Movie Box Review

Since we last saw our rag-tag band of survivors, they've had to endure the loss of their leader, the man most responsible for mapping out their initial strategies and saving them along the way from all manner of deadly predators...  

Oh, wait.  That's THE WALKING DEAD series itself, where the vanished hero is Series Creator/Showrunner Frank Darabont (he's still credited as an Executive Producer, but that seems to be a contractually-required formalism).  Darabont was reportedly unhappy with AMC's treating their one genuine hit (MAD MEN and BREAKING BAD are Emmy magnets, but their ratings are mid-level) by cutting its budget, as well as other network strictures, and so he's walked away, leaving control of the series in the hands of Executive Producer Glen Mazzara.

In truth, and despite Darabont's shiny screenwriting reputation, Walking Dead wasn't known for the pithy wit of its writing, and the show doesn't seem to have suffered at all in his absence.  Tonight's Season 2 premiere, oddly credited to 2 writers on separate title cards (Ardeth Bey and original graphic novel creator/EP Robert Kirkwood), and also to 2 directors (Ernest Dickerson and Gwyneth Horder-Payton), was, despite its supersized 90-minute length, quite compact in scope, and as effective as the show has ever been.  

Our characters who survived the death trap that the CDC in Atlanta turned out to be have a new goal:  Fort Benning, 125 miles away.  But as they start to make their way down the highway, they encounter an impassable jam of crashed cars and trucks, a faulty radiator on the RV, and something new:  a "herd" of zombie Walkers, dozens of them all looking for human flesh.  Luckily, they're still none-too-smart and none-too-fast (and their sense of smell seems to have disappeared), so they're mostly avoided or dispensed with.  But one does go after young Sophia (Madison Lintz), and Sheriff Rick (Andrew Lincoln) goes after her.  When Rick has to dispatch a couple of Walkers, Sophia is lost, and the next day most of the group combines in search of her.  Meanwhile, the characters deal a bit with the aftereffects of last season's storylines:  Andrea (Laurie Holden) is furious that Dale (Jeffrey DeMunn) didn't let her self-immolate at the CDC as she wanted to, while Shane (Jon Bernthal) decides he's going to split off from the group, rather than co-exist with Rick's wife and his former lover Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies).

Among TV's horror series, Walking Dead is unusual for its relatively simplistic plot--since zombies, unlike vampires, witches and other supernatural beings, can't handle much more than lurching and chewing--and also for a tone that relies more on suspense and sheer grossness than narrative thrills.  (Tonight's "yecch" sequence had Rick and Norman Reedus's Daryl cutting open the belly of a Walker to see if any of Sophia's body parts were in there.)  Things bogged down a bit when the group came to an abandoned church and we got not one but two agonized monologues directed to its statue of a crucified Jesus, but the episode did have a strong, and unexpected, cliffhanger ending that should bring people back next week.

AMC also launched something new and different tonight:  THE TALKING DEAD, a weekly half-hour talk-show that will follow every episode of Walking and try to keep fans from changing the channel  It's modeled after the highly successful Watch What Happens series on Bravo (Lifetime has also gotten into the game, with a follow-up to each week's Project Runway), but this is the first time it's been tried in conjunction with a scripted series.  The initial episode, unfortunately, was formatted within an inch of its life and had no substance at all.  Instead of allowing host Chris Hardwick and guests Patton Oswalt and James Gunn (he wrote the script for the Dawn of the Dead remake) to talk with any depth or insight about tonight's episode or the series, they were just permitted to deliver a few one-liners while the show bounced from viewer poll to tweeted question to behind-the-scenes featurette to jokey death count to jokier murder montage.  A brief satellite appearance from Kirkwood was also nothing more than the most superficial kind of celebrity Q&A.  The post-game recap show for a series with committed fans is an idea with real potential, but right now it's as empty of meaningful content as a Walker's brain.

The first inkling of just how deranged AMERICAN HORROR STORY is going to be comes with one of the early "normal" scenes.  The location isn't the haunted house, so we're away from the girl with Down's Syndrome who tells people they're going to die in there, the brutally murdered identical twins, the body parts and fetuses preserved in jars... I could go on. But at this point in the story, we're at the private high school where teen Violet (Taissa Farmiga, sister of Vera, who played the younger version of her sister in the recent Higher Ground) is merely smoking a cigarette where it's prohibited, and the local mean girls don't approve (one of their grandmas died of lung cancer).  Yet even this scene is staged with such intense, hyped-up rage that you might think a massacre is about to take place.  The message is clear:  Abandon restraint, all ye who enter here.

"Restraint" isn't a word associated with Ryan Murphy and his co-creator Brian Falchuk in any case (Murphy also directed the pilot)--whatever their strengths and failures, both Nip/Tuck and Glee have been all-in propositions, veering wildly from serious drama to wild perversity often in the course of a single episode.  Letting Murphy and Falchuk loose in the horror area is like granting them a license to kill, mutilate, and generally rampage.  American Horror Story, with its oddly emblematic title ("American" as opposed to what, exactly?  A Portuguese horror story?) embraces all the leeway the genre provides; watching it, you can almost feel Murphy and Falchuk exulting: Where has this genre been all my life?

On the most basic level, American Horror Story has a classic set-up:  the very troubled Harmon family moves from Boston to Los Angeles, where they buy a house with a history of terrible events.  (The gay couple who owned the house previously died in a murder/suicide, and that's just the beginning.)  Vivien (Connie Britton) had suffered an awful late-term miscarriage and hasn't been, psychologically or physically, the same since; after that, her psychiatrist husband Ben (Dylan McDermott) cheated on her with a 21-year old, Vivien walked in on them, and while the couple has remained together, they're completely estranged.  Violet is an outcast who hates LA and cuts herself, but she finds her life livened up when she meets Tate (Evan Peters), one of Ben's patients, who has elaborate fantasies about wreaking Columbine-type vengeance on his schoolmates and is also suicidal.  Plus there's the next-door neighbor Constance (Jessica Lange), mother of the Down's Syndrome woman who "has a way" of getting into the house even when all the doors are locked; Constance has some as-yet unclear involvement with whatever terrors the house contains.

There are many influences here, but the predominant one seems to be The Shining.  Like the novel and especially the Kubrick film, there's the general idea of a family's psychosexual dysfunction being absorbed and amplified by the evil spirits of their dwelling (just as Jack Torrance saw a beautiful, naked woman in place of a rotting corpse, when Ben looks at the elderly housemaid Moira, he doesn't see Frances Conroy, but rather the young, very sexual Alexandra Breckinridge).  More specifically, there's the suggestion that Ben will be coaxed by the house into trying to murder his family, which is apparently what happened to previous owner Larry Harvey (Denis O'Hare).

Luckily for American Horror Story, the genre doesn't require too much in the way of logic, which is typically a weak point for Murphy and his team.  On the other hand, it's very unclear how they're going to sustain this premise beyond a few episodes--after a certain point, there are only so many repellent, terrifying incidents the family can undergo before they'll seem like complete idiots for staying in the house.  For now, though, the show is quite compelling in its crazed way (it certainly isn't dull).  It's also graced by some terrific acting.  Even though Vivien is hardly comparable to Tami Taylor on Friday Night Lights in terms of depth or fullness, Britton brings the same kind of commitment and intelligence to the role, while McDermott, Farmiga, O'Hare, Peters, Conroy and especially Lange offer effective creepiness.

It remains to be seen whether American Horror Story will offer anything beyond superficial scares, let alone a coherent story or meaningful theme.  But the horror genre is, if nothing else, a flexible one, and cheap thrills can be satisfying too, if they're well done.  So far, the show is off to a darkly entertaining start.