American Horror Story Welcome to Briarcliff Season 2 Episode 1 Editor’s Rating 4 stars * * * * Previous Next » Photo: Michael Yarish/FX

This ain’t no disco. This ain’t no country club, neither. This is AMERICAN HORROR STORY: ASYLUM.

And we’re back! HI GUYS! I don’t know about you, but I haven’t been this excited and scared about anything since I lost my virginity. And it should be noted that I lost my virginity to a COBRA! Kidding, that’s gross. Anyhow, are you guys ready for some TV MA (LSV)? I sure as hell am.

Briarcliff — it sounds like one of those depressing old-people manors where you go if you’re not quite totally demented but you still might burn down the house making a hot borscht. This whole season is going to be like a Marilyn Manson video.

RIGHT AWAY we open with a homage: Blair Witch, friends, because I think we blazed through every other possible horror tribute in season one. If, like me, you were hoping that a sophomore season wouldn’t mean more sophisticated dialogue or less obvious foreshadowing, your stupid fears were quickly assuaged by this opening bit of voice-over: “God, I’m so happy I married you.” You don’t have to be Randy from Scream to know what’s coming here!

Even better — the speaker is ADAM LEVINE. Oh, thank god. Here’s your obligatory joke about how we’ve been waiting to watch this guy die a violent death since that whole “This Love” thing. He and his wife (actually married to Channing Tatum in real life) are honeymooning and doing that cutesy hipster thing of breaking into haunted and disused buildings. Set your Instagram filters to XProMURDERRRRRR.

And here comes the exposition: 46,000 people died in Briarcliff Asylum, a Catholic home for the criminally insane (REDUNDANT, am I right? Ha ha ha ha, topical joke as of 1996). The bodies were shuttled out through a tunnel in the basement called “the death chute.” “We should totally do it in the death chute,” coos the wife. No, honey, that’s only on his birthday.

Anyhow, this is apparently their thing, and they start banging away in a rusty electroshock chair, and seeing Adam Levine’s thrust face is more disturbing than the Tod Browningian exploitation of a million billion actors with facial deformities. Hope you both have had your tetanus shots. They go down to the basement to investigate a scary noise and OH NO, something bites/rips his arm off. Hope he’s still able to “play guitar!” Well, take heart, honeymooners: I bet it was still more fun than Sandals: Nassau.

Titles! Titles which, incidentally, are just as Trailer-for-Silent Hill 12 as we had all hoped. It’s 1964. And Tate is working in a gas station!!! You guys! It’s Tate, and he’s a greaser gas station attendant named Kit. Ohhhhh god. It’s like somebody took your sex diary, ripped out a page, and sent it up the chimney from Mary Poppins. He’s menaced by a racist, Giovanni Ribisi–look-alike who munches on a piece of chocolate and West Side Story–dances off into the night. He goes home to his wife (who is black! Thus the weird allusion to chocolate). Ick. They have tender, basic-cable sex before being attacked by … aliens? Oh Murph.

And now we’re at Briarcliff, where Lily Rabe and Sarah Paulsen watch Jessica Lange shave Chloë Sevigny’s head. S.P. is Lana Winters, a reporter who’s pretending to research a story on the molasses bread the asylum makes. You know, asylum molasses bread? I think you can buy it in the Vermont Country Store. Anyhow, she’s actually there to catch a glimpse of Bloody Face, the serial murderer who is arriving that very day.

Of course, Jessica Lange is Sister Jude, the grand dame of Briarcliff who likes a good Led Zeppelin reference and punishes with asymmetrical lesbian haircuts. Chloë Sevigny is an incorrigible nymphomaniac. She also plays one on this television show. (I had to, folks!)

And oh, hooray, it’s Tate/Kit, and we get a glimpse of his butt, and Jessica Lange quickly says something racist and horrible about “dark meat.” She whips him, and Chloë Sevigny offers him butt-sex while the Singing Nun song plays. NOW we’re cooking with American Horror Story gas. Kit says he’s not Bloody Face and makes fast friends with Grace, a French girl who says she also didn’t kill her family.

Okay, so, we’ve hit pretty much every horror asylum trope so far. But what about a creepy, bespectacled doctor with a Nazi goatee and a dark secret? Oh helllllllo, James Cromwell. That’ll do, basement pig monster baby from season one. That’ll do.

And oh, hooray! That L on Sarah Paulsen’s lapel apparently stands for LESBIAN, because later we find her at home with her girlfriend, Clea Duvall. Loved them in 1999s indie comedy But I’m an Ambitious Reporter.

Next up: Jessica Lange, rubbing perfume on her negligeed body and cooking coq au vin for sexy priest Joseph Fiennes, who incidentally is looking good. In some kind of dream reverie, she whips off her wimple and humps up on that. Shakespeare in age-inappropriate LUST! Get it girl.

We check back in on the FUTURE, where Adam Levine is still gloriously bleeding out to the delight of everyone. This one ends on a cliffhanger (the wife goes off to get help and runs into BLOODY FACE!), so we don’t know for sure that Adam Levine is 100 percent dead, but at least he’s still squirting blood and in considerable fake pain, right? I mean, it’s a TV show, but I bet that prosthetic is uncomfortable, so Adam Levine is at least theoretically suffering somehow. Moves like JUSTICE.

Back in 1964, a few things happen in rapid succession: an inmate flings poo on Sister Mary Eunice, intrepid girl reporter Lana catches Chloë Sevigny blowing an orderly before Sister Jude catches her investigative journalisming. James Cromwell removes some kind of alien spider tracking device from Kit’s neck, and we see Lily Rabe’s butt when Sister Mary Eunice begs Jessica Lange to spank her. In case you thought we were going to save any of the lesbian-blow-job-butt-sex-S&M-priest-sex-anal-probing-scat stuff for episode two.

Sister Jude takes Lana prisoner and goes to visit her partner, and there’s some kind of prrrrrobably anachronistically timely talk about gay marriage and about how they have no legal rights over each other, which is fine. I mean, the best place for rational political discourse is FX’s American Horror Story? That’s what I always shout, at my TV, during the debates.

What did you guys think? Were you delighted? Whose butt do you want to see next? Do you think Joseph Fiennes got plugs? Anyhow, see you next week!!!!