new running gag?

5.4: Devil’s Night

--An argument could be made that every serial killer wins. You can halt their spree, lock them up, and execute them, but it’s too late: they’re legend. James March touched upon this as he raised a glass at televison’s freakiest exclusive dinner party not hosted by Hannibal Lecter. Our species still worships a pantheon; the difference is, we are conceited enough to make ourselves the gods. And while somebody like Ghandi or Jane Goodall or Pope Francis may achieve mere sainthood, it’s the bad guys who we deify. And if ghosts are real, if negative energy and unfinished business are what causes a spirit to linger, then the great serial killers of history are truly immortal. Pleasant dreams.

--Every now and then, AHS does something where I’m not sure if I should be really, really offended. Remember when they used the racist murder of a little black boy as a set-up for rampaging zombie rednecks? They’re always crossing some line or other, and the part of me that isn’t a total freak wags a finger. It’s Halloween at the Hotel Cortez, Devil’s Night, a very special holiday. Because according to this show’s rulebook, Halloween is the one night when ghosts can wander at will. And a few of them wander over to the Hotel Cortez, where March presides over a private dinner for the worst of the worst. Jeffrey Dahmer. Aileen Wournos. John Wayne Gacy. Zodiac. Richard Ramirez. You may notice that a couple of those names were in the headlines pretty damn recently. And that’s my quibble. It’s one thing to portray, say, Jack the Ripper. But giving us Aileen Wournos, whose death is fresher than 9/11? Damn. Someone’s gonna write an angry letter or two. Anyway, they’re March’s special snowflakes, and I did find it a bit contrived that all of these killers visited the Hotel Cortez in life. The place seems to write its own reality, which is the only explanation for why no one’s noticed the FOUR THOUSAND MILLION murders committed within its walls in four episodes alone.

--Still, I think AHS did the smart thing. They didn’t try to portray these killers in a “realistic” manner, but gave us the glorified celebrity versions that the media turned them into. Wournos was played by our dearly beloved Lily Rabe, who I hope returns to her proper home on AHS now that her silly alien invasion show has fizzled. Rabe was facing the impossibly high bar set by Charlize Theron in Monster, but she was game, turning Wournos into a jittery, sneering ball of sexual fury with shark eyes. Meanwhile, in a sick little joke, Gacy, the “Killer Clown,” was played by John Carroll Lynch, aka, Twisty the Clown from last season. And was that Fringe’s Seth Gabel as Dahmer? Scrumptious. I do wish they’d acknowledged the well-known killers of the AHS-verse. Where was Oliver “Bloody Face” Thredson? Missed opportunity.

--Sheesh, I can’t believe I’m defending John Wayne Gacy, but this has always bugged me. I do not condone his murders for one damn second. I find him extra-creepy because I’ve met actual people like him: cunning, likable sociopaths surrounded by friends who witlessly deny and/or excuse their dirty deeds. Gacy was evil scum. HOWEVER, I hate the whole “Killer Clown” thing. He dressed up as a clown for certain public events. It had absolutely nothing to do with his murders. Until the media decided that it did. If we turn serial killers into gods, I blame the media for a good chunk of their holy scripture. Shit, we just turned one dead lion into a crucified Christ because Twitter said we should. I’m cutting short this rant before it goes entirely off the rails. But I’m glad this ep mostly portrayed Gacy without the clown persona. He may have worn the most unsettling makeup ever, but he was scarier as the friendly, charming neighbor with the crawlspace full of rotting teenage boys.

--Funnily enough, with a chunk of the main cast absent, it was Miss Evers who got the tragic backstory while bonding with Lowe. They share trauma: Evers lost her own son to the Wineville Chicken Coop Murderers, who I guess were too lowbrow to sit at March’s table. This apparently caused her mind to snap and her to become March’s accomplice? Maybe we’ll get the rest next week. But she’s definitely in her own purgatory.

--Lowe may be as well. Because the poor bastard was the guest of honor at the killers’ dinner, absinthed all to hell as they cavorted. And everyone else on the internet is calling the upcoming twist, so I won’t brag about guessing it. But I got the gist when Liz Taylor dramatically revealed Lowe’s personal invite. And when March was very cryptic about said invite and the reason behind it. Guys, I didn’t consider this at all. John Lowe is the Ten Commandments killer. His weird, dazed demeanor may well be covering up the fact that he himself is out murdering and doesn’t remember it! Devil’s Night may help trigger his horrified emergence. As the night wound down, Sally provided dessert -- a juicy man for the ghosts to prey upon -- and also provided solace to Lowe, writing off his experience as a boozy hallucination. I think Lowe’s about to become one cheatin’ husband.

--Alex has other problems. In the second major plot of the evening, she brought Holden home but changed her mind when he exsanguinated the dog. With Holden snug in his coffin, The Countess cast her spell over poor, confuzzled Alex. She was awfully confident that Alex would choose option A) willing vampification over option B) running to the fucking cops, one of whom is her fucking husband, who would presumably drop everything to help rescue their fucking long-lost son. Alex, you’re a tool. And now you’re a vampire. You and Iris can form a book club. First up: Fifty Shades of Grey. Also, I’m hearing theories that there’s some sort of power struggle going on between the ghosts and the vamps, with Sally as an independent go-between. I might be down with that.

--Countess costume commentary: During the no doubt massive police investigation following Holden’s disappearance, nobody at the amusement park reported seeing a woman dressed as Mary Poppins with a geisha parasol and her hat pulled down to her chin? Inconspicuous The Countess ain’t.

--AHS normally does Halloween as a two-parter, but this felt like a standalone episode, so who knows what next week will bring. I do think a little of those serial killers goes a long way. Except Lily Rabe. We can never have enough.

--This doesn’t really have anything to do with anything, but I’m fairly sure that in one shot, they digitally erased a dog’s butthole. I’m also fairly sure that the FX artist knocked back an extra glass that night.

--Hey, I sure hope Alex cleaned that broken glass off the living room floor. Someone could really get hurt! And she’d better have disposed of her dog’s corpse, because Scarlett is already gonna need copious therapy when she learns her entire family are vampires and/or serial killers. Girl can’t catch a break.

Fez -- THERE... ARE... FOUR... OWLS!!!

There are four owls. They can be found somewhere in the game. You need to speak to all four in order to unlock the secret of the giant stone owl statue. What? You didn’t have a clue? You saw an owl once, but assumed it was just part of the scenery? Oops. What a silly fool you are. Better get searching. Yes, I know the map is gigantic. Didn’t you realize there was a clue to the owls’ locations in a random room way back near the beginning? Well, it’s not our fault if you’re unobservant! Oh, and the owls only appear at night. Good luck, ya sorry bastard.

Welcome to the unique mix of glory and utter frustration that is Fez. I have such a weird relationship with this game. I recognize it as one of the coolest games I’ve ever played, but at the same time, it pisses me off to no end. The first time I played it, I was so nonplussed that I left it off my games-of-the-year list, which was probably a mistake. I included it in the Myst review series in part so I could bitch about it. But doing so meant replaying it, and, dude, I liked the game so much more the second time around. The great things about it loom larger, while the shitty things about it have...well, not entirely diminished. So brace yourself for a schizophrenic post.

Once again, we have a game that barely seems to relate to the Myst series, until you pay closer attention. It’s heavily pixelated like The Dig, but this time, that’s a style choice, a little slice of retro 8-bit hipsterdom. Its initially flat, boxy aesthetic certainly can’t compare to the sumptuous vistas of the Myst games. But there’s plenty in common. You’re a blank-slate protagonist tossed into a dreamlike open world consisting of several distinctly color-coded environments, and there’s no way to die, no enemies, and lots of cryptic, world-spanning puzzles to solve. Our beloved formula returns! Fez stars a little marshmallow-dude named Gomez who lives in a comfortably flat, two-dimensional plane, or so he thinks. Then the village elder summons Gomez for an epic quest! He is brought into the presence of a giant yellow cube that’s supposed to give him quest instructions, but the cube explodes and Gomez must hunt down all its fragments to save the universe. Since the cube presumably did not intend to explode that day, one wonders what Gomez’s quest was supposed to entail. Doing the cube’s tax returns?

This is where the very cool, unique mechanic of Fez comes into play. Gomez receives the titular accessory, which gives him the ability to perceive and manipulate a third dimension. You see, Gomez’s world is fully 3D, but he (and the player) perceive it from a fixed 2D perspective. Thus, you can fuck with spatial physics by rotating your view ninety degrees. Is a platform too distant to reach? Rotate, and boom, it’s now inches away. Are two patches of climbable moss annoyingly far apart? Rotate, and blam, they connect. Gomez must study the world from all angles as he hunts down the little golden cube pieces, and his hunt takes him in a non-linear fashion through a variety of vibrant zones. I’m not exaggerating when I say Fez is one of the most gorgeous games I’ve ever seen. The retro graphics fool you, until you begin to notice the sheer amount of detail crammed in. Beautiful textures. Ambient light and water. Color gradients that make the artist in me swoon. Each area is a vertical labyrinth and finding the correct path of ascension enables the player to study all these amazing little throwaway details. Fez feels like an actual world with actual history; its crumbling ruins suggest epochs we can only guess at, and each new zone (an island chain, a neon-lit city, a gothic graveyard, and much more) ties into the overall archaeology. This alone is reason to bump up the game’s letter grade.

But if we’re scrutinizing a potential successor to Myst, we can’t just go by looks. What about the puzzles? Here’s where things get weird. On the surface, you only need to collect the golden cube bits, which form 32 larger cubes and can be collected via basic exploration and platform-hopping. New areas introduce mechanics -- bombs, moveable sections, invisible platforms, time challenges -- that keep things from feeling repetitive. However, there are also 32 “anti-cubes,” and getting them is in no way straightforward. The anti-cube puzzles are all over the map, figuratively and geographically. Some are benign enough: move some blocks into the right pattern, use this treasure map to spot a hidden platform, etc. Others ooze past frustrating into the realm of unfair. There is an anti-cube that only appears once per week, in real time. Several require you to translate a made-up alphabet and a numeric system. There are puzzles that demand you visit a certain place when night falls; miss it and you’ll have to wait around for an in-game day. Other puzzles are impossible unless you’ve beaten the game and unlocked stuff. And what makes all this annoying isn’t difficulty so much as lack of obvious clues.

Kindly peruse this cute webcartoon about furries playing Until Dawn. It’s a good litmus test for what type of gamer you are. Me, I’m Rick the lizard. I’m a completionist; I like the feeling of knowing I’ve found everything, or as much as possible. Fez is incredibly daunting to me. Yes, I’m good at solving puzzles, but a lot of the puzzles in Fez aren’t what I’m used to. Translate a fucking alphabet? That is a job for a linguistic anthropologist, not a gamer. Fez accommodates the casual player: you can beat the game’s story without collecting a single anti-cube. But if you’re like me, you’ll feel inadequate. The first time I played Fez, I was left confounded and unsatisfied. When I went back, I was determined to penetrate deeper into the game’s secrets. Having done so, I feel better. Fez does reward your obsession: decrypt its codes and entire new vistas open up. I did what most people will do: I cheated. But is it really “cheating” at this point? Yes, someone online translated that damn alphabet for me, but that’s kind of the world we live in now. Fez is a game that requires a support structure.

I don’t believe you can make a game with such deeply-buried treasures and expect everyone to spend the time and sanity digging them up. One big problem I have with Fez is that playing it gets exhausting. If I find a crucial clue to something on the far side of the map, it’s gonna take ages to transport Item A to Slot B. There’s a warp system, but it doesn’t make re-climbing all those platforms any less tedious. Yes, the map screen tells you which areas still contain items and secrets, but was that one treasure chest near the ruined observatory, or in the crypts, or back in Gomez’s home village, or....? You see the problem. Even the gorgeous details begin to mock you. Is that pattern on the wall important? If the owls can talk, what about the frogs and worms? Did I miss something crucial in this area, and will I be able to remember it for future reference? It’s a completionist’s nightmare: a disorienting game that doesn’t provide the clues needed to point you in the right direction.

Still, Fez does grow richer the more time you pour into it. I’ll keep chipping away. Got plenty of time to do so, because designer Phil Fish had some sort of ugly meltdown, decided the gaming industry was bullshit, and canceled a planned sequel. Thus we can lump Fez into the same category as Braid: a well-made but highly pretentious indie that pompously deconstructs the very DNA of classic gaming, created by an artsy dude who sneers at us poor, unenlightened plebes for merely wanting to push buttons and collect stars. Funny thing is, a game can be all of the above and still be awesome. I would say that Fez is awesome. But if you’re gonna play it, you need to take deep breaths, align your chakras, and summon up reserves of patience you didn’t know you had. Because maybe this time around, you’ll notice the paintings that pinpoint the locations of the four owls. And you’ll remember to visit those spots during the nighttime. And you’ll already have a guide to morse code open in your browser. And your phone will be ready to scan the QR code in the throne room. But you still haven’t translated the riddles in that one chamber, and you forgot to lower the water level on the islands, and the Black Monolith is still a fucking mystery, and what’s with that creepy skull artifact? And...

Deep breath. Let’s start with the owls.

Myst Review Series

Myst• Riven• Myst III: Exile• Myst IV: Revelation• Submachine• Kairo• The Talos Principle• The Dig• Daymare Town• Fez• Tri: Of Friendship and Madness• The Witness

5.5: Room Service

--This episode could get American Horror Story canceled. Oh, I don’t believe for a second that it will. But it could. An army of indignant moms could start a letter-writing campaign, because how DARE this show depict something as tasteless as an elementary school massacre! Children can’t be exposed to this! If my child watches a show not intended for children, it is not MY fault, it is the SHOW’S fault. My child needs to be protected from EVERYTHING! No vaccines! No trick-or-treating! If I see my neighbor’s kids outside without an adult, I’m calling the police! This will definitely ensure my child becomes a proper adult as opposed to a paranoid, entitled shithead like me! My parents failed! I will not fail!

--I just summed up a lot of what’s wrong with America right now. So did this ep. The Countess’s brand of vampirism became a conduit for razor-edged social commentary. And the school massacre scene blew me away, because it was so unexpected, so offensive, and because it felt so important somehow. In addition to that take on modern fear culture, we also saw self-entitlement, contempt for the elderly (in the US, “elderly” now refers to anyone over thirty-five), sexual repression, the well-meaning idiocy of parents...hell, they even got in a brief dig at cultural appropriation. (“You’ve got that dot on your forehead.” “I’m Hindu.”) For these reasons, this is my favorite episode of Hotel thus far. Which may be a problem, as it all felt more interesting than ghosts, vampires, or dildo-demons.

--Both members of our Vampire Mommy Brigade experienced the unpleasant effects of changing. Alex was forced to guzzle bags of blood at the hospital, and also to endure having a fisheye camera clamped to her ear, because it’s artsy! Seeing the impending doom of Max the Measles Kid, she used her blood to save him...and convert him. He promptly killed and ate his parents, but that was only the beginning of young Max’s adventures! Meanwhile, Iris got a big wake-up call. All her life, people have shat on her. As she suffered through new-vampire tremors, did her own son care for her? Nope! Donovan dragged Iris to Ramona’s McMansion and offered her up like a Christmas goose. A pawn in their petty little scheme to topple The Countess. Back at the hotel, a miserable Iris found comfort, and a blood cocktail, in Liz Taylor, who...

--Well. This ep ensured Liz Taylor as one of my favorite characters this season. Denis O’Hare seems born to play the role. I always assumed Liz was a ghost with a lurid backstory. No and no. In his old life, he was a thoroughly wretched little man, stuck in a utilitarian marriage, happy only when he checked into hotel rooms and indulged in his private fantasies of wearing fur and silk, of being glamorous. Beautiful. Perfect. The Countess smelled his unhappiness, and did something that proves she’s not all rotten: she liberated him. She showed him how glorious he could be, and his reaction, his shyness and joy and relief, warmed the room. The Countess also murdered Liz Taylor’s homophobic coworkers. And he’s been reading Voltaire and delivering sassy barbs ever since. For such an act of twisted kindness, The Countess wins karma points.

--Nobody cares about John Lowe. Boo hoo, he’s having a meltdown and he got fired from the force. At this point, he’d better be the Ten Commandments killer, otherwise he’s useless. Not surprisingly, he fell into bed with Sally. It’s funny that they’ve given Sarah Paulson her best AHS character since Asylum, and are kinda wasting her. Every minute she’s onscreen, with her parched voice and eternally tear-filled eyes, I’m riveted. So how about giving her more than one freakin’ scene per ep?

--Alex, who could have been the pointless filler character her husband has become, hijacked the episode when she vampified young Max. And that led into the amazing, horrible chaos I couldn’t help but admire. At school, Max began slaughtering adults and infecting kids. Lockdown ensued. The media descended. Worried parents clumped behind the police lines. When the bloodied, shaken students were led to safety, they had their story straight: it was a guy in black with a mask on who did the killing. An archetypal Bad Man whose existence will be accepted without question. “How could this happen?” the public will wail. People will demand more gun laws, even though guns weren’t involved. They will waste their time on armchair outrage and superficial, useless “solutions” while ignoring the deeper problems, like an army of vampire kids lurking in LA. But take away the bloodsucking and this bullshit logic could just as easily be applied to Sandy Hook. Sorry if that upsets you. But it’s true. Our fear, our belief that we need to be afraid rather than prepared, is our greatest enemy.

--So vote for Bernie Sanders! Just kidding. Maybe.

--Iris had to deal with perhaps the scariest creatures ever to appear on American Horror Story: HIPSTERS. Two smug, whiny twentysomethings (Jessica Lu and Darren Criss) checked into the Cortez because Halloween sucks, #StrollerVermin. If the twelve-and-unders have been raised to fear life, the next-oldest generation is worse, because they believe they deserve a medal just for existing. Their theme song is “First World Problems” by Weird Al, only they’d hate that, because Weird Al is a pitiable relic who’s only funny to six-year-olds, #HighFive. They will never get within fifty feet of a celebrity, but demand a discount just for name-dropping. The fact that they despise anyone older or younger than them reveals their social toxicity. Non-shitty Millennials such as myself apologize for the hipsters. We really do. Anyway, this pair of vape-heads heaped all their disdain upon Iris...and, with Liz Taylor’s help, she fought back. Cat food passed off as paté? How about some old-fashioned stabbing? Yes, Iris murdered the hipsters, but it wasn’t played for laughs. It was a tearful, furious catharsis for a woman scorned by everyone around her. “I MATTER!” Iris howled, on behalf of all the mothers who gave their children love only to become a cruel Tumblr meme, #DinosaurMom. And her new boldness spells trouble for Donovan and Ramona’s plan. Good. Fuck those two.

--For some reason, when The Countess and Tristan simultaneously craned their necks forward to scrutinize Iris, I lost my shit and giggled for a couple minutes. Why was that so funny? Maybe I needed it on account of this episode being very, very unfunny. Reminding us that real horror involves misguided values and ingrained dread. The kids who are taught to stay away from school windows. The fifteen-year-old who steals his dad’s car, kills three people with it, and thinks he’s the victim. The parents who attack a teacher for giving their child bad grades, while their child is online, bullying a chubby girl into committing suicide. This episode made me angry. I hope I’m not the only one.

Bless me, horror movie gods, for I have sinned. In the wake of October, I can actually justify making a Halloween-y post, and what movies have I been watching? The fucking V/H/S franchise. Blame Netflix. At least I didn’t spend movie ticket money on Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, the “final” (har har) entry in a tired, wretched series that’s trying to rely on the even tireder and more wretched gimmick of 3D. If you did, the more fool you.

This post will look similar to my rundowns of The ABCs of Death and its sequel, but while that other horror anthology series is like an experimental art show, V/H/S is like the strip club down the road. It’s grungier, trashier, more juvenile (about thirty seconds into V/H/S/2, the screen is filled with a pair of bare boobs)...and more true to the horror genre, if I’m honest. I started watching on a whim and didn’t hate it like I thought I might. The gimmick of V/H/S is, of course, found-footage, and I think we’re all glad that the trend for el cheapo handheld camera hijinks is waning. Still, there’s a reason why it took off like it did. Found-footage horror, with its shakiness, long takes, and non-acting, looks and sounds real enough to get under your skin. And the V/H/S series, lowbrow though it may be, does showcase some interesting twists on the idea that any random rube can film something horrifying.

Here’s the entire series thus far! Each main entry is broken up into several short films, with a wraparound tale that ostensibly connects the dots.

V/H/S

Tape 56
We’re off to a lousy start. The events of “Tape 56” are a bit too mysterious and feature the most unlikeable characters I can imagine. They’re a group of assholes who get off on being assholes (property damage! Sexual assault! Fun!), and who break into an old man’s house to find the guy sitting dead before a strange shrine of old TV sets and VHS tapes. As the burglars view the tapes (which are represented by the entries below), ghostly shit starts occurring. Problem is, we never get an idea of what’s going on, or why we should care. As I said, the assholes are utterly irredeemable, which might have been fine if they’d gotten cool death scenes. Most of them croak offscreen. Considering the balls-out gore of the other entries, this wraparound is just toothless. C-

Amateur Night
More assholes, yay! This time, the assholes are young brobags who want to film their own porno flick with a hidden glasses-cam and unsuspecting female partners. I think this anthology could use a bit less rampant misogyny, but it’s the bros who suffer the gruesome fallout when they recruit a spooky young woman who turns out to be...other than human. This entry features alllll the nudity, alllll the gore, and very few surprises. But it aims low and connects with a bang. Good makeup and special effects, and Hannah Fierman, who plays the predatory succubus, has an eerie, riveting screen presence. I could believe she was a monster. That’s a compliment. B

Second Honeymoon
Not really a horror story, more like a weird urban legend. A young couple are vacationing out West, trying to rekindle their dried-up passion, and someone might be stalking them. The story takes a slow-burn approach, with excess footage of the couple doing nothing in particular, in an attempt to build suspense. It doesn’t quite work. Yeah, after a long time, we get a gory payoff and then a final plot twist that works okay, I guess, but leaves plot holes. I think it’s supposed to be a modern-day Hitchcock story, complete with its very own Bates Motel. But if you’re gonna twiddle your thumbs for most of your runtime, make sure the payoff is all the way to the moon. C+

Tuesday the 17th
Okay, this feels like horror! Even if it doesn’t entirely make sense. A girl named Wendy takes three friends to her family’s remote cabin in the woods, or so she claims. I’m not spoiling much to say that Wendy has an ulterior motive. In the middle of nowhere, the four kids face an...entity...who appears on camera as a staticky glitch. This is actually very frightening, demonstrating how it can be way scarier to imply something than to show it. The film bets everything on how freaky its killer looks, and almost wins out, but suffers from not-great dialogue and odd character behavior, especially on Wendy’s part. She’s played very inconsistently, which distracted me right up until the end. But I did get scared, so thumbs up. B+

The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger
This is definitely the best entry in the first V/H/S, if only because of how it teases our expectations. The titular Emily has moved into a new apartment and is video-chatting with her long-distance boyfriend. She thinks the place is haunted, and sure enough, we soon begin glimpsing ghostly children in the background. The ghosts are somehow tied into Emily’s childhood trauma and a mysterious lump on her arm. What’s going on? Is Emily crazy? Then how can we be seeing the ghosts too? I particularly liked the non-acting in this one; both the main characters feel like real people trying logically to explain what can’t be explained. The climax plays out very well, with a big, fat plot twist that makes you kick yourself for not realizing what was really going on. Lastly, the video-chat format offers a nice break in style. Well done all around! A

10/31/98
1998, a time when VHS tapes actually still existed. This final entry is just plain fun. Four dudes are off to a Halloween party, only they get the address wrong and barge into a house that is very, very, very haunted. True, their behavior follows dumb movie logic (once they established the clear lack of any Halloween party, why didn’t they leave?) and they remain pretty clueless even when the supernatural shit hits the fan. But these guys, at least, aren’t assholes. They try to do the right thing, and you kinda want them to escape a horrible fate for once. On the flip side, the special effects are really good, both scary and goofy, no holds barred. We are not meant to take it seriously. We are meant to jump, shriek, then laugh. Mission accomplished. B

Overall Grade:V/H/S is too long and still finding its footing. If they’d cut “Second Honeymoon” and made “Tape 56” way shorter and less muddled, it would leave a better impression. Still worth it for the good bits. B

V/H/S/2

Tape 49
The wraparound is obviously supposed to be a sequel to “Tape 56,” as it features the exact same premise: amoral schmucks break into a house, find VHS tapes, die horribly. One problem I have with this whole premise is that these people are watching tapes that are ostensibly real and contain ghosts, demons, murder, you name it...and their response is never anything more than “Huh.” Still, I found “Tape 49” more bearable than its predecessor. The burglars are boring but not such horrid scumbags, the pace is brisker, and there are actually some scary moments. The camera keeps catching glimpses of a lurking threat the burglars don’t see, and it did give me shudders. It still doesn’t really explain what’s going on. Comes a little closer, though. B+

Phase I Clinical Trials
These directors are trying different things with the found-footage concept, and kudos to them. But this short fumbles. The main character has an “ocular implant” and we’re seeing everything through his eyes. Didn’t you know we can now turn people into cyborgs? Skynet, baby! Anyway, the dude starts seeing ghosts through his robo-eye, and the entry is content to rip off Paranormal Activity and feature the most typical and predictable of jumpscares (every time the guy turns around, there’s guaranteed to be a phantom right behind him). Being startled does not equal being scared; thus, nothing here scared me. I could have accepted either the lame premise or the uninspired ghosties, but not both. Also, this story was already done ages ago. C

A Ride in the Park
Looks like somebody wanted an excuse to shoot lots of bloody zombie mayhem! If there’s anything more tired than found-footage horror, it’s zombies. However, this entry works because of how it approaches a well-tested story. A bicyclist with a helmet-cam stumbles into an undead outbreak. But it’s not a survivor’s tale: our hero is very quickly zombified, and before long he’s filming his own grisly attempts to feast on the living. When you think about it, we don’t often get to see a zombie’s POV, so the novelty factor makes up for the lack of originality everywhere else. Also, there’s tons of cheerful, old-fashioned gore and guts on display. I think I would have preferred an explosive climax over the more “thoughtful” ending we get. But it manages to inject some juice into the genre. B+

Safe Haven
This is the centerpiece of the entire film, and everyone knows it. It’s the longest entry and by far the best. An Indonesian film crew obtains permission to enter the compound of a religious cult and film their everyday life. Wouldn’t you know it, the hapless wannabe journalists arrive right when the cult decides the End of Days is nigh and it’s time to break out the cyanide punch and prepare for the coming of the Dark One. The plot takes its time in getting to the good stuff, and when it does, hoo boy. We’re dragged into a crimson maelstrom of shocking, outrageous, unapologetic, capital-H Horror. The carnage keeps finding new ways to surprise us, and everything -- the setting, the people, the effects -- is played for maximum HOLY SHITBALLS. I loved it. It really is a horror junkie’s dream and it sets the bar super high for everything to come. My only real complaint is that, again, the ending didn’t quite satisfy. The final shot comes off as unintentionally funny. Was that deliberate? A punchline to a very black joke? I can’t tell, but if you ignore that one misstep, “Safe Haven” is one nasty, vicious, raging little ball of horror-movie greatness. A

Slumber Party Alien Abduction
They really should have ended with “Safe Haven” instead of this nonsense. Now that you’ve read the title, you don’t need to see the film. Aliens abduct kids. Really, that’s all they’ve got. The kids are so fucking annoying that we feel nothing when they meet their poorly-defined fates. And the aliens are just as bad: generic gray-skinned types who lurch about, bellow, and wave their arms in the air. Y’know, just like you’d expect from an advanced race with interstellar travel. The aliens from Signs look like Vulcans by comparison. And the “scary” scenes are composed of loud noises, bright lights, and more shaky-cam than all the other entries put together. Hard to be frightened when you literally can’t tell what the fuck is going down. There’s only one decent idea: the camera is mounted on a live dog. Spoiler alert: the dog dies at the end. Just to ensure your mood is ruined. D

Overall Grade: It’s funny how V/H/S/2 has both the best and the worst entry in the entire series. Things sort of even out overall, helped by a tighter pace and a much better wraparound segment. I’d say it’s a leeeeeetle bit better than the first one. B+

V/H/S: Viral

Vicious Circles
The latest wraparound story wisely breaks with the old format and tries something new, with generally successful results. One dark night, a sinister ice cream van leads the police on a chase through the city, while the general public circles like sharks, smartphones in hand, hoping to land the ultimate viral video and be briefly Youtube-famous. The story focuses mainly on a dude who thinks the van snatched his girlfriend, but other characters pop in here and there, making the mayhem into an effective ensemble piece that grows increasingly end-of-the-world-ish. The moral is that our voyeurism may be our undoing, and it’s delivered via decent acting and some freaky gore. Way to up the ante! A-

Dante the Great
Say hello to the gritty reboot of Now You See Me. A trailer-trash magician happens upon a black cloak that allows him to perform real magic -- but the garment demands human sacrifice in return. Interestingly, this is presented as a faux documentary, complete with stock footage and smug interviewees. Probably the best approach to what is, a heart, a profoundly ridiculous story. By the time the climax hits, with SWAT team guys getting ripped apart and two characters flinging magic tricks at each other, we realize we’ve been humbugged. The nonstop special effects are very good but almost too slick, and the filmmakers totally cheat with their handheld footage: certain shots occur when there is no one who could possibly be filming them. Maybe it’s magic. Maybe it’s laziness. C+

Parallel Monsters
This one’s got a sci-fi twist, and is actually my favorite of the Viral bunch for how far it takes its premise. It’s about a guy who invents a gateway to a parallel universe. He comes face to face with another version of himself, and they agree to explore each other’s lives for fifteen minutes. The fun, if you can call it that, comes from the, shall we say, provocative ways in which the B-universe differs from ours. It made me chuckle like a weirdo when...well, I won’t spoil anything. But I liked how the entry presented the B-universe’s, um, abnormalities without explaining them. No need. After all, it’s all perfectly normal...to them. And the unhappy ending proceeds with a dark and grisly logic. Good effects, lots of surprises, and a playfully over-the-top aesthetic make for quite the roller-coaster ride. A

Boneshaker
Why must some filmmakers act like fucking thirteen-year-old boys behind the camera? I ask you. “Boneshaker” follows some douchebags who head to Tijuana to film their bitchin’ skateboarding video. Some occult crap happens and the gringos are attacked by a horde of zombie cultists or something. The film quickly devolves into an endless orgy of first-person murder, a cheerless video game in which the “heroes” behave like, well, video game characters, apparently thrilled by the prospect of beating Mexicans to death. There’s even gangsta rap on the soundtrack. It’s boring, then it’s stupidly violent, then the violence gets boring. And it’s a bit racist too. So I won’t waste any more time on it. D+

Gorgeous Vortex
Bonus round! This short film was cut from the final anthology and appears as an easter egg on the DVD. Having hunted it down, I found it visually striking, but I can see why they gave it the axe. It is insufferably avant-garde. It has no dialogue and basically no plot...just a series of artsy, sorta-connected scenes and images. There is a gorgeous supermodel drifting through urban decay. There are creepers with white stocking masks. There is oral sex. There are many, many shots of dead and/or kidnapped women. A hideous monster turns up near the end, why not? The director definitely has a major fetish for high heels. And half of it isn’t even found-footage. Many of the images are evocative, and the score is quite good...but it’s just too obtuse. It obviously wants to be “interpreted,” but I’m not sure there’s much to interpret. Just well-shot vacuity. B-

Overall Grade: I’d say V/H/S: Viral is by far the weirdest and most unpredictable of the series. And that’s good! I much prefer it over the same old ghosts and jumpscares. You can’t accuse this threequel of recyling. However...it’s not scary. At any point. Lack of actual horror is pretty damn significant. They’ve gotta balance the fear and the creativity to really hit gold. B

Will there be any more entries in the V/H/S series? Maybe. Like The ABCs of Death, it’s a decent showcase for filmmakers, and while it’s not nearly as sophisticated, it offers up some nice nuggets of low-budget fear. Found-footage may be going the way of the VHS tape, but in this little haven, perhaps it can still thrive. We’ll see.

5.6: Room 33

--There were four naked guys in this episode. We are truly living inside Ryan Murphy’s sex fantasies, people. To be fair, the ep served up a heaping helping of Nordic boobs and legs as well, plus The Countess’s pert, leather-clad booty. I believe sex is good for the soul, but the Hotel Cortez negates that effect. The only people who had good sex this week were bound for a tragic fate. And let’s not even get into childbirth!

--Actually, let’s. The “thing” in Room 33 was fleetingly mentioned ages ago, but now we’ve got the whole scoop. Room 33’s occupant is Bartholomew, the eternally crib-bound vampire son of The Countess. And how did little Barty-Boo come into the world? Heh. In 1926, The Countess needed to expel her rapidly-gestating bundle of joy, so where did she go? The fucking Murder House. Great to see that awful edifice again! The good Doctor Charles Montgomery (remember him?) was all too happy to abort The Countess’s baby, and utterly fascinated when said baby ate his nurse. Barty-Boo’s been in Room 33 ever since, never aging, ever hungry. Which may explain The Countess’s need to abduct actual children. Her one flesh-and-blood progeny will always be...a THING. It’s almost tragic.

--How low can Lowe go? Pretty low. He found the swimming pool coffins, requiring Alex and Liz Taylor to execute a swift cover-up. Their timing was excellent, because The Countess jetted off to Paris with Will Drake, Iris blew the whistle, and Donovan and Ramona slithered in to commit some righteous infanticide. No vampire kids were to be found, but that didn’t stop Ramona from visiting Room 33. Killing Bartholomew Countess (I’m gonna pretend his last name is “Countess” because it’s funny) would have been the ultimate act of vengeance...only Barty-Boo’s a trouper, and he escaped both Ramona’s blade and the room. Meanwhile, the yellow-bellied Donovan moped around the penthouse suite and encountered, of all people, the blonde Swedish babes from the premiere. Dead, of course. He explained to them that it’s easy for a ghost to become trapped in a behavioral loop (this was hilariously demonstrated by last week’s dead hipster stomping around, squalling for kale) and they need to find a “purpose.” Like that one waterlogged lady ghost on the fifth floor. Yeah, remember her? Me neither.

--Anyway, the Swedes tried some violent murder and didn’t enjoy it, so Alex recruited them to break Lowe’s widdle bwain and drive him out of the hotel. The sight of Lowe running around the lobby, butt-naked and covered in ghost blood, really made me think they’re taking a satirical approach to his mental ruination. “This is MY meltdown! I’m havin’ it!” And it stung, being kicked off the crime scene when the Ten Commandments killer struck yet again (Thou Shalt Not Take the Lord’s Name In Vain!). Hounded at every turn by various spooks, Lowe finally fled the Cortez, little realizing that Bartholomew had stowed away in his suitcase. Yeah...Lowe’s attempt to patch things up with Scarlett backfired (no pun intended) when he spotted Barty-Boo and emptied several rounds into the kitchen floor. Jesus, I feel so fucking sorry for Scarlett right now. She’s got a mom who’s flat-out ditched her, and a dad who still loves her but is a whackjob. She’s become the saddest tale Hotel has to tell.

--Or has she? In a very abrupt twist, we learned that Liz Taylor has fallen head-over-Pradas in love...with Tristan. Do I buy this? I believe in Liz’s love, but I can’t quite swallow that somebody as vain and superficial as Tristan would come to love Liz. Still, let’s learn us a lesson and not judge a book by its cover. Tristan had already figured out that his days with The Countess were numbered. Liz was hoping for one act of selflessness from The Countess. Just one. And Liz has become such a full-bodied character that I really felt for him, especially since it was obvious how this story would end. Liz should have paid attention to Ramona’s warning -- Ramona, who’s witnessed The Countess’s lethal jealousy firsthand. Instead, Liz and Tristan appealed to The Countess for mercy. For her blessing. Oh, she gave it, all right. She blessedly slit Tristan’s throat and told a weeping Liz, “He’s yours. Bury him.” I saw it coming, but it wasn’t any easier. Maybe Tristan will become a ghost; that’d be an okay consolation prize, right?

--Countess costume commentary: Brussels sprout hat. That is all.

--I have some extra space, so let’s finally talk about this season’s opening credits. The fact that I haven’t mentioned them yet shows they don’t do much for me. I mean, they’re fine, but the past couple years gave us artistically striking openers, and now they’ve fallen back on a lot of standard fare. Blood! Babes! Bad interior decorating! I do like the recurring theme of peering through a peephole, and I like how the actors’ names are spelled in mournful orange neon. But cramming the Ten Commandments in there makes things far too busy. And they need to stop adding crap to the theme music; it’s spookiest in its original, minimalist state. Eh.

--Overall, a brisk and gripping ep that covered good ground and made room for everybody on the main cast...except Sarah Paulson. FUCK. It’s like they’re openly mocking me at this point. But I have to give them credit for actually making little Bartholomew Countess scary. Less is more! The vampiric infant was freakier when we never quite glimpsed him. Until the end. And what a good final scene! Alex, who has turned into quite the calculating schemer, rescued Bartholomew from the Lowe residence and returned him to a very flustered Countess. Now Alex has something major to hold over her mistress’s head, which will add even more dynamics to the hotel’s power struggle. And at the very end, we finally got a brief look at Bartholomew’s face, and it was HORRIFYING. That is the kind of scary payoff this show needs more of!

--There’s less of a three-act structure this season, but since we’re just about at the halfway point, I trust Hotel can maintain some narrative momentum. Many questions remain to answer. And many mattresses remain to sweatily hump upon.

5.7: Flicker

--Marcy! NOOOOO! Damn you, Rudolph Valentino! Damn you and your silent-movie vampire virus!

--I just demonstrated how utterly bonkers this show is when taken out of context. Or even in context. What a weirdly awesome episode this was. It can be risky to ignore most of your subplots, or it can really pay off. “Flicker” gave most of the cast the week off in order to unveil the backstory of The Countess, and it’s just as glamorous, gruesome, tragic, and sexy as one could expect. It began when Drake’s renovation crew discovered a barrier of solid metal...and behind it, an entire section of hallway, moldering and forgotten. But not unoccupied. A pair of decrepit vampires lurched from the shadows and fed upon the work crew. The Countess, for once, had no explanation. But, Iris noted, she looked afraid. Maybe she smelled something she recognized. A trace of cologne, an echo from far in the past...

--A creature like The Countess can only hail from a time when beauty and pleasure ruled the landscape. She has worn many guises, but it’s inevitable that the 1920s birthed her. Tinseltown. The flickers: those soundless, treasure-box films that changed America forever, blazing on screens, turning men and women into gods, before sound came along and snuffed the careers of the shrill-voiced and foreign-accented. Elizabeth, as she was once known, began her career as a cleavage-baring extra, but had the amazing fortune to catch the eye of film titan Rudolph Valentino...played by Finn Wittrock. My guess is that this dual casting is a nod to the monster movies of old, when vampires and mummies pined for long-dead lovers and set their sights on modern-day doppelgangers. Elizabeth was claimed by Valentino and his sultry wife, Natacha Rambova (Alexandra Daddario), and apart from the amazing sex, she found love. Real love.

--Valentino died. Elizabeth got the news during the inauguration of the Hotel Cortez, and prepared to fling herself out a window before a lusty James March saved her. Broken and jaded, she married March and descended into his twisted world. What did she care, as long as she had pretty things to distract her from the wound in her heart. Turned out Valentino not only lived, but held life eternal. I really dig this particular origin of vampirism: the “blood virus” was unearthed deep in the Carpathians by German director F.W. Murnau, as he filmed Nosferatu, which most agree is the first and greatest of classic vampire films. Nosferatu is not about charming, sophisticated blood-sippers. It is about a primal, bestial vampire who doesn’t even try to pass as a human being. Murnau embraced the virus, sharing in the savagery but ushering it into society. He saw the coming of the sound pictures, the death of silent Hollywood, and he sought to preserve something of the old ways. Murnau vampified Valentino, Valentino vampified Natacha, and both of them vampified Elizabeth, planning to spirit her away to a life of eternal bliss. And so they would have...if March hadn’t been listening in.

--Elizabeth never got her Hollywood ending. She lost her great lovers twice in a row. She inherited the Cortez and became The Countess, aloof and loveless, drowning in earthly pleasures. In the present day, The Countess visited March for a cool, cordial private dinner. She wanted to tell him she’s marrying Drake. March had something to tell her, too: he’s the root of all her misery. He nabbed Valentino and Natacha and bricked them up in that hallway to rot, unable to die. What will The Countess do, now that she knows the truth? It’s not like March can die twice...but maybe she can strike at him in other ways.

--“How would someone even know their anus needs bleaching? I couldn’t pick my butthole out of a lineup.” Oscar winner Kathy Bates, ladies and gentlemen.

--So, yeah, it turned out that the creaky old vampires in the hidden hallway were, you guessed it, Valentino and Natacha. And, to my sorrow, their third victim of the day was Marcy the realtor. Alas. She survived the Murder House only to gurgle her last on the tacky carpet of the Cortez. I shed a tear. Snark has lost one of its champions. After Marcy, the vamps devoured some Aussie strippers, because any nutritionist can tell you that Aussie strippers are high in antioxidants. Just as The Countess was learning what really became of Valentino and Natacha, they were striding from the hotel, young and healed, ready to enter a new age. Can Hollywood handle such a comeback? Can they be put in charge of that new brood of vampire kids?

--Besides giving us quality backstory, this ep made me care about Lowe’s odyssey again! Seemingly contrite, Lowe checked himself into a hospital for psychiatric help, but he had an ulterior motive: he’d discovered that the suspect in the Ten Commandment killings was being held there. Lowe busted into the suspect’s cell and found....a spooky girl named Wren (Jessica Belkin), one of The Countess’s little blonde vamps. Lowe listened, stunned, as Wren revealed she’d been helping the Ten Commandments killer. His semi-willing accomplice the whole time. Lowe’s this close to catching the killer, but he won’t like what he finds. Because I watched Wren closely, and I saw how she looked at Lowe and reacted to his words. And I knew. Lowe busted them both out of the hospital and promised he’d end the Ten Commandments killer for good. “You’re going to kill him?” Wren asked. Then: “I really like you. I’m sorry to see it end. Goodbye, John.” And then she flung herself in front of a truck. Her last words are the key. John Lowe is the Ten Commandments killer. Two men in one body. Wren knew it, and now, so do we. And that’s why I really can’t wait for the next episode. Stupid Thanksgiving, forcing us to take a week off!

THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY, pt. 2

What follows is my final review of the Hunger Games franchise. If you need a refresher, why not revisit my posts on The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay, pt. 1.

Thus another titanic film franchise draws, panting, to a close. And what a close. Four films might not seem as momentous as six films, or eight films. But those other guys seem determined to chug onward with their Silmarillions and their Fantastic Beasts, while I must believe that we really have seen the end of Katniss Everdeen and the war-ravaged dystopian playground of Panem. I’ve been waiting eagerly for this finale for two years, since the first half of Mockingjay had little to offer beyond an extra movie ticket lightening our wallets. All it could really do was lay down groundwork for the future-deciding war to come. Now that we’ve suffered through that gray, soupy cash grab, here’s Part Deux to explode our brains with tragedy, victory, special effects, and closure. About damn time!

Okay, where were we? Panem has gone to war. We have the decadent, clueless Capitol, under the thumb of the increasingly frail President Snow (Donald Sutherland). And we have the ragtag grassroots Districts, led by the not-exactly-benevolent President Coin (Julianne Moore). And we have Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), who has been a powerful symbol of rebellion but is in danger of losing her relevance once the professional fighting begins. She’s not ready to lay down her bow, because Snow went and did something personal: he turned Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), the man Katniss sort of loves, into a brainwashed assassin who can’t look at Katniss without seeing slavering monster fangs and a big red sign saying, “MURDER ME NOW.” Katniss wants to see Snow’s defeat with her own eyes. She wants to cause it with her own hands. But first, there’s some loose ends to tie up. Sadly, the first half-hour of the film is basically Mockingjay, pt. 1.5, with even more somber war-room conversations and even more bombed-out concrete! Yay!

If you can sit through the extended prologue, you will be rewarded. Because Part Deux comes to life once Katniss hits the Capitol streets. She’s assigned to a military team that’s supposed to be shooting low-risk propaganda (ha ha, yeah right), and sees an opportunity to get close enough to Snow’s mansion to put an arrow in his crusty old eye socket. Her teammates include her saber-rattling secondary guy, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), brave merman Finnick (Sam Claflin), subtly subversive Commander Boggs (Mahershala Ali), and guerilla filmmaker Cressida (Natalie Dormer), plus a handful of soldiers and key grips and such. Also, Peeta, who is struggling to sift through the drug-induced sludge his mind has become. (This would have been more effective if Hutcherson didn’t seem like a puppydog even when he’s supposed to be an angry mutt.) Could Coin have stuck all these volatile folk together in the hopes they’d be killed? It won’t be the last dirty trick Coin pulls. As Katniss and co. scrambled through the rubble, as supporting characters croaked left and right from vicious booby traps, I breathed a sigh of relief. The story and environment got interesting again! I love how they showed us the gaudy, sparkly decadence of the Capitol all torn to hell; it made a great contrast.

Yes, the film builds awesome momentum with few missteps. Even the quiet scenes are generally effective; we need time to come down from our adrenaline rush, mourn the latest deaths, and discuss the stakes. In a kind of reverse Bechdel Test, Peeta and Gale are given a moment to talk honestly to each other about their feelings for Katniss. I’m glad they weren’t just whiny rivals, even if neither one really clicked as a solid character. Action-wise, the big show-stopper is a trip through the sewers and an attack by lizard-creatures. This sequence worked so well because it took the time to build quiet, dreadful suspense before exploding into ghastly action; it was like a deleted scene from Alien that suddenly turned into a deleted scene from Aliens. It’s one example of how brutal Part Deux can get. Yes, the violence is bloodless; we haven’t gotten any less PG-13 since the Tributes vaguely waved knives and spears at each other in the first film. But, man...you can’t slap a rating on grimness. One death involving black tar and razor wire is straight out of Silent Hill. The final action scene is not victorious, but achieves a downward spiral of sheer horror, and they did something from the book that I was sure they’d leave out. But they went there. The children and the silver parachutes. I’m kind of awed.

The thing you have to understand about the Hunger Games series is that it becomes a parade of terrible events, death, and war crimes, in which Katniss is reduced to a PTSD-ridden shell and must somehow start anew from the ashes. Jennifer Lawrence has made this franchise her own, and thanks to her face, her eyes, she’ll remain in our memories for a long time to come. The story doesn’t come down to Katniss and Peeta, or Katniss and Gale. It’s Katniss, Snow, and Coin. Sutherland plays Snow as a man who’s realized he’s going to lose, but wants to cause as much anguish as possible, simply out of toxic bitterness. Moore plays Coin with calm, snakey artifice. The scenes following the rebels’ victory are crucial, and the film nails them. What Katniss realizes about good and evil. Snow’s final speech to her. The council of the surviving Hunger Games victors, in which Katniss does entirely the wrong thing for entirely the right reason. And then a scene that I’ve been waiting for since the beginning. It’s where Katniss fires her final arrow -- the last one that matters, anyway. This scene is a keystone. In a sense, the entire franchise leads up to it. It was perfect. The timing, the use of silence and music, the reactions of each character. Perfect. It’s so good that the last few scenes barely register. But they’re still important in their own way. I think the ending does a good job of showing that some wounds never heal, but that it’s possible to live with pain, and live well.

So that’s Mockingjay, and that’s Katniss’s journey done. I think that, in the end, Catching Fire was the best film. I initially thought it was weaker than The Hunger Games, but I’ve changed my mind. Yes, the kid-on-kid violence was more powerful, but the sequel balanced all its themes with real flair. I will say, however, that some scenes in Mockingjay, pt. 2 rose above all the other films. If the finale had a flaw, it was mismanagement of its bloated cast. This is partly the book’s fault, but the movie had to abridge the book (though not as badly as I was expecting). Thus, everyone got shuffled around and some were shuffled out the door. Blink and you’ll miss Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, Jeffrey Wright, and Gwendoline Christie. Thank God, though, that they made extra room for Jena Malone, whose psychotic Johanna is the only person onscreen who can cut through all the bullshit better than Katniss. I wish we’d gotten a better depiction of Katniss’s sister, Prim; Willow Shields was okay but not great, and Prim’s overall symbolic significance was definitely lacking. Still, pretty much everyone (beyond the two love interests) did a very good job, and the film acknowledged them when it could. Elizabeth Banks’ Effie and Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Plutarch may have been scarce, but the final close-up of each one was spot-on. Woody Harrelson’s Haymitch got some great closing material. Sutherland’s take on Snow was nothing like I’d always pictured from the books, but he turned out to be just right; I prefer a smiling, smooth-voiced villain to a slavering creep.

All well and good, but it’s hard to call these films an ensemble when so much is on the shoulders of Jennifer Lawrence. She was amazing from start to finish. The books are Katniss’s inner monologue, and Lawrence is able to convey it with a simple gesture, a flick of her eyes. She’s the main reason I’ll return to the Hunger Games movies in the future. They took a strange, compelling, bleak trilogy and turned it into mature and artful blockbusters. They didn’t pander. Yeah, we could talk about how the story slams the cynical fetishizing of a young woman for marketing purposes, while the films’ marketing does exactly that. (That sexy, skintight red outfit Katniss wears on the posters? Completely absent from the film.) We could sigh at the movies for not pushing their topical themes even farther. Making people suffer for televised entertainment? The media mangling the facts? The upper class willfully ignoring those who labor to provide their stuff? Terrified refugees being shat on because of their origin? At least the movies show these issues. They’re trying to handle a very dark story in a way that still entertains. We can provide our own commentary. Mockingjay, pt. 2 is a solid and powerful finish to an exceptionally well-done franchise, and I don’t think it will become any less relevant. Because, as the far-future nightmare of Panem demonstrates, we’ll always live under the threat of repeating our mistakes. I hope we’ll keep that in mind as we move ever forward.

I hope the Katniss Everdeens of history are ready and waiting.

5.8: The Ten Command- ments Killer

--“It’s you, John. It’s always been you.”

--So sayeth Sally, as well as most of us out there in TV Land. I’m thankful to this ep for wasting no time. We pick up where we left off: Wren the vampire girl, road pizza’d before Lowe’s bleary eyes. Lowe staggers into the Hotel Cortez, demanding ANSWERS, DAMMIT. Doing his Dark Knight Rises impression: WHURR’S TH’ KILLURRR?! Sally and Liz Taylor sigh, because they’ve been through this bullshit before. Sally takes Lowe to good old Room 64 and points him toward a secret chamber behind the armoire. Ten bell jars, seven of which contain grisly trophies of flesh and bone. As Lowe’s memories come flooding back, we get the classic montage-o-revelation. A round of applause for John Lowe, Ten Commandants Killer and clueless drip extraordinaire.

--I can be mean. The ep felt weak to me, because A) I have no problem with a flashback-filled episode focusing on a single character, but two in a row makes me fidgety, and B) I never thought the TCK subplot was super amazing. Maybe if the killer’s identity had remained a mystery. But many of us guessed it was Lowe early on, and everyone else must have realized before this week. Still, it was handled okay. Over Wren’s cold corpse in the morgue, Lowe poured out his sins, or perceived lack thereof, to his faithful buddy, Detective Hahn. The calm Morgan Freeman to his jittery Brad Pitt. See, Lowe’s a longtime patron of the Cortez. The staff all know him, even if he doesn’t always know them. Back in 2010, down and needing a martini, Lowe entered the Cortez and sealed his fate. Oddly enough, it was Donovan who brought Lowe into the presence of James March, smelling potential in him. Why Donovan? Does he have a hidden motive, or were the showrunners trying to atone for their criminal underuse of Matt Bomer’s cheekbones?

--March lit up like a jack-o-lantern when he perceived Lowe’s inky-black aura. He saw a man who could finally take up his mantle. March kickstarted the Ten Commandment killings, but only got two under his belt before his death. But Lowe? An officer of the law, filled with rage at all the little injustices he sees every day. Innocents who die at the flip of a cosmic coin. Vile human scum who float away scot-free on a cloud of red tape and compromise. If Lowe had his way, the scum would not get a token slap on the wrist, but Punishment with a capital P. March wormed this out of Lowe, and sealed the deal with a vile deed of his own: The Countess didn’t just abduct Holden because he was cute and platinum-blonde. March asked her to, in order to shove Lowe all the way over the brink. Five years passed, during which time March and Lowe talked and talked and talked, and drank and drank and drank...

--Countess costume commentary: Weird, I thought she owned the hotel. Judging by the outfit she wore during one scene, she is also employed as its bellhop.

--By 2015, Lowe had been well-marinated in a cocktail of booze, grief, fury, and self-righteousness, stirred constantly by March’s toffee-like voice. Can I just say again how much fun Evan Peters is having? Everybody wants to be the one cheerfully evil, irredeemable character. But not everybody can pull it off. Lowe also had Sally, who attached herself to him with sex and need. She could take his rage inside herself and leave him at peace, for a bit. A drug, sucking him in again and again. The lost souls of the Hotel Cortez turned Lowe into the perfect weapon. A collaboration, twisted and artful. In time, Lowe committed his first kill: the movie critic, worshipper of false idols, who was also a pedophile, just in case we felt any qualms with his getting an Oscar up the poop chute. Horrified by how much he relished killing, Lowe tried suicide, but March saved him. And we got an interesting tidbit: March and Sally have some sort of deal going, and if Sally doesn’t feed victims to that demon with the pointy strap-on, it will devour her instead. More, please?

--So that’s the big origin story. Lowe began carrying out his baroque murders. Sally assigned Wren to protect Lowe outside the hotel. And due to his shattered mental state, Lowe usually doesn’t remember what he’s doing, what he has become. No more! After hearing all this awfulness, Hahn still tried to be the good buddy and console Lowe. Alas for Hahn. Previously, when Alex came to him for comfort, he responded, and maybe they never had sex, but Hahn definitely got close. That was enough for Lowe. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Wife. Lowe stabbed Hahn and took his penis (sufficiently mangled to slip past the censors) as trophy number eight. Rather chillingly, Lowe now seems happy. Or, at the very least, at peace with himself. The good man inside has died; the Ten Commandments Killer rules.

--Which is interesting, because we’re left without an everyman. A normal, sane character who can be our surrogate. Maybe that’s a good thing, because the audience stand-ins of the past (Kit from Asylum, Zoe from Coven, Bette and Dot from Freak Show) tend to get badly sidelined, unable to compete with the monsters, weirdos, and Angela Bassetts. Now Lowe is a willing monster himself. It’s gonna be interesting when I re-watch Hotel down the road, because I can study the first half of the season with new eyes, with the knowledge that all the hotel folk already know John Lowe as a kindred spirit, and are merely humoring his memory lapse. It was nicely executed, even if the twist surprised nobody.

--Thou Shalt Not Murder. Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me. Two more Commandments to go, and I’m interested to see what Lowe cooks up. Will he end the spree with his own death, in case we somehow missed all the allusions to Se7en? If so, let me get this out of the way now:

--WHAT’S IN THE BOXXXXXX???!! WHAT’S IN THE FUCKING BOX???!!

--What? You knew it was coming.

5.9: She Wants Revenge

--I noticed something: the opening credits to Hotel read kinda funny in places if you combine the Ten Commandments with the actors’ names that follow. Thou Shalt Not Covet Cheyenne Jackson. Though Shalt Not Steal with Angela Bassett. Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery and Lady Gaga. The Countess needs committing, all right. Does Briarcliff do vampire fashionistas?

--Speaking of Cheyenne Jackson...plenty of this year’s cast drew short straws. I mean, Angela Bassett has been in like three episodes, and Sarah Paulson’s appearances are as sporadic as, well, a ghost. Poor Will Drake got it worst, though. Clueless to the end, serving as a mere plot monkey. And now he’s dead, I guess. Yeah, Hotel picked the least-surprising main cast member to eliminate (ghostly return pending), but that’s okay, because this episode contained lots of forward momentum leading into the winter hiatus. Everyone’s plotting against everyone else, but who will out-plot whom?

--The Countess is just royally pissed. Pissed at March for being responsible for a near-century of lonely misery. Pissed at Alex for creating non-Countess-approved vampire children. Pissed at Liz Taylor for taking the murder of his one true love so damn personally! Why’s everyone gotta be so butthurt? The Countess is done with not being entirely in control of the situation, so she pressed on with marrying Drake while turning Valentino and Natacha’s former prison hallway into...a prison hallway with a door. She also took back Donovan, who seemed smitten with her all over again. And she tracked down Valentino, who truly was delighted to have her back in his arms. Yeah, The Countess juggled three men this week, though Valentino’s the only one she cares a whit about, presumably. Miss Evers, forever friendzoned by March, popped up to deliver a snappy warning to Drake. No one escapes the Countess. Miss Evers promised she’d watch Drake die with a smile on her face. I don’t think I’ve seen a more gratuitous use of foreshadowing all year.

--Right now, Iris seems mostly interested in snuffing people she doesn’t like -- porn stars, in this case -- and the number of murders we’ve seen in the Cortez is really starting to bug me. The LAPD has never investigated the hotel? Never? Even after dozens, maybe hundreds, of people have disappeared there? Gimme a break. Fresh off her latest murder spree, Iris was happy to see Donovan but dismayed to find him under The Countess’s thumb. Only, surprise! Donovan is still scheming with Ramona, and took the male porn star to be an hors d’oeuvre for them both. And then...random flashback time!

--Ramona’s such a weird character. She’s barely been around, yet the show has given her these huge, gristly lumps of backstory. It wouldn’t work if Bassett didn’t sell the bejeezus out of it. Ramona explained why it took her so long to plot revenge: she was busy with her parents, who took her in after her bloody fallout with The Countess. But then her mom died of cancer and her dad succumbed to Alzheimer’s. Withering away while Ramona remained helplessly immortal. She vampified her dad, hoping it would make him strong again, but a shattered brain is beyond even supernatural repair. All Ramona could do, in the end, was euthanize her father, which shocked her awake and ended her rather contrived twenty-year absence from revenge-seeking. Thank you for a flashback we didn’t really need, show, but I’ll forgive you because of who it focused on.

--I was worried the show would forget all about the newly-created vampire kids’ subplot. Nope! Alex found Max and his creepy little tribe in a house, feeding on pizza delivery guys and various other hapless adults. She tried to get them to follow her to the Cortez, but they refused to listen. Vampire tweens are no less stubborn and self-centered than normal tweens. I’m concerned for Alex -- she may be in The Countess’s crosshairs next.

--Drake was dumb. But Donovan is dumber. He lured Ramona into The Countess’s boudoir, promising that he’d drugged her into oblivion and Ramona could murder her with impunity. Double surprise! Donovan really is under The Countess’s thumb again! He tazed Ramona, who was soon crammed into one of those neon-lit gibbets in the prison hallway. Donovan’s such a fucking tool! God! Iris really needs to admit that her son is a banana slug, and move on with her fucking life. Go to Alaska or something. No sun; easy to murder peeps.

--And Drake? The Countess married him, with Liz Taylor as a pouty witness. Twoo wuv! But Drake’s bliss didn’t last long. March still seems beholden to The Countess despite her newfound loathing for him, and took Drake to see creepy little Bartholomew. He did not react like a proud stepfather. Then The Countess stuck Drake in the prison hallway, and when he freed Ramona from her cage, she showed her gratitude by eating him alive, while Miss Evers I-told-you-so’d and The Countess relished the whole thing via security cameras. RIP, Drake. When Lachlan learns of his dad’s death, I’m sure he’ll respond with the same stoned detachment as always. Kids these days. With their blood orgies and their stylish ennui. Right?

--The Countess’s plans are proceeding swimmingly, but I dunno about her luck lasting, because events on AHS can always execute a screeching hairpin turn. Liz could still be a threat. And although The Countess has a plan to get rid of the increasingly valley-girlish Natacha, she didn’t notice Donovan snooping on her visit to Valentino’s motel room. Man, The Countess just sucks at keeping her infidelities hidden. Maybe Donovan will be less of a tool now? I suspect that next week will not go well for The Countess. Should be fun! Bring popcorn and Swedish fish!

Long ago and far away, I stuck some old anime shows on a Cautious Enthusiasm list. I am delighted to say that after all this time...I have watched one of them. Oy.

“Anime as an Art Form.” That was the name of a program in my college dorm, and my first major exposure to weeaboos. Now, my own program was called “Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror in the Arts,” so I’m not gonna say I was any less nerdy. But we, with our Dungeons & Dragons, our earnest discussions of Tolkien and Firefly, still kinda hated on the weeaboos. For those of you fortunate enough to not live entirely on the internet, a weeaboo is a white person who worships, idealizes, and emulates Japanese culture. They wore Rising Sun headbands. They addressed each other as “Ashley-chan” and “Jeff-san.” They turned up their noses at all things Western. And, most of all, they fell into a violent, frothing rage at the very IDEA of watching anime in English. Unthinkable.

This post is dedicated to them. Because I watched the English dub of Death Note and I thought it was great. All those American-accented voices. Speaking English. So nice, not to have to focus on a bunch of subtitles. God, I hate weeaboos. They’re annoying as fuck and need a serious beatdown from reality. But I digress.

Death Note is beloved for its mix of Serious Adult Themes and supernatural thriller elements, plus its Gothy aesthetic. I found it to be a very good anime series (no, I haven’t read the original manga; shaddup) that doesn’t feel dated and takes an engaging approach to its premise. It falls under that cool subgenre where a single improbable or supernatural element is superimposed onto the real, everyday world. In this case, we learn of the Shinigami, Japanese spirits of death, who reside in their own realm and regard humanity with jaded amusement. Each Shinigami posseses a notebook that can end the life of anyone whose name is written in it. One such Death Note plops down in Tokyo and is found by Light Yagami, a brilliant high school senior who sees in it a golden opportunity. He’ll use it to kill all the bad people clogging society, creating a brave new world! Light is a sociopath in need of an outlet. Give him a country to rule, and he’d terrorize its inhabitants while insisting it’s for their own good. Give him a Death Note, and he’ll literally murder anyone he needs to in order to juftify his precious Utopian vision.

The Death Note provides us with another beloved storytelling trope, the Three Rules. Don’t feed a mogwai after midnight. A robot may not harm a human being. The Three Rules are fun because of how much mileage one can get from exploiting them for loopholes and side effects. The Death Note’s rules are 1) Write someone’s name in the notebook, and they will die forty seconds later; 2) You must picture the victims’s face in your mind, in order to avoid killing the wrong John Smith (crucially, this means you can’t kill someone if you don’t know what they look like); and 3) The victim will die of a heart attack by default, but you can customize the time and manner of death by writing it down. Oh, and a human who touches the Death Note can perceive Shinigami, which is why Light finds himself bantering with Ryuk, a wry, apple-chomping spirit with Gollum’s eyeballs who dresses like the most punchable Goth who ever slouched through a Hot Topic. As Light begins snuffing criminals, the world takes notice. Not everyone wants to stop the unseen death-bringer, whom the media dubs “Kira.” Some want to sing his praises.

This is where the ethical richness of the scenario unfolds. A world free of murderers, rapists, drug dealers, dictators, warlords, war? Sounds pretty awesome. On the other hand, how does one man have the right to judge an entire species? Is Light a savior or a psycho? A special task force is formed to catch Kira, and teams up with a reclusive detective known only as L. L is the best character by far: disheveled and detached, snarfing sugar to fuel his superbrain, he soon has Kira pretty well pinned down. But Light is counting on being hunted, and Death Note comes alive when it focuses on the psychological ballet between Light and L. As if the intrigue wasn’t piled on heavily enough, Light’s dad is chief of police, and Light finds his way onto the task force. Light can’t kill L without his true name -- and killing wantonly would blow his cover. L thinks Light might be Kira, but doesn’t want to waste him as an ally. Thus, they circle, probing each other. It’s an ongoing game of strategy in which each must play their best cards without revealing their hand. It’s pretty riveting.

Death Note would be amazing from start to finish if it were entirely about Light vs. L. It’s a great 24-episode anime. If only it didn’t last for 37 episodes. I enjoyed the whole thing, but it felt bloated overall, and frequently lost its way. For instance, at once point Light willingly loses his memories of being Kira. While it’s interesting to see how the move fits into Light’s larger scheme, it reduces Light to a bland boy scout for way too many episodes. Around this time, the show twists itself into something resembling a wacky espionage thriller, with an unpleasant aftertaste of romantic comedy. Yeah, things get more fun when a second Death Note appears, but unfortunately, its bearer is Misa Amane, a shrill pop starlet who attaches herself to Light. Misa is the Jar Jar Binks of Death Note. She’s an entirely juvenile character, she embodies every negative female stereotype, and the show stubbornly keeps her around till the very end, long after she has anything to contribute to the plot (the real romantic tension is between Light and L, as anyone can see). In general, the show doesn’t portray women very well; they’re often hapless, and the stronger female characters tend to get killed off.

But the big issue is L. As I said, he’s the best character, and the subtle internal war between him and Light is the best interaction. However, at around the two-thirds mark, L is booted from the storyline and replaced by a character who, while interesting enough, lacks L’s unique pizzazz. The post-L portion of the show struggled to hold my interest, introducing too many new characters and plot details as the final episodes huffed and puffed toward a resolution. The three cardinal rules of the Death Note were joined by many more, some quite redundant, and it became difficult to keep track of who had a Death Note, how many there were, and how Light’s plans kept changing. Light was diminished without a worthy nemesis. I like a character-driven story, but Death Note should have limited itself to a small cast while broadening its exposition. I wanted to see more of how the existence of Kira affected the world, how different societies reacted, what circumstances arose. And I wanted way more of the Shinigami realm, which all but vanished after its introduction.

Still, what a beautifully made anime! You can’t tell this kind of story without getting biblical, and here, we get tons of appropriate imagery (apples, winged beings, shafts of light) while the soundtrack hits us with ominous chimes, Gregorian chanting, and “O Fortuna”-style choral yelps. Anime dialogue is often heavy-handed, and in this case, time keeps freezing as Light delivers a smug interior monologue. But it works, because it ties into the thriller elements: there’s a reason the villain always describes his plans for our benefit. I really loved the use of colors and monochrome, the low-key art style that occasionally exploded with stylistic flourishes. And even when the plot spun its wheels, it remained enjoyably unpredictable. I even liked the opening credits, because they bombarded me with visual clues that I could gradually decipher. (I did not, however, enjoy the opening theme songs, which began with a whiny, barely-pubescent rocker and ended with shrieky death metal.) I’m hardly an expert on anime, but on a scale of one to ten where one is DBZ and ten is Miyazaki, Death Note is at least an eight. Its technical and artistic quality never slips.

But the weeaboos would tell you that I have no right to be reviewing Death Note at all, because I committed the cardinal sin of watching the English dub. See, if I could appreciate the great subtlety and flawless delivery of the original Japanese, I would actually understand the show’s true meaning. And the manga is still better, obviously. Because everything Japan does is superior in every way. Kawaii. You can see why I prefer to blot out the weeaboos and their delusional standards and just focus on enjoying Death Note on my own terms. It’s an excellent anime with great ideas and a couple truly definitive characters. Watch it sometime, and ask yourself if you’d oppose Kira, or root for him...

VERDICT: A solid squee! In English.

3.10: She Gets Revenge

--Discussion question: Who is the “She” referred to above? It ain’t Ramona, not this week. And I’m afraid The Countess’s odyssey of petty vengeance has come to a screeching halt. Based on the final shot, that cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers, I guess it’s Liz Taylor. And I’m happy about that, and also happy because this was a FUCKING GREAT episode, full of good dialogue, powerful emotional moments, unpredictable plot turns, zingy one-liners, and the rich, meaty development of subplots. I feel gleefully gorged, and I should be able to last through the hiatus after this. But not without the screaming need to see what happens next! Wow!

--Death was inevitable, but who would be biting the bullet? Alas, alack. While The Countess was luring Natacha into her spider’s den, Donovan was paying Valentino a bitchy little visit. These two confrontations cut back and forth, boxing in our love quadrangle as it became a two-way street. Valentino dramatically brandished a scimitar...and Donovan shot him in the face. Natacha sexily rolled around with The Countess, then pulled a knife...and The Countess shot her in the face. This type of totally ghastly humor can only be given proper justice by AHS. The Countess then called the cops, all “Boo hoo, my husband is missing, woe betide me!”...before Will Drake strolled in, more than a little pissed. I love it! Maybe Drake won’t be a pointless character after all! Once he gets the hang of being a ghost, he can make life quite inconvenient for The Countess. OH, WAIT...

--What was the most disturbing story element this season? Well, it’s subtle, but my pick would be how Lowe and Alex have casually abandoned their daughter, and can barely muster any guilt. “We’re terrible parents,” Alex mumbled half-heartedly. Acknowledging your faults does not excuse them. Jesus! Lowe was fresh off his ninth kill, a trio of voodoo practitioners whose ears he sliced off (hello, AHS mythology shout-out!). Under threat from The Countess, Alex needed help to deal with the junior vampire brigade. Not sure why Alex and Lowe thought it’d be a good idea to stroll into their lair...but the sight of little Kimmy croaking from malnutrition was enough to make the kids follow the adults meekly into the Cortez. Whereupon Alex and Lowe locked them in the prison hallway, leaving them to rot just as they did to their own daughter. This nasty deed re-ignited their passion, and I love how conflicted I am about this! Alex and Lowe are scum, yet I want them to be happy together? Kind of? Anyway, Ramona now has her own mini-army and I can’t wait to see the payoff.

--And the most heartfelt Hotel tale? Liz Taylor’s. Talk about lumps in throats. After witnessing an elderly couple lovingly take their own lives, Liz decided to follow suit. No family, no Tristan, nothing to live for. Iris, raw from Donovan’s rejection, jumped aboard the suicide train. First, though, Liz wanted to reconnect with the son he abandoned decades ago. Which makes him a better person than Alex and Lowe, huh. This led to some outrageous material for Miss Evers, who is an absolute treasure. From her pronunciation of “Los Ang-hell-ays” to her referring to Liz as “the ghost of Theda Bara” to her joy at being bribed with a bottle of detergent and a fancy washer-dryer. I adore her. This season may be wasting some of its ladies, but it ain’t wasting Mare Winningham. She could be the new Frances Conroy. I don’t say that lightly.

--James March lit his building contractor on fire. It doesn’t have much to do with the plot, but it happened, so I may as well mention it.

--Liz nervously arranged a visit with his grown son, Douglas (Josh Braaten), who deserves a T-shirt: “I checked into the Cortez and somehow didn’t die horribly.” At first glance, Douglas seemed to embody the old Liz: a banal man with a hideously boring job and no lust for life. Liz couldn’t bear to reveal his true identity to Douglas...but he didn’t need to. After they’d talked and drank and bonded, Douglas revealed he’d known who Liz was the whole time. And his reaction made it clear he’s a fine, fine man. He didn’t gloss over Liz’s abandonment, nor did he hold a grudge. He is happy. He’s gonna start a kayak store in Boulder. And he wants Liz back in his life. The scenes between father and son were deeply poignant, vibrant with truth. Well done, show! Liz no longer wanted to end his life, and his newfound carpe diem was enough to convince Iris as well. Why, the two of them can turn the Cortez into more than just an outdated murder parlor! BUT FIRST...

--In a moment. We’ve gotten some very good payoffs on our subplots, but the tale of Sally remains dangling. No sooner had Lowe fallen back into bed with Alex than Sally appeared, wrathful and seductive. The drug, demanding that Lowe relapse. But Lowe found the strength to break free. After a joyous reunion with Holden, Lowe took his wife and son and proudly exited the Cortez, while Sally, unable to follow, screamed dire threats. All Lowe has to do is never return. But he will. One more bell jar needs filling with meaty tidbits. And Sally’s in the way. Guess which “She” wants revenge now?

--And thus we return to The Countess, the great mover and shaker of this season. Final(?) costume commentary: In the closing scene, she dressed all in black. Mourning her years of wasted time, her mistakes. After she learned what had become of Valentino, she returned to her penthouse to kill Donovan. And Donovan was okay with that, because he’d realized something: he’s just another Valentino. So was Tristan. So was Drake. All these dark-haired men with their swoon-inducing cheekbones, all The Countess’s attempt to craft a Pygmalion copy of her original beloved. She made Donovan everything he is, which makes him absolutely nothing. A shell. He fell to his knees before The Countess and asked her to kill him, and she gazed sorrowfully at the beautiful, hollow man she’d pretended to love. Who knows what she would have done. She didn’t get the chance. The penthouse door banged open and in charged Liz and Iris, brandishing two pistols apiece. They fired. Again and again and again and again and again. But we did not see where those bullets landed.

--FUUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKK.

--I loved the episode. I love how good this show is when it takes the time. And while I wait, I demand to see all of Iris’s self-tribute video! That was perhaps the most hilarious, tragic, hilariously tragic thing I’ve seen all season. If this season has its finger on the pulse of modernity, then make that shit go viral!

Man...when I was a kid, I read books like some people inhale and exhale. And not just Goosebumps and junk; I tackled Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle at age fourteen, like a boss. These days, I still read lots of books, but never quite as many as I’d like. Being an adult with a job and multiple interests and published short stories and all. Sigh.

But here are the most enjoyable books I did read in 2015. I’ve realized that these best-of lists are not based on number of entries, but on whether a book (game, album, etc.) took me to that certain special zone of happiness. In the case of books, the big question is, did I want to read them again someday? I could have lengthened this list with Stephen King’s The Stand, which I liked a lot, but I can’t quite say it captured me like the following seven titles did. And seven is a highly appropriate number, as you’ll see...

DANG-BLASTED’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2015

7. Marrow by Robert Reed
Sci-fi dominates this list. And none of the sci-fi I read this year was quite as wonderfully mind-exploding as Marrow. I tip my hat to authors who exceed the farthest reaches of what might be possible. Marrow begins with our discovery of a space vessel, bigger than Jupiter and immeasurably ancient, drifting through the cosmos. Its builders are long-gone, its destination unknown. On the principle of “Why the hell not?” we commandeer the ship and sell passage to whatever alien species want to hop aboard for the cruise to end all cruises. By the time the main narrative kicks in, the humans aboard the worldship are so advanced as to be essentially immortal. An entire functioning planet is discovered at the ship’s core. There is a sinister conspiracy that lasts millennia, an adventure that stretches across generations. What Reed does best is dream up a future where the human lifespan is so long that time itself barely has any meaning. Where “history” no longer exists because everyone has lived it. Thinking outside the box? THERE IS NO BOX. And novels like Marrow show us how limitless the imagination may find itself.

6. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
I’ve been on a David Mitchell kick that will continue into 2016. While The Bone Clocks was awesome, it felt mired within his personal comfort zone. I hope he writes more stuff like The Thousand Autumns, which eschews his usual genre-hopping style in favor of thrilling, grimy historical fiction. Jacob de Zoet is a morally upright clerk plopped down in the snake’s den of a Dutch East India Company outpost clinging to the edge of Nagasaki like an engorged tick. De Zoet soon finds that nice guys finish last, that only the biggest bastards walk away with their fortunes made and their flesh intact, and that when you’re trying to be faithful to a girl back home, it is a spectacularly bad idea to fall in love with a scarred Japanese midwife who is herself coveted by an insidious shogun. The book would be fine enough if it were merely Jacob’s tale, but it keeps shifting perspective when you least expect it, giving us many vibrant points of view as its cast of dreamers and schemers stagger toward a conclusion where nobody may be left in one piece. Who says history is boring? In Mitchell’s hands, it’s an ill-mannered and playful-minded tour de force.

5. Planesrunner by Ian McDonald
Ian McDonald is quite possibly my favorite author ever, but not every author can pull off the transition to the seductive YA market. McDonald can; his criminally obscure YA trilogy is creative, thrilling, whip-smart, and never panders. Our hero isn’t the Chosen One for once; he’s Everett Singh, a London teen who comes to possess an app that acts like a GPS for an infinite number of parallel universes. McDonald’s knack for the baroque comes into play when bad guys chase Everett into an alt-verse powered by electricity instead of oil. It’s all the airships we could wish for, but it also demonstrates the sheer fun of imagining sideways Earths. The narrative is crammed with hip little details (Everett wins a spot on an airship’s crew via his mad Indian cooking skills), the stakes are high, the characters are delightful...and, hey, for once a YA hero isn’t white! Progress! I can’t wait to read the two sequels. In a perfect world, this would be the next Hunger Games. Maybe it can have a belated success? Anyone?

4. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Bookworms will know this one. It got great reviews. Here’s another. Short, lovely, and profound, it rises high above its premise. Apocalypse tales are very vogue right now, but St. John Mandel’s global disaster (a flu pandemic) is so much more. Hopping around in time, she examines the hyperlinked lives of those before, during, and after the terrible event -- a venerable actor who dies onstage, an old-school theatrical troupe roaming the ruins of America, a community of travelers destined never to leave the airport, and others. Her chronology is spiritual rather than temporal, showing how, in the midst of massive upheaval, small events touch people, planting seeds which are carried for years, maybe lifetimes, until they find a place to take root. There is so much light in this particular apocalypse; despite its dark moments, the underlying tone is deeply optimistic. Base survival is not enough, this story argues. In order to exist, we as a species need beauty. We need joy. Rejoice, for we will always, always conjure it. I agree.

3. The Familiar (vol. 1 and 2) by Mark Z. Danielewski
Danielewski is not for the faint of heart. The House of Leaves scribe hasn’t become the cultiest of modern authors by following rules, and now he’s booted the rulebook all the way to Pluto. 2015 brought the first two volumes of his...let’s just call it a “project”...which I’m not even gonna try to describe. I mean, the plot is all well and good -- eccentric young girl rescues kitten; kitten is more than it seems -- but simmering beneath is something massive, strange, confusing, and glorious. Let’s just say that The Familiar contains nine POV characters, that each volume stretches past 800 pages, that Danielewski morphs and molds the printed word like a mad trickster god, daunting us with an Escher-maze of divergent fonts, color tags, nested parentheses, dialects, untranslated Cantonese, HTML, and a trio of metaphysical entities who drift through the narrative like sentient annotations. Also, the finished project will consist of twenty-seven fucking volumes. The audacity terrifies me...and yet, under all his tricks and gimmicks, Danielewski is a red-blooded writer whose breathless, intensely modern prose keeps you in its grip. I’m hooked. I’m onboard. I’ll be there when The Familiar finishes up in the late 2020s or thereabouts. Let’s watch fiction be redefined.

2. Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones
I love the Muppets, but my knowledge of their bearded creator was always superficial. After reading this biography, I’ve learned oodles about Jim Henson, yet he remains an enigma...as, perhaps, he should be. Providing a blow-by-blow account of Henson’s career, the book overcomes a slow start (did we really need his grandparents’ backstories?) and rockets into high gear once Henson and his googly-eyed, fuzzy-faced characters conquer television. What a fascinating man of contradictions he was: naive but always ahead of his time; a hippie who disdained worldly possessions and a Gatsby-style hedonist; a devoted father who became weirdly, almost cruelly detached from his wife. He not only rescued the dying art of puppetry, but dragged it, flailing like Kermit, into the modern age. He accomplished more in his lifetime than ten ordinary men, but it wasn’t enough, and the headlong pace of the book leads to the gut-punch of Henson’s abrupt, pitiable death at age 53. The sheer unfairness of his end had me biting back angry tears, but his legacy remains intact, and you won’t find a better retelling. An epitaph for one of the greatest visionaries ever to love life.

1. Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Last year, Reamde entertained the shit out of me. This year, Seveneves brought me to rapture. Neal Stephenson’s dive into nuts-n-bolts science fiction is everything I could have hoped for and more. It’s the end of the world again: the moon explodes, giving humanity scant time to prepare before trillions of falling fragments turn Earth into a lifeless lump of magma. The only option is to modify the ISS into a long-term habitat -- a zero-gravity archipelago that will house whoever remains of us. Stephenson cleverly imagines how near-future technology might allow for our relocation into orbit, and focuses in on the women who will bear us up from extinction (hint: read the title carefully). As if that weren’t enough, the final third of the book is a leap forward into the far, far future, to see how we evolved, and how we reclaimed our ruined planet. This (literal) world-building offers one speculative fascination after another. It’s an amazing book, heavily technical but never dull, rife with surprises. I demand a sequel. Neal Stephenson has proven that he can do anything, as far as I’m concerned. And he’s just one of the talented authors who push fictional boundaries further and further. Long may they weave ideas.

2015 was quite the year for music! Adele thundered back. Taylor Swift pretended to care about her fans. “Hotline Bling” got stuck in my head. And not even the whole song; just the eponymous couplet. Ugh. If we zoom in on my personal musical odyssey of the past twelve months, we find it skirts the edge of mainstream and sometimes skids off into the great blue yonder. Take a look.

DANG-BLASTED’S FAVORITE MUSIC OF 2016

9. Seal, 7
This past year saw an interesting mini-trend: venerable musicians of a certain age releasing mid-life breakup albums. But is 7 really a breakup album? It’s clear Seal used songwriting as therapy following the derailment of his fairytale marriage to Heidi Klum (which, I gotta say, oozed cloyingly into his last couple albums). Luckily, Seal’s heart and soul -- and voice -- transcend us mortals, and the overall tone of 7 is cathartic rather than mopey. He draws upon his entire career and takes inspiration from his early, club-friendly work, blending it with modern pop and R&B savor. This does make 7 a wee bit too disco-flavored here and there, but most of the album is a home run, quivering with complex emotions. We may not know if he’s singing about his breakup with Klum or not (though it’s pretty obvious that “The Big Love Has Died” is autobiographical) but what matters is that he’s singing from deep recesses, pouring himself out and finding peace.

8. Nightwish, Endless Forms Most Beautiful
Here was my most hotly anticipated album of 2015. The fact that it let me down doesn’t make it unworthy or lacking in quality. It’s just...Nightwish’s last album, Imaginaerum, set the bar outrageously high. Armed with a new female vocalist, Floor Jansen, and with bagpiper Troy Donockley joining the group full-time, my favorite epic metal act has proceeded to......play it utterly safe. Oh, believe me, Endless Forms is almost desperately high-concept, with Richard Dawkins guest-lecturing and quite the gamut of song topics. (Darwin! Thoreau! Fantasy gypsies! This lady!) It’d suffer less if it didn’t have to follow the triumph of Imaginaerum, and that’s why it’s only at number eight. But, ya know? It rocks my world anyway. Jansen is a great pick for vocals; not only can she blast the roof off, she’s more versatile than her predecessors and always looks like she can’t believe how awesome her job is. If this album was a test run for “Nightwish ver. 3.0,” I can’t wait for the full product launch!

7. Eiffel 65, Contact!
No, you’re not hallucinating. It’s that Eiffel 65. The Italian guys who did “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” and drove us all insane back in the late 90s. Confession: I always liked their sound, and their 2001 sophomore album, which barely registered in the US, is a happy endorphin rush if you’re shamefully into this particular style of Eurodance. I’m not going to make any arguments in favor of Eiffel 65, but for me, Contact! provides a parade of electronic, sugar-coated anthems to which I can dance when no one’s looking. If you grooved to Europop back in middle school, well, this is more of the same. More quirky beats, more sideways English, more blissfully stupid lyrics (“I live my life like a vampire sucking music”), and way, way more nostalgia. Remember: contemporary pop music will always be called crap by hipsters, no matter what year it is. So check your cynicism and join me in bouncing around to Eiffel 65. If only to get “Hotline Bling” out of your head. Fucking Drake...

6. Woodkid, The Golden Age
The Golden Age was my big discovery of 2015, and is also the single weirdest album I’ve listened to in a long time. What to say? Woodkid. Real name: Yoann Lemoine. French videographer and music video director, rocker of a gnarly beard, who decided to compose an album somewhere between allegory and memoir, in the musical genre of...uh...Jesus, to call it “Alternative” seems like an act of cowardice. It’s grand and cerebral, an ambitious clash of orchestrations -- strings, tribal drums, furious horns -- barely tethered by Lemoine’s plaintive, heavily-accented warbling. Vocals may not be his strong suit, but composition definitely is, and even if it’s impossible to figure out what The Golden Age is trying to say (loss of childhood innocence? Romance is bullshit? Romance is everything? Beards are cool?), this is not an album that leaves your mind in a hurry. Haunting, portentous, and emotionally titanic, it makes me wonder if Woodkid has more up his sleeve, and if we should be bracing ourselves for his next symphonic atom bomb.

5. Pentatonix, Pentatonix
I love Pentatonix. You love Pentatonix. But are they more than a Youtube novelty? Yes, they’ve helped lead the new wave of talented young e-celebrities, but they cover more songs than they write. No more! Their first full-length album contains mostly original material, and is so gosh-darned bright and joyful that it’d melt the heart of any Scrooge. Oh, but it’s in no way juvenile; this a capella quintet has allowed its distinct sound to mature and evolve. Avi Kaplan, Scott Hoying, Kevin Olusola, Kirstie Maldonado, and Mitch Grassi are a single, well-oiled unit that eschews any one style. Yeah, the album is mostly pop-flavored (and, if I’m honest, leans a little too heavily on Hoying’s boy-band whine), but it also taps into R&B, soul, gospel, 50s doo-wop -- hell, it even ends on a beautiful lullaby. Don’t call these kids imitators just because they do a lot of covers (especially if their covers are as gorgeous as this one). There’s no one quite like Pentatonix and they love their songcraft. They’re ready to join the big leagues.

4. Avril Lavigne, Avril Lavigne
The weirdly ageless Avril Lavigne has no lack of haters, and it’s fascinating to me how she dons and then sheds one persona after another. Is she trying to find the real Avril, or is she just desperate to suckle at the latest trends? With her fifth release, it’s like she gave a rebel yell and decided to no longer give a shit, and the result is the most balls-out fun album she’s ever done. It starts with a bang and never really comes down from that high; it’s all giddy momentum, even if it’s all over the place. She plays up her girlishness but also gives us the knowing wink of a mature woman. From the Peter Pan defiance of songs like “Here’s to Never Growing Up,” to the smoky melancholy of “Give You What You Like” and the sweet vulnerability of “Falling Fast,” to whatever the almighty fuck “Hello Kitty” is supposed to be, Avril is dancing out of her twenties and into some sort of strange, snarky goddess-state. I’m down with that, because I loved the shit out of this album. Even the Chad Kroeger cameo.

3. Lorde, Pure Heroine
Okay, okay, but we all know who’s hip, right? I may be late to Lorde’s party, but once I actually decided to see what besides “Royals” she has to offer, I was quite entranced. It’s not just how she molds pop elements into something wholly her own. It’s not just her lyrics, with their superior vocabulary, deconstruction of teen angst, and bodily preoccupation (drinking game: knock it back every time Lorde mentions teeth). It’s the voice. That throaty, parched drawl, the way she rolls the lyrics around to achieve maximum flavor before letting each syllable glide off her lower lip. Lorde has the voice of one much older and wiser, but that’s a wonderful thing, because imagine the evocative songbook she has yet to write! Her poetic teenage ramblings may be the prologue, but they’re never going to become dated, either. They’ll keep speaking to music lovers young and old -- anyone who craves a different kind of buzz.

2. Adam Lambert, The Original High
While we weren’t looking, Adam Lambert wove himself a sequined cocoon and emerged as something unexpected: no longer just a glam, fabulous party boy, but a fashionably gaunt, brooding outlaw of spectacular pop glory. Or so his third album would imply. I knew it’d be great, but the minute I first heard “Ghost Town,” its bluesy acoustic strum giving way to eerie synth echoes, I understood: The Original High marks the end of the Adam Lambert I knew. Oh, is it glorious. He hasn’t lost touch with his flashy side, but he’s found a richer and more adult sound overall, helped by his recent symbiosis with Queen. Pretty much every track on this album is amazing in one way or another. Lambert’s rockstar howl has never sounded more sincere, and his evocation of pop music’s glory days has never been more relevant. He’s making real music without any agenda beyond blowing our minds. This was the album I enjoyed most in 2015. So why isn’t it number one...?

1. Björk, Vulnicura
Because there’s more to music than pleasure. If it evokes raw emotions from the listener, it will have better staying power. I can’t believe what Björk just recorded. This is the mid-life breakup album to end them all. It’s raw, it’s hurtful, it will make you feel like shit, then patch things up and soothe your ache. Björk has always been powerful, but her last couple albums were complacent -- slick and gimmicky with no new emotions to unpack. Then came her breakup with artist Matthew Barney, which fuels the chronology of Vulnicura, beginning with unease and tentative optimism, then spiraling into shock, despair, and rock-bottom surrender. The album’s keystone, “Black Lake,” is ten minutes of beautiful, beautiful misery, as igneous drums and endless, keening strings frame Björk’s rising tirade of righteous bitterness. Make it through the abyss and you can let your muscles relax as the album’s second half chronicles the process of closing wounds and carrying on, one step at a time. Björk is fifty years old, her musical career has spanned universes, but it took bare heartbreak to ignite a flame and produce some of her very best work. I did not “enjoy” Vulnicura, but it touched me to the very core like few albums have ever done. It deserves far more praise than I can give it here.

Great news! We got a PS4 this year! Specifically, December of this year. So there will be no 8th-gen titles on my annual games-of-the-year list. Check back at the end of 2016. For now, indie titles still rule my roost and crappy Mac ports remain my great agony. And I seem determined to outdo myself in sheer eccentric variety of taste. Here we go!

DANG-BLASTED’S FAVORITE VIDEO GAMES OF 2015

Honorable Mention: SOMA (Multi-Platform)
It’s become a tradition to award a special ribbon to a game I watched someone else play. (If I plan to play it myself someday, it doesn’t count.) I never went near the Amnesia series, because if I’m gonna be creeping through dark spaces with nightmare hellspawn nipping my heels, I want to at least be able to smack the fuckers with plywood or something. SOMA is in the same vein, but pleased me with its mature dive into science fiction and Big Questions. We’re in a dank undersea lab (imagine if David Cronenberg made Bioshock), the world is ending, and the human race, which now numbers in the double digits, is undergoing a quasi-willing symbiosis with a slithery artificial intelligence. To discuss the plot further would be to ruin some elegant twists, but SOMA earns points for the dark intricacy of its storyline and the journey of its characters. Hiding behind the slimy bulkheads and coral-encrusted monsters is the riddle: What makes us human? A fleshy body? A mere clump of neurons? If the world ever does end, we may need an answer, and SOMA did a pretty incredible job.

8. Mimpi (PC/Mac/iOS/Android)
These days, any fool can make a 2D platformer. In order to leave more than a momentary impression, it must display a unique charm and sensibility. Mimpi is short but sweet, an appealing little adventure in which a spunky terrier sets out to find his absent owner. We find ourselves guiding the canine hero through his own fantasy world, a trippy collage where a dog’s day-to-day encounters morph into bizarre, whimsical obstacles. The gameplay combines traditional platforming, point-and-click puzzles, and even hidden object sections. It’s a game kids would enjoy, but it doesn’t pander, nor is it especially easy. While it commits one or two cardinal sins (why are we chased by lava? Why are we always, always chased by lava?), Mimpi is both lovable and memorable, as opposed to the seven million uninspired “retro” side-scrollers currently clogging Steam. Woof.

7. InFamous: Festival of Blood (PS3)
The InFamous franchise is my other annual gaming tradition, but it’s their own fault for being so damn fun that even their DLC can stand proud. In this Halloweeny, tongue-in-cheeky tale, Fake New Orleans is in the midst of celebrating Fake Mardi Gras and Cole McGrath receives an unexpected new “superpower” when he’s turned into a vampire. Forget moral choices; the hapless citizenry are Cole’s screaming, flailing juice bar as he battles his fellow vamps all through the night. It’s the gameplay we know and love, filtered through the lens of cheesy horror movies to ridiculous effect. As DLC goes, it’s not the best -- the campaign is horribly short (they bet everything on user-generated missions, damn them) and the final “boss battle” consists of Cole getting dogpiled by unfair waves of enemies. But it’s InFamous. And if Sucker Punch ever makes an InFamous game that I don’t love, I’ll know it’s time to quit gaming and become a monk in the Andes or something.

6. The Stanley Parable (PC/Mac)
Despite its solid rep, I was not initially taken with The Stanley Parable. But, then, I’d started out with the most obvious path, the one where Stanley discovers a sinister thought experiment beneath his office building. And that’s all I’m gonna spoil about this game -- everyone should have the chance to delve into its rich, tiramisu-like layers, uncovering one new secret after another. A game in which you play a drab office drone who challenges the status quo, a game in which the wry British narrator is your conscience, your BFF, your devil’s advocate, and your nemesis, all at once -- I never thought crushing existentialism could be so hilarious. The Stanley Parable is almost more of a visual novel than a game, but the more directions you wander, the more ways you find to warp and subvert the narrative, the more you’ll laugh your ass off and then ponder the meaning of life itself. Don’t be a Stanley who hunches over a gray desk from now until death. Be a Stanley who chooses the wrong hallway, pushes the glowing red button, ignores the narrator’s fretful mewling. Be a Stanley who plays games like this one.

5. Submachine 10: The Exit (Free Online)
Just in time for Christmas, Mateusz Skutnik released the final(?) entry in his amazing Submachine series. What a journey it’s been! And what a note to end on! Since my original blog post, I still couldn’t quite tell you what the Submachine is or how it operates, but the tenth foray into its endless, crumbling expanse is a visual joy, mysterious and creepy and utterly unique. The Exit is fucking MASSIVE compared to its predecessors; not only must you click through a new series of mythic environments, you get to revisit every damn game in the series, which is exactly what I hoped the finale would accomplish. I’m going to miss it: the melancholy colors, the steampunk- and archaeology-inspired realms, the mechanical ka-chunk as you glide from screen to screen. But I’m in no hurry. Hell, I haven’t even finished The Exit yet. I’m not ready to let go of this series. It’s too cool. An absolute treasure and a rallying cry for creativity in gaming. I know there’s more to come...there’s always more. The Submachine never ends.

4. Undertale (PC/Mac)
Gamefaqs just did a tournament where voters could choose the best game ever. Ocarina of Time placed second. Undertale won. Which amuses me, because I can just hear the outraged screams of every gamer over the age of thirty. But it just goes to show how Undertale quietly grabbed hold of our zeitgeist this year. It’s another game that seems simple on the surface (basically one man’s love letter to Earthbound), but the more you play, the more you’re astonished. What Undertale does better than any game I’ve ever played is moral choice. The unique and ever-surprising combat system, in which you must bullet-hell your way through your foes’ attacks, allows you to beat the entire game without killing a single being -- and, believe me, every “enemy” you face has a voice, a personality, a soul. Games like InFamous or Dishonored may chastise you for killing, but Undertale will make you feel utterly, wretchedly bad about it -- and each alternate ending, depending on your level of brutality, has unexpected weight and pathos. For all that, the game’s world is vibrant and delightful, full of little details and memorable moments. Is this the best game ever? Probably not. But it stands among the best; just ask its fans, who voted out of love.

3. Lumino City (PC/Mac/iOS)
My admiration for a game is often proportional to the effort poured into it, hence my contempt for lazy 8-bit copycats farted out by delusional college students. They should do what developer State of Play did: Lumino City, the niftiest puzzle game I’ve encountered in awhile. You see, these guys didn’t program their gameworld into being, they fucking built it with their bare hands, crafting a miniature metropolis from paper, cardboard, and Radio Shack gizmos, then adding animated characters. As a result, Lumino City achieves a very distinct tangibility, a quirky realness that makes its precarious cliffside dwellings, skewed angles, and Rube Goldberg engineering feel more like an actual location than anything rendered on computers. The young heroine must track down her wayward grandfather and, along the way, solve the city’s energy crisis. Lumino City has a statement to make about our passive dependence on obsolete fuel technology, but it’s presented with such clever puzzles and artistic flair that it might actually win people over. Teach this in schools! It deserves more than just critical praise; it deserves social relevancy.

2. MirrorMoon EP (PC/Mac)
My runner-up is a hipster game with a hipster title, for hipsters who sneer at any game that’s not hipster enough. Well, hell, if I shunned pretentious games, these lists would be way shorter. MirrorMoon EP is an MMOG, sort of, in which you glide through the cosmos and visit procedurally generated planets, sans any kind of real goal. With origami graphics and a scant color palette, it casts a hypnotic spell. And it’s anchored by a slick idea: each planet has a moon, and the moon mirrors its planet (get it?) like an interactive mini-map. You wield a device with which you can move the moon, rotate it, or cause solar eclipses, affecting the very ground beneath your feet. Although the gameplay is repetitive (warp to a planet, visit its landmarks, lather, rinse, repeat), it’s the kind of repetition that can eat up an entire afternoon, because playing is meditative. It’s a mellow, sleepy, yet addictive experience, a game you can pick up over and over. New starmaps are routinely added, and when you visit a brand-new planet, you can name it. I guess this particular hipster experiment succeeded; I love MirrorMoon EP for its possibilities. When No Man’s Sky comes out, I can say I played this type of game way before it was cool.

1. The Evil Within (Multi-Platform)
Fuck, I’m even more embarrassed by my top pick. All year, I waited patiently for a game more enjoyable than The Evil Within. Nada. So here it is. Yes, parts of it made me fling the controller, and its philosophy on the horror genre (include ALL the cliches!) was kind of pitiable. There are the slowly-advancing undead hordes, and the offal-smeared linoleum, and there’s the bulky fellow with a polyhedron for a head. This game tried way, way too hard...but somehow, for me, it still succeeded. I had so much fun with it. As Detective Sebastian Castellanos bulldozed his way through crypts, caverns, hospitals, and an earthquake-stricken Raccoon City knockoff, chasing a plot that a drunken chimp might have kabanged out on a rusty typewriter, I measured the game by how often I had a big grin on my face. Pretty damn often. I witnessed the entire history of horror gaming in one delirious package, and if it felt incomplete, guess what: the DLC is excellent, filling in much of the backstory and providing all the weapons-free, stealth-based tension the main game lacked. There is nothing perfect or refined about The Evil Within, but its sheer earnestness, coupled with the cathartic pleasure of sending an explosive crossbow bolt into a two-headed, acid-spewing mutant’s uvula, kept me playing in an orgasmic haze. It wasn’t a scary game, but it was awwwwwesome. If I won your respect with the rest of this list only to lose it with my favorite game of 2015, so sorry. Boo hoo. World’s tiniest violin. I gotta be me: the doofus who never knows what game is going to steal his affections next. See you in a year.

Myst Series, pt. 9

ABCs of Death 2

To Squee Or Not to Squee: Hannibal, pt. 2

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 1

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 2

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 3

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 4

Myst Series, pt. 10

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 5

V/H/S

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 6

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 7

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, pt. 2

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 8

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 9

To Squee Or Not to Squee: Death Note

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 10

Favorite Books of 2015

Favorite Music of 2015

Favorite Games of 2015