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75The first episode teases an exciting dynamic, with the possibility of forcing viewers to root for one monster over another.
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75Does it add up to a coherent whole? Impossible to say so far. Asylum is, in its opening episodes, more energetic and impishly funny than its predecessor.
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42Ultimately, it's the exact same tedious show they've been making, under one name or another, for years now.
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70This is still a cheeky, trashy, nasty series, one that'll do or show pretty much anything if it thinks it'll get a rise out of you. But its sense of itself has become more refined.
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38If Freddy Krueger married Regan from "The Exorcist," and they moved to "Shutter Island" with "Agnes of God" on "Friday the 13th," they'd all end up in this Asylum.
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50Asylum has some good special effects, just not much of a story to hang them on.
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63It's dark, big-top sadism, and we wait for a story to emerge. [5 Nov 2012, p.41]
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70Not everyone's going to like this or other aspects of Sister Jude's story, which essentially does for nuns what the first season did for real estate agents. But it's the kind of cliché meant to appeal to parochial-school survivors of a certain age of which, yes, I'm one. And Murphy another.
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80In its first two episodes, AHS returns as a creepy, spooky jolt of unpredictable storytelling.
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60American Horror Story: Asylum reintroduces the first season's nightmarish craziness but also sets it within a coherent basic history. It helps too that the new cast appears to be so tight.
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75It's truly troubling to watch as helpless, restrained patients are treated against their wills. Yet despite mumbling over and over during the first episode, "I'm done with this already," I had to see the second.
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80Asylum dives right in on racism, homophobia and sexism, and wrings something emotional out of them.
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75Occasional PSA breaks aside, Asylum is all in great and occasionally gory fun, and the cast members deliver the over-the-top dialogue with a heaping topping of relish.
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75The most interesting thing here is the show's willingness to take risks: killing off major characters, running about 18 different plot lines at once, incorporating racy psycho-sexual and religious undertones, asking more questions than it intends to answer.
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70Less scary than freaky, it's deliberately unhinged-light horror about low camp, a showcase for scenery chewing and giddy blasphemy, an exploitation chamber piece.
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75Like a good scare? How about a bad scare? Or a thousand scares, good and bad and crazy? Season 2 of "American Horror Story," subtitled Asylum, is for you.
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80It's to the credit of Asylum's writers, directors and cast that the emotional pain of the characters often feels as real as their uncertainty and terror.
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40The bad news is that this potentially rich stew of frights and kink has been underspiced: Asylum, so far, doesn't have the energy or the over-the-top inventiveness that Season 1 eventually displayed.
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80So far it works.... Asylum feels like a more focused, if equally frenetic, screamfest. It's also gorgeously realized.
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80Asylum delivers a much more evocative nightmare gallery without losing any of the franchise's provocative, look-ma-I'm-screaming bravado.
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25Some of its imagery is arresting. But this is mostly a sorry, unfortunate and even contemptuous enterprise.
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40The series remains a collection of moments (creepy, campy, revolting) and stock characters, designed more to provoke and earn the "TV-MA" rating than to interact.
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80This new Horror Story is nearly as depraved, unapologetically over the top and engrossing as the first season was.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 24 out of 30
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Mixed: 4 out of 30
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Negative: 2 out of 30
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0This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.