American Horror Story: Hotel Season 5

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Normally I watch AHS in 24 hours. I have stayed up overnight watching the series because it’s so good and engaging. This time, either it changed or I did, and I wasn’t hooked by this series as I normally am.

I had a lot of expectations for this because Lady Gaga was in it, and she won and Emmy for her role, and I suppose I expected a lot. I hadn’t seen it by the time she won. Now I’ve seen it and I say with 100% confidence: she didn’t deserve it. Lady Gaga is a terrible actress, and it’s made even more obvious when she’s in a show with great actors like Chloe Sevigny, Evan Peters, Angela Bassett, Sarah Paulson, and Kathy Bates. I felt like all she did was pose while playing herself and wearing fancy costumes. It’s not a stretch. Sadly, almost all of these actors didn’t have great roles in this season. The story just wasn’t as strong, I guess, or the characters were too 1-dimensional. As a horror story, this time the season felt more along the lines of “Saw” than previous versions of AHS.

The one saving grace of this season was Evan Peters as Mr. March. For him alone, I’d give this 5-stars. His portrayal was amazing and I watch clips of him as Mr March on YouTube all the time.

-A. Walker

All of the American Horror Story seasons are a guilty pleasure, including this one. This season isn’t as good as the other seasons, but it’s still watchable. I found that it had some interesting moments that held my interest, but then it had moments where it dragged into dullness. Half the actors are great and breathed quite a bit of life into their characters, while the rest were too bland. The good ones were Angela Bassett, Kathy Bates, Evan Peters, Lily Rabe, Dennis O’Hare, Chloe Sevigny, and Mare Winningham. The rest sucked the life out of the writing, which wasn’t top notch this season to begin with. Lily Rabe had a small role in this one, but she should have been cast as the Countess. That was too large of a role for Lady Gaga to tackle. Gaga had a cameo in the season after this and she was good in that because it was small enough to handle, but this season was too meaty of a role to give her. She held back instead of going to town with it. You could tell she was almost trying to hold her breath in scenes to look hard and tough, but it just came off cheesy and on the level of those bad B movie soft core pieces with the poor acting. While this season was good for the most part, there were too many lulls to keep it exciting. This felt like it was all over the place, disjointed, and pointless in so many areas even though it mildly held my interest, yet it left me mumbling in the end, “What a boring mess.” The maker of AHS said after Jessica Lange left this show that his dream cast would be Michelle Pfeiffer and Reese Witherspoon. They would be killer in AHS without a doubt, but can’t imagine they would’ve said yes to this season. Hotel could have been so much better and more exciting than it was especially with more accomplished versatile actors in the main lead roles.

I’d give Seasons 1-4 a total of 5 stars, Season 5 gets 3 stars, and Season 6 after this one 4 stars as it was definitely more interesting than this one.

– K Dude

First of all, this is by far the most lavish and insightful episode of the entire American Horror Story series. The plot is cleverly humorous as it is genuinely shocking and at times indeed horrifying.

The production values are visually stunning which is not a contrivance to obscure the absence of Jessica Lange nor do they provide a setting to exclusively showcase Lady Gaga for the cachet of her fame and create an overblown music video-like pot boiler to parade her around like a mindless Barbie Doll in $50K couture gowns.

This would be a grotesque insult to Lady GaGa and if the production had in fact proven to be a deliberate deception to use her in this manner she would have had every right to go “John Lowe” on the writers and director.

While we’re on the subject of John Lowe, who in fact is one of the most pivotal and intriguing characters of “Hotel”; I must laud Wes Bentley’s amazing portrayal of a man impaired with a severe psychiatric condition; Multiple Personality Disorder (Dissociative Identity Disorder) delivering a brilliant and definitive performance for which he should have received an Emmy Award.
It is no small task to convey a completely convincing portrayal of the “Jekyll & Hyde” nature of his serial killer personae vs. the police detective and grieving father obsessed with finding his lost son.
Even his preference to mete out justice as the “10 Commandments” serial killer, reveals the connection between his 2 personalities as we witness his detective character angrily bemoaning the loopholes in the justice system that permit law beakers to go free without punishment.

I’ll take a moment to deviate and point out that the exterior of the Hotel Cortez; more specifically the neon sign bearing it’s name, is identical to the neon sign of the old Hotel Chelsea in NYC (or more colloquially the Chelsea or Chelsea Hotel); although the interior of the Chelsea was anything but glamorous and nothing like the sumptuous Art Deco period sets designed for the lobby and bar of the Cortez.
The Chelsea Hotel was home for many accomplished musicians, authors and artists alike.

The implied association of the two very old hotels is not meaningless since they were both residential and the spiritual identities, both literally and figuratively, were essentially artistic and spectral in nature; yes I am implying but deplore the use of the word “ghosts”.

Designer Will Drake (Cheyenne Jackson), fashion editor Claudia (Naomi Campbell) and certain aspects of “The Countess” (Lady GaGa) are the catalytic elements that define the artistic elements of the Cortez.

Evan Peters who plays Mr. March, is an actor who honors his craft with an outstanding portrayal of the “Sweeney Todd” musical inspired character of the same name.
Mare Winningham portrays the ever suffering “Miss Evans” with a perfect touch of poignancy and tragic sentimentality channelling the roll of Sweeney Todd’s “Mrs. Lovett”.
I would like to think that the portrayals of Mr. March and Miss Evans might even evoke a nod of approval from Stephen Sondheim.

The same can be said of Denis O’Hare in his characterization of “Liz taylor”.
The ever reliable Kathy Bates delivers a solid performance with with bulls eye precision as “Iris”.
Sarah Paulson shines as the bitter mainlining junkie, “Sally” and the clairvoyant, Billie Dean Howard who regrettably contacts the band of serial killers.
Angela Basset is hallmarked by her razor sharp and scheming demeanor that distinguishes her performance of “Ramona”.

This is not your typical vampire movie and there are amusing quips alluding to the universal nature of vampirism is all of it’s aspects, whether it’s a traditional depiction of inhuman blood sucking creatures or greedy, parasitic insignificant-other boy or girlfriends who are “gas lighting” their partners; which is a clever allusion to the antics of season 1.

Lady GaGa treats us to a reenactment of Bianca Jaggers’, Lady Godiva inspired entrance on a white horse at Studio 54 and comments that back in the heyday of the 70’s, we were all vampires; an observation mirroring the famous Bram Stoker/Dracula, admiration filled comment about the nocturnal “children of the night” .

The installment of the Rudolph Valentino story as the background story explaining how GaGa is turned vampire would have benefitted from a more focused and aggressive editing of this necessary subtext which is excessively drawn out and laborious.

All in all, this production is ambitious to say the least and is an indisputable triumph.

-lawrence chan

DVD Wholesale Main Features :   

Format: AC-3, Box set, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), Spanish (Dolby Digital 5.1)
Subtitles: English, French, Spanish
Dubbed: French, Spanish
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only.)
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Number of discs: 4
Studio: 20th Century Fox
DVD Release Date: October 4, 2016
Run Time: 78 minutes
ASIN: B01D3RP2ZY