Simpsons Season 26 Review: Treehouse of Horror XXV

Marvin Monroe approves

"Treehouse of Horror XXV"

    Here we have it: another year, another Halloween special. I'm gonna say it right off the bat: this is a pretty good episode. Generally, even in the Simpsons' crappiest seasons, you can usually rely on the Halloween episodes to at least be semi-entertaining. This year is no exception. I will say, I only enjoyed two of the three segments. Maybe I'm just dumb, but the Clockwork Orange parody really left me cold and annoyed. I'll get into more detail below, but I'd call it one of the worst ToH segments I've ever seen. Yikes.
    The episode begins like the beginning of any number of late night talk shows. There's an announcer rattling off lists of celebrities that would appear in this year's installment, while clips of the past 24 iterations of the Halloween episodes scroll past. At the end, all the dead bodies of the celebrities mentioned spell out, "Treehouse of Horror". Meh, it's a decent opening. Unlike the other couch gags so far, it's okay that this one is long. It isn't as long as the absurd (and awesome) couch gag from "Clown in the Dumps", and it doesn't overstay its welcome. At least you get to see brief glimpses of great former episodes.
    For this episode, I'll give short rundowns of the three segments here. Let's "get-r-dun" (still relevant?)

School Is Hell

 

Love these demons!

    Bart and Lisa get pulled into Hell, where they attend the school there. As you would imagine, Bart excels. Eventually, he has to torture (which is part of the curriculum) Homer, who is fully supportive of the idea (since Bart is finally doing good at school). The story is decent, although I'm pretty tired of the novelty of Bart doing well in school (no matter where it may be). However, this is a great segment for something that I generally don't look for in a Simpsons episode: the look. All the demons, the monsters, the school itself, the various Hell versions of normal Springfield denizens, it's all awesome. The school really looks like how you might imagine Hell looking. Even for a cartoon, there's some fairly disturbing imagery and disgusting stuff. I could call some of it horrific even. This episode has a few laughs, and a decent story, but I would say this segment is worth watching just for the imagery. This segment gets a 6/10 from me! A few quick notes:

• One of Bart's Hell courses: "Keeping the Yankees in first place". 
• Homer: "Bart, you went to Hell and came back a winner, like Jesus."

A Clockwork Yellow

 

Not the best picture, but this segment doesn't deserve a good pic!

 

     This is a parody of A Clockwork Orange. I haven't seen the movie, so perhaps some of these jokes are lost on me. I don't even feel confident giving a summary. But, let's try anyway: Moe, Lenny, Carl, and Homer are a band of delinquents. Moe drops out, and sometime later (months or years, I don't remember. Or care), gets beat up by a new band of delinquents. So Moe gets the old band back together (so to speak), and they do...something? I don't remember. I really, really disliked this segment. I thought it was dull, boring, unfunny, and annoying. I don't think the accents are great either. This one just bugs me. I'll give it a very generous 3/10 (mainly because of one joke which I really enjoyed. See below).

• Homer brings Marge back to his pad. Marge thinks they are gonna have sex, but it turns out to be a montage of Homer doing literally everything else but sexing up Marge. She sits bored on the bed. It's kinda funny
• The iPhone perspective bit, towards the end, is my favorite joke of the episode. Pretty funny.

 

 

The Others

 

   The Simpsons family is being hassled by ghosts! Oh no! It turns out it's their Tracey Ullman era selves. God, I LOVE the meta-ness of this episode. All the regular Simpsons members end up killing themselves so they can be ghosts along with the Ullman-Simpsons. The story is pretty good overall, and this is just a damn hoot. The funniest of the three segments. But that doesn't even matter! The Simpsons meeting their old 1987 Tracey Ullman selves (even the voices match up pretty good with those very first Simpsons characters) is too good. This one definitely gets an easy 8/10. Let's check it out:

• The Married-with-Children-on-every-channel gag was pretty funny
• Marvin Monroe cameo! How fucking awesome
• The end, with the different variations of the Simpsons family (Adventure Time Simpsons, Japanese manga Simpsons, Lego Simpsons, etc) is great
• Overall just really fun, and I love all the callbacks
• Tracey Ullman Homer: "What kind of afterlife is this? Can't even strangle my dead kid!"

    That's it folks. This was a pretty good episode. It's not big on the laughs (most come during that final segment), but the Hell-imagery and monsters of the first segment, and the meta-ness and laughs of the final segment, make this a great entry into the ongoing Treehouse of Horror anthology. That Clockwork Orange segment notwithstanding, this was a solid episode. So, all even numbered episodes are gonna be good? Is that is? Doesn't make me look forward to the next one, episode five! This episode overall receives from me the almighty rating of:

6/10

    If that second segment could have been even mediocre, I'd have no qualms with giving this one a strong 8/10. Sorry this one took so long to be written. There just are not enough hours in the damn day. Anyway, thanks for reading, and expect the next one up soon!