![]() Same goes for much of the parody of the decidedly non-horror movie Mr. If there's a real laugh to be found, I didn't. (Her name's Kodos the Destroyer, for crying out loud.) In a rushed conclusion, Bart finds out the truth, the military wipes out the invading aliens with ease, and Homer smothers the captive Kodos with a pillow. parody has Kodos popping up in the Simpsons backyard, being befriended by Bart, and dropping far too many hints that he's not a harmless visitor from the stars. At least that's Marge's lesson as the logos for all the Fox programming that caused this installment to, once more, be shunted into the first week in November are turned into meatloaf for the cold open. ![]() Seriously, though, don't mess with Treehouse of Horror. Set the controls for the heart of the sun. There's hardly a joke to be found, the inclusion of Spike Lee in the sun-bound loser rocket is an ugly bit of cultural blindness on the show's part, and this whole, would-be momentous anniversary outing is just a straight-up bummer. The Y2K segment, meanwhile, sees Homer's typical carelessness infecting every computer in the world on New Years Eve (cue pointless Dick Clark cameo), leading to a pair of escape rockets for the world's best and brightest (including Lisa and plus-one Marge), and worst and most mediocre (including Bart, Homer, and a parade of tiresome celebrities, including a guesting Tom Arnold). (Although not as much as Lawless shutting down the nitpicking Frink over Xena inconsistencies by stating unequivocally, "Whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it.") (Technically this is a Halloween tale, only so far as the machine was inspecting the kids' candy.) Lucy Lawless turns up, because why not, and seeing the Xena actress beat the crap out of a decidedly rapey Comic Book Guy supervillain is at least a bit cathartic. ("Please be a dog," she pleads after running over Flanders on one of his nightly fog-walks.) The middle segment is a superhero takeoff, with the malfunctioning town x-ray machine granting Lisa and Bart superpowers. Plus, here and throughout, the show is all about breezy cruelty, with Marge being the primary victim of character drift as soon as a given story needs her to do something uncharacteristic. But the swerve into a werewolf story is basically just the show hitting the eject button on a story with no center. The Ned Flanders-centered riff on I Know What You Did Last Summer at least rustles up a little tension as the supposedly run-over and dead Ned stalks the family down a lonely lane. Plus, the commitment to the horror part of Treehouse Of Horror is essentially tossed out the window, as two of the three stories contain no horror elements at all, while the first simply slams two horror premises together and calls it a day. The cracks started to show in the previous season's shaky outing but the three stories here feel less like a chance for the writers to air out some great ideas that wouldn't fit into the series already elastic continuity, and more an exercise in cynical formula and terribly-aged topicality. The 10th anniversary of the Treehouse Of Horror franchise sees this once-inventive goof of a yearly premise succumb to slapdash laziness so fast it's unnerving. The whole Avatar thing had been done to death, even then, and while there are a couple of amusing embellishments (I liked the planet-defending pterodactyls dropping eggs filled with piranhas), lines like Bart's, "How dare you betray the planet I got laid on!," and Bart's mate revealing she got "space warts" from sleeping with a traitorous Milhouse are enough to make one space-barf. Follow that? The episode concludes with yet another Avatar parody, only with 10-year-old Bart having deceptive and copiously procreative sex with a Rigellian. The Ned Flanders becomes a murderer piece starts out feinting toward a Taxi Driver riff, then switches to Dexter, before God shows up to kill Homer for tricking Ned into killing Homer's enemies thanks to a speaker-gimmicked bible. The mid-segment switch to a Spider-Man parody (but, you know, keeping the whole fart motif) does nothing to redeem things. ![]() Raise your hand if you were clamoring for a Simpsonized take on the touching and completely non-horror-related The Diving Bell and the Butterfly centered on the paralyzed Homer only being able to communicate through farts. That the segment ends with a nihilistic, Bart-driven twist worthy of one of those Jim Thompson, nobody-wins desert scenarios is especially and impressively dark. It's probably not a great sign when the abbreviated cold open is the best part of a Treehouse of Horror, but the 127 Hours manner in which Homer (spiriting off the kids' Halloween candy thanks to that switch-witch bullcrap) is trapped under a boulder and chews through all four limbs to get to his purloined treats.
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