There are moments in TV that are so pivotal, seminal and memorable that you remember them forever.
I mean, who could ever forget say, “Frankenfish” or “Sharktopus”?
Tonight, “American Horror Story: Asylum” premieres its second season with just that kind of quality broadcasting, and I wish I could forget the whole thing. Right away.
If you thought last year’s show was a campy joke, this season’s “American Horror” is so over-the-top, it makes “Trog,” the movie in which Joan Crawford in lab coat took the missing link to lunch, look like high art.
Forget lunch. If the great Jessica Lange keeps working on this series she will find herself (since it’s FX after all) in a red bustier taking the missing link to bed.
Anyway, even though it’s an entirely different story from last year’s “American Horror,” some of same cast returns. But instead of the “let’s move into the spooky house” scenario we’ve got “we’re forced to live in this house of horrors” plot.
This time, the “house” is an asylum for the criminally insane.
The show, which switches with no regularity between 1964 and the current day, begins in the present with (I swear ) Adam Levine as a photographer who breaks into the shuttered former asylum to take porn-y pictures of his hot wife while she administers oral sex. No, that’s not why the photos are blurry — it’s because the skinless man comes to kill him — which Levine deserves for being on TV so much he’s as annoying as the Kardashians.
Anyway, back to 1964, where Lange is Sister Jude, mother superior of the asylum. I don’t know to whom she’s superior, since there’s only one other nun working there (Lily Rabe), two guards, and a doctor who acts like the demon love child of Mengele and Dr. Moreau, (James Cromwell). In his free time, he turns inmates into hybrid monsters.
When Sister Jude isn’t administering shock treatments, she’s beating the crap out of inmates while wearing naughty undies. (see above).
She’s also handy at exorcisms, which we see when someone walks in off the street without an appointment for one.
Inmates include Bloody Face, a wrongly accused wife-decapitator/serial killer (Evan Peters); a lesbian reporter (Sarah Paulson); and one nympho (Chloe Sevigny).
If Freddy Krueger married Regan from “The Exorcist,” and they moved to “Shutter Island” with “Agnes of God” on “Friday the 13th,” they’d all end up in this “Asylum.”
And now I need to enter one myself after two hours of this craziness.