Editorials
‘American Horror Story’ 2×08 Review: Crazy Santa Spreads Death, Rape And Christmas Cheer
The Angel of Death (played be the always amazing Frances Conroy) carried last week’s episode on her big, beautiful black wings. It would’ve been entertaining without her glorious presence, but because she makes everything better, you can’t argue how much better she made that episode. This week, she’s gone, and her absence has left a dark angel sized hole in my heart. Thankfully, Ian McShane has come to town, and he successfully manages to add some much needed Christmas cheer to this week’s episode. More after the break!
Also, SPOILERS!
The episode starts off Christmas-y enough, with a charity Santa ringing one of those annoying bells outside a market. He spreads some wisdom to a little boy and as he’s packing up to go to his wife — who we quickly learn he dons Santa’s robes to escape — Ian McShane pumps him full of lead.
As if that’s not awful enough, immediately after that murder he visits a seemingly random house while dressed in the bloodied outfit of the guy he just slaughtered. That’s when the stupidest kid alive sees him, mistakes him for Santa — even though he’s not fat, jolly, bearded, and it’s six full days before Christmas — and decides to lead him to her parents.
Even after he puts a gun to her head this little idiot still calls him Santa. I know kids are dumb, but this little girl is beyond dumb. She deserves to be orphaned (did I seriously just write that?).
After Crazy Santa threatens to rape the dad, he shoots both of them in the head and goes on to murder another sixteen people. This is just the first five minutes! American Horror Story sure knows how to do a Christmas episode right.
It’s a year later and we’re back at Briarcliff where Evil Sister Eunice is preparing her Christmas Orgy and Virgin Sacrifice, or, well, not really. Her event seems pretty tame, even if she is cutting off patients’ hair and slapping it on the Christmas tree alongside empty bottles of alcohol and some poor guy’s dentures.
The guard that shot Grace at the end of the previous episode (belated spoiler!) is feeling pretty bad about it. He tells Dr. Nazi that he wants to tell the police and that he doesn’t care what happens to him. He’s a good guy, so obviously, that means he’s going to die (just not for another twenty minutes).
Sister Jude only recently found out that Sister Eunice is evil now and she’s not too happy about it. Jude decides to confront Eunice with a razor to the throat in one of the many showdowns we see this episode. Unfortunately, Dr. Nazi interrupts their little tiff just as it’s getting interesting — and by interesting, I mean Eunice is mind-throwing shit all over the place. Angry Jude gets escorted out of Briarcliff, and my hopes of seeing an epic showdown between her and Eunice leave with her. For now.
Evil Eunice sure does recover quickly: In one scene she has a blade to her throat and in the next she’s freeing Crazy Santa, who’s been locked in solitude for a year after he went all Hannibal on a guy’s face for wearing a Santa hat. We find out a little more about him, too. Apparently, he was thrown in jail for shoplifting, then on Christmas day five inmates took turns raping him in his cell while the guards went caroling. Yikes.
One of my favorite scenes is the one where Dr. Nazi gives Eunice a pair of ruby earrings. She loves them almost a little too much, and as she’s admiring how good they look, Arden dishes on their origin. Back when he was a Nazi in one of the concentration camps, he met a once wealthy Jewish woman who was having stomach troubles. He followed her one day only to see her sifting through her poo so she could get the ruby earrings she swallowed every single day. She eventually dies of internal bleeding and Arden takes her earrings to he can “give them to someone who is worthy.” The whole time he’s telling this story, he’s staring at Eunice in disbelief as she admires herself. When she shows no signs of giving a damn, he admits he hoped Eunice would turn the earrings down in disgust. After she didn’t, he knew there was no humanity left in her.
It’s a neat scene, and it almost made me feel bad about his situation.
Angry Jude sure is angry! She’s complaining to who I can only guess is the Queen of the Nuns about needing to get back into Briarcliff. She throws out her best religious fanaticism, ranting about how the devil is trying to avert humanity’s eyes away from god bit by bit (one of these bits being Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, apparently.)
Arden then does what he does best and interrupts again, only this time it’s so he can admit he was wrong and team up with Jude to take down Evil Eunice! I’m ashamed of how excited I got when this happened, but I couldn’t help but picture Sister Jude and Dr. Nazi walking down a hallway in slow-motion with the camera facing them as they look supremely badass. Dubstep may or may not have been blaring in said fantasy. Unfortunately, my dream of a spin-off series gets dashed rather quickly.
Meanwhile, the festivities at Briarcliff are continuing, where a very pale Monsigneur visits to give Eunice a special star to put on the tree — side note: does anyone else get weird vampire vibes from him? — and Ian McShane utters one of the best lines in the episode.
Let me set the scene first.
He’s sitting on a chair facing a gorgeous, denture-laden tree, with an almost definitely doped up woman on his lap. She looks at him, he looks back. Their eyes meet, and he says “”what do you say we blow this pop stand, go savage some elves, and then suck on each other?” So great.
There’s also a sweet and brief flashback of a pre-committed Kit and his girl on Christmas. They have a stunning tree, there’s a kid on the way, then, suddenly, Grace is there and she’s pregnant (and, possibly, sans accent)! Now, obviously Kit’s doped up and feeling bad about getting Grace killed, but seriously AHS writers: don’t bring her back. I know anything’s possible in this show and the aliens seems to have a weird fascination with Grace, but please, let her stay dead. I don’t want her to have a recurring hallucinatory role in this show.
I bet you were wondering when we’d have another showdown, huh? Well, we’re about to get not just one, but two.
Lana meets up with Kit to let him know she totally knows who Bloody face is. She also realizes the cops aren’t coming, because Kit’s still there. When she goes to get help, fucking Threadson shows up wearing his best creepy face. He’s a little pissed he had to destroy all his Bloodyface stuff, but now he’s looking to reinvent himself, and he’d very much like to use Lana’s skin to do that.
Than, Kit saves the day! Lana desperately wants to kill Threadson, but the duo decides to lock him up instead.
The other showdown happens when Arden leads Sister Jude into her old office so she can have her showdown with Eunice. Unfortunately for her, Arden actually wasn’t on her side, and instead, Eunice (who just got back from killing the guard who shot Grace) locks Crazy Santa in with Jude, who immediately begins to freak out. I would too, it’s just weird to see Jude begging for her life.
Long story short: Jude stabs Crazy Santa in the neck right before he got too rapey.
Oh, and the aliens took Grace’s body. I don’t know why.
Burning questions: The aliens. What’s going on there? They appear every once in a while to make me wish they’d leave and never return. And the Also, Monsigneur: is he a vampire? Lastly, Sister Jude says Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is one of the things to blame for humanity’s corruption, then Evil Sister Eunice (hilariously) says she plans to play that same movie during the “entertainment portion” of her Christmas event. Does that mean Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer really is one of the devil’s tools? DISCUSS!
Have a question? Feel free to ever-so-gently toss Adam an email, or follow him on Twitter and Bloody Disgusting.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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