Man, you guys are quick watchers for the TOH. Now that I've watched it, I can say that I guess the segments sort of had an upwards slope of improvement throughout, I'd assume?
The intro segment was pretty flat and unfunny. Demon Maggie is such a repetitive trope in TOH, I don't know why they would commit to it again, even for an
Omen parody, which I'm surprised they haven't done until now. Also, something I noticed in the joke where they are trying to find Maggie's mark of the beast was that in the promo before the show, it was Bart, but in the show itself, it's Mickey Mouse. Does anyone find that odd? It feels kind of deliberate within the way that was executed. They censored out the Disney joke for the advertisment.... 0/10.
The first segment was the worst one. The
Stranger Things parody had little-to-no plot or no stakes. It wasn't funny at all, it was very forgettable, and the tone is weird. It's supposed to take place in the 80's, but there are a few modern references in it, including an Amazon one for some reason. 0/10.
The second segment was pretty boring, but a little more interesting. Dead Homer switching bodies with people in order to stay with Marge until he finds the right one. Interesting, but it didn't bring any laughs. 3/10.
The third segment was the best one, surprisingly. I thought
The Shape of Water parody was gonna be the worst, but I laughed a few times. Particularly at Mr. Burns saying "don't aim at the truck, shoot the driver" to an army man in a car trying to chase after Homer, Selma, and Barney trying to sneak Kang away and the army man shooting the driver was pretty well-timed as well as Mr. Burns doing a little "nah-nah-a-boo-boo" dance after Kang uses the Infinity Gauntlet to destroy the army. 5/10.
So I'd rate this episode around 2/10. Maybe 3. Not sure. Pretty bad and pretty boring except for the last segment. I'd say it's slightly worse than last year's. Last year's had the Multiplisa-ty segment with some of the series' most fluid animation EVER. It was almost movie-tier animation, even if the jokes weren't memorable, the visual gags certainly were. Hell, I'd even say last year's TOH had a better intro as well with the Cthulu shit. This one was very mundane.
At its best, the annual “Treehouse Of Horror” episode gives The Simpsons an opportunity to bust loose of the admittedly elastic laws of its animated universe to treat us with some loopily inventive genre tales. If an outing manages to ground its trilogy (or more, in this case) of comic terrors...
tv.avclub.com
As usual, AV Club just gives it a B- even though the reviewer describes the episode as "wheezy". What's so weird is that every segment's separate grading is also a B-. It's extremely strange that this reviewer's default rating is B- for pretty much everything. I have no idea what kind of scale they use, but that's a weird bar to set.