Rating:

On the one hand, “Treehouse of Horror V” is an episode of the TV show The Simpsons and not a movie, so it shouldn’t really count for review here. On the other hand, go fuck yourself. In our TV intensive society, the annual Simpsons Halloween special has become something of a tradition along the lines of A Charlie Brown Christmas; the particular holiday season isn’t complete until you’ve seen it. Granted, the new “Treehouse of Horror” episodes have aired after Halloween a number of times in recent years, so the holiday season actually was complete before you saw it, but I maintain it didn’t seem complete. Thus, I feel like a “Treehouse of Horror” review is not only justified but necessary, and baby I can’t fight this feeling anymore.

Of the many Halloween specials The Simpsons have thrown our way over the years, the fifth one is doubtless the best. It aired in the show’s sixth season, squarely within that “golden era” of seasons three through eight, and a big heaping helping of that gold went right into this show. If, for reasons known only to yourself, you are somehow unfamiliar with the format of a Simpsons Halloween special, the episode is divided into three separate stories. In the early years the shows featured wraparound segments before and after each story proper, but that had been phased out by this point. Telling three complete stories in such a short amount of time, it’s amazing they ever found room for the wraparounds, but by going without them we don’t lose anything; instead, we gain more time for jokes and plot within the stories themselves. The three mini-episodes in “Treehouse of Horror V” are called “The Shinning,” “Time and Punishment” and “Nightmare Cafeteria.” Since they truly are three separate entities jammed tightly into one package, we’ll deal with them one at a time.

The Shinning
Oh, holy cow is this one great. As the title would lead you to guess, this segment is a parody of Stanley Kubrick’s classic film version of The Shining. The most impressive thing about this little cartoon is that it manages to hit every pertinent point of the two hour film, distilling it down to its very essence in just seven minutes. But even if you’ve never seen the movie from which this draws its inspiration, there is plenty here for you to enjoy.

The story in a nutshell: Homer is hired on as the winter caretaker for a hotel Mr. Burns owns, and he brings his family with him. The hotel is full of spooks and haints, and they do all they can to make Homer go crazy and kill his family. Adding to the ghosts’ influence is the fact that the hotel is completely devoid of all beer and cable TV, and it’s this more than anything else that pushes Homer over the edge.

And when he goes over the edge, he does so in absolutely marvelous form. Homer’s freakouts are some of the most comical things mankind has yet unleashed upon the world. Homer screams and jibbers while contorting his face and body into positions so bizarre they make me get down on my knees and give thanks to the heavens for the fact that animation exists. He goes from one comical pose to the next, each more hilariously improbable than the last, leaving the viewer laughing so hard he wets not just his pants but the pants of several people nearby.

Don’t worry—Homer doesn’t succeed in his quest to kill his family. He does eliminate Groundskeeper Willie with an axe to the back, however, so if you’ve got a crush on the hirsute Scotsman you may want to have a tissue handy.

Time and Punishment
The middle section of the episode is inspired by Ray Bradbury’s famous short story “A Sound of Thunder.” You know the one; it’s the story that taught us all that if you travel back in time and so much as bend a blade of grass, you will fuck everything up for sure. So don’t do it!

Unfortunately, Homer Simpson is the one traveling through time in this case—an ability he develops after accidentally jamming his hand in a toaster—so, in terms of preserving the timeline as we’ve known it, the outlook is none too good. With each trip into the past, he inadvertently does some measure of damage that changes everything about the world he comes from. At one point he finds himself in a world where Ned Flanders is the unquestioned lord and master of the universe; another time he is an ant-sized Homer plagued by a gargantuan Bart and Lisa.

Each time he finds his reality destroyed, he again travels to the prehistoric past in attempt to set things right. In typical Homer fashion, he fails each time. Once he squashes a bug, once he kills some dinosaurs, and on one particularly memorable occasion he sits down on a fish, squeezing the life out of it and prompting him to deliver one of the greatest lines in the whole history of The Simpsons: “Oh, I wish I wish I hadn’t killed that fish.”

Oh, bad news for you kilt-o-philes: Groundskeeper Willie gets axed in the back again. I’m so sorry.

Nighmare Cafeteria
A school cafeteria is a pretty nightmarish place even under the best of circumstances. Where else in the world does pizza come in those odd rectangles? Where else are Halloween cookies served until school lets out in May? And what’s up with those kids who played “No Woman No Cry” on the jukebox every single day for all four years of my high school experience? I mean, seriously!

But the cafeteria at Springfield Elementary is (perhaps) even worse. With the school overcrowded and unable to afford enough quality foodstuffs, Lunchlady Doris and Principal Skinner hatch a scheme to solve both problems by feeding the student body students’ bodies. As more and more children disappear, Bart and Lisa get wise to what’s going on. Marge flatly refuses to help her two children despite their mortal danger, so they attempt to escape before they’re made into a gruesome but delicious lunch.

Except, well, they don’t escape. Principal Skinner, stopping only to plunge an axe into Groundskeeper Willie’s back yet again, catches them and gets them cornered, pushing the kids inch by inch toward a giant food processor in which Bart and Lisa will be unceremoniously gooified. Just as Bart announces that surely something will happen to save the young Simpson kids, he and Lisa plummet into the whirling blades of the food processor to their death.

And that’s when Bart wakes up. Whew, it was only a nightmare! The horror is all over!

Or is it? There’s barely enough time to reassure Bart that no one intends to eat him before a deadly fog that turns people inside out seeps in through the window and turns the entire Simpson family’s innards into outtards. They view this basically as a minor setback, and close the show with a cheery musical number, which contains the following lines:

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