Member-only story
Got two hours before Halloween ends, so I’m going to do a bonus feature this year, that doubles as my first attempt to fulfill a new quota of publishing at least two articles per week.
Since I did all of the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes last year and this one had some buzz around, I figured I could do another review. So, yeah, here it is:
The first segment is a parody of “The Babadook”, called “The Pookadook”. Basically Marge and Maggie read this strange book that tells of the “Pookadook”, which, like in the film, haunts them after reading it, and represents some inner rage that Marge is having.
As a parody, it’s a pretty good segment. A return to the more straightforward parodies of the old Treehouses instead of the more abstract, kinda weird and listless parodies they’ve been doing recently.
I like that they do adapt the film with Marge and Maggie, but adapt it to the setting of the Simpsons. In particular, the exploitation of grief in The Babadook instead is about Marge feeling used by the family, which is a good update, and the ending is pretty fun with the use of an outdoor vacuum cleaner.
My big complaint is that the actual jokes are sparse. The titular Pookadook doesn’t have a lot of great jokes, and the aforementioned outdoor vacuum is the only really funny joke (that and the beginning where the Pookadook book keeps popping up)
It’s honestly hard to watch modern Simpsons, in part because Julie Kavner is clearly…
