Reviews
New ‘Family Guy’ Halloween Special Gets Silly In Its Pursuit of the Perfect Holiday Song [Review]
Family Guy’s newest Halloween special hatches a passionate trick-or-treating scheme while also righting an age-old wrong that’s hung over the holiday’s head for years.
Halloween episodes are a tried and true television tradition that has thankfully only grown more creative over time. They’re a great opportunity for characters to try on new skins – figuratively and literally – during a time when it can often feel like reality’s rules don’t apply. Family Guy is no stranger to Halloween episodes, yet they’re hardly something that the series has run into the ground. Family Guy’s first Halloween episode didn’t occur until the show’s ninth season, and it’s been fairly selective on that front ever since. Corporate synergy and Hulu holiday specials have given Family Guy the chance to embrace Halloween in new ways. While the series is still finding its footing with how it approaches these specials, “A Little Fright Music” is a strong, silly Halloween episode that’s a great apéritif for this year’s spooky season. It turns to music and mischief to get to the very core of the holiday.
Brian and Stewie were front and center in Family Guy’s previous Halloween special, and “A Little Fright Music” unites this duo over a very relatable annoyance. There’s plenty that Brian and Stewie love about Halloween, yet they’ve developed a growing disdain for the holiday’s lackluster song catalogue. Trick-or-treaters have been forced to accept “The Monster Mash” as Halloween’s anthem. Disappointed with the state of Halloween’s musical affairs, Brian and Stewie pledge to craft the ultimate Halloween song instead of waiting for the holiday to create one on its own.
This is a small-scale plot in concept, but the perfect type of story that has infinite room to grow as these characters get lost in the creative process. This idea could play out with so many potential outcomes that are all dependent on which characters are involved in the carol creation. Stewie and Brian are certainly the most satisfying duo to embark on this endeavor, which results in an entertaining episode that’s as much a love letter to everyone’s favorite autumnal holiday as it is a celebration of Brian and Stewie. It’s a playful story that explores the endless creativity that Halloween inspires, rather than an episode that opts for scares and suspense (although there’s a little of that, too). “A Little Fright Music” pursues an angle that represents an equally important part of the holiday that’s helped Halloween become a touching time for new traditions and personalized passion, regardless of age.
There’s plenty of fun to be had with the dissonance that’s created between Stewie and Brian as they get deeper in this project. Stewie gets lost in every aspect of song production except the song itself, while Brian loses his patience and grows to regret this creative collaboration. Curiously, there are quite a few sitcoms that attempt to create new musical anthems for holidays, albeit typically not with Halloween. That being said, the same principles are in place, and this turns into one of the more entertaining examples where two stubborn, creative forces attempt to work together and create something. There’s a moment in which Brian uses the term “bon mot” as an early indication of the turbulence that these two will have in their musical endeavor. While this is hardly a reference to Frasier, the dynamic that’s shared between Stewie and Brian here is very akin to Frasier and Niles and how they would go about such a pursuit. It’s a successful tone that helps both characters shine in their own ways, rather than pitting them against each other and punching down with them.
Brian and Stewie’s musical mission becomes a light-hearted balance for the rest of the episode’s exploits. Chris finds himself looking inward when he experiences malaise as a teenager who longs to continue trick-or-treating, while his older age suggests that he’s now banished to hand out candy at home with the rest of the joyless adults. Family Guy has something compelling to say with all this, especially once it turns into an opportunity for Chris to “become a man” with Peter. This – evidently – means learning how to comfortably lie to the women in his life while he does what he wants.
“A Little Fright Music” heads into a ludicrous third act that’s rich in car crashes, urban legends, and masked killers. It’s a heightened trope-filled turn of events, but it at least finds a way to justify all this and make sense of it all, rather than actual serial killers being in pursuit of Peter, Chris, and company. These holiday machinations push Lois to go all “get off my lawn” when it comes to Halloween’s mutation over the years, as it’s turned into yet another extended excuse for adults to regress and commandeer the holiday away from children. What’s supposed to be fun escapism becomes an opportunity for bragging rights, class disparity, and ego boosts. Lois is certainly a fitting Halloween Grinch, but this doesn’t necessarily become a storyline of its own. Lois’ irritation works as an obstacle to Peter and Chris’ pursuits. Her initially toxic perspective blossoms over the course of the episode until it becomes an unlikely inspiration to the rest of the cast, rather than something that impedes their holiday joy.
Chris and Peter’s night on the town is an innocuous enough story that reinforces the episode’s grander themes of Halloween’s societal expectations and how this is often bifurcated between kids and adults; creative freedom over the prison of monotony. In this sense, it’s appreciated that Family Guy attempts to say something a little deeper with this holiday. It’s the right move for a show that’s committed itself to multiple Hulu holiday specials at this point, and so it better have something about Halloween that goes beyond a surface level analysis. Family Guy’s previous Halloween special, “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Cheater,” was much less successful because it indulged in hollow guest stars and an exaggerated storyline that strayed too close from home. “A Little Fright Music” finds a better balance that turns this into a significantly stronger Halloween special and a better Family Guy episode in general.
There’s also plenty to appreciate in “A Little Fright Music” outside of the core storytelling and character development. The episode’s non sequiturs land, for the most part, while the cutaway jokes are a cut above the norm. There’s a brilliant riff on “Who’s on First?” that’s filtered through Abbott Elementary that genuinely had me laughing. Another gag takes a ridiculous jab at FOX Animation Domination synergy through a Grimsburg shout-out. This is all accompanied by decent pacing and an episode that doesn’t waste time. “A Little Fright Music” isn’t anything revelatory, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do in this Halloween showcase.
Family Guy does solid work in this holiday installment. However, episodes that revolve so heavily around the debut of a big song – while admirable – are often set up to fail in some respects. “A Little Fright Music“ makes a decent argument that there aren’t any definitive Halloween songs. Granted, Halloween is not as song-heavy a holiday as Christmas, but the point still stands. An episode of this nature would really hammer its point in if Brian and Stewie’s song legitimately caught on in the real world and turned into a seasonal hit. Now, such a feat is nearly impossible, and something with even the cultural pull and legacy of Rick and Morty, The Simpsons, and South Park would struggle to pull this off. This doesn’t turn “A Little Fright Music“ into a failure by any means, but it does just underscore how an episode like this could really succeed on a meta level under the right circumstances. Family Guy doesn’t attempt anything nearly as lofty in “A Little Fright Music,“ but that’s more than okay. This is a Halloween special that features far more treats than tricks. Brian and Stewie’s song is unlikely to become an evergreen Halloween hit, but this Family Guy episode might become a part of many audiences’ annual Halloween watch list.
“A Little Fright Music” is available to stream now, as of October 6, on Hulu.
Reviews
‘Unhinged’ Review: Netflix’s Interactive Horror Thriller Is Short But Serviceable Gaming Fare
Netflix has such a strange history in gaming. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people don’t even know that there are free mobile games you can access through the service. Many of them are adaptations of their TV series, like “Too Hot to Handle” or “Squid Game”, while some are mobile versions of existing games, like Into the Breach or Hades.
In addition to mobile games, they’ve also created interactive movie experiences where you use your remote to select narrative options at branching points. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was a fairly successful version of this, but my sentimental favorite was the one where WWE’s New Day had to escape a murder house boobytrapped by The Undertaker. Even if some of these made a bit of a splash, it seems it never really hit with mainstream audiences the way their shows do.
One of the studios they purchased while trying to break into the game space was Night School Studio, the creators of the spooky narrative series Oxenfree. This struck me as a particularly smart acquisition, as this type of narrative game seems like something that would feel at home under the Netflix umbrella. While they did release Oxenfree II while owned by the streaming giant, it was released on traditional platforms, which led me to wonder when their first Netflix exclusive would show up.
While they did produce a game called Thronglets, a mobile version of a plot element from an episode of “Black Mirror”, the recently released Unhinged seems to be one of the highest profile Netflix games in a long time.
Unhinged is a first-person, narrative-driven thriller starring Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink, and Troy Baker. This 30-minute experience, played on your TV through the standard Netflix app, is controlled by your phone, using some clever tricks to make the whole thing feel more immersive. It’s a neat variation on the “interactive movie” subgenre, with a tiny bit of point-and-click adventure game DNA thrown in for good measure, but it doesn’t exactly offer you as many options as something like Until Dawn.
Kravitz plays Ava, a woman who is hunkering down in her apartment complex during a dangerous hurricane. As she talks with her friend Claire, who lives in a neighboring building, about possibly leaving to find shelter elsewhere, she finds herself in a desperate chase with a crazed killer that stalks her through the halls of the building. It’s a decent setup for a very contained story, but I wish there was a little more meat on the bones. The voice acting is great, but there’s not really a ton of characterization for the two leads, and the killer was a bit “generic psycho” for my taste. There’s some implied backstory with other tenants in the building, but it’s not enough to make me feel like there’s a web of relationships that would give the story more emotional weight.
To play the game, you open up your Netflix app wherever you usually watch, then select the game. This will bring up a QR code, which you’ll scan on your phone, prompting you to download a controller app that will sync up to the game. The majority of the way you’ll interact is by pointing at the screen like a Wiimote, which selects on-screen options for Ava and shines her flashlight around the environment.
While this does give it the feel of an FMV game, Unhinged is rendered in a photorealistic graphics style, and while not quite to the level of something like P.T., it does the trick of drawing you into the action. You’re still put on a pretty strict path while moving around, which is done automatically when you select a direction, but moving your phone gives you the ability to look around your environment, even if only slightly.
The real immersive part of the game is the fact that your phone also acts as Ava’s phone. The plot is frequently moved forward by calls and text messages that you answer as you would on your own cellular device. As sound blasts out of your phone, it does put you in the shoes of the main character, momentarily worrying you that the sound of the call or text is going to alert your on-screen stalker. This part of Unhinged truly takes advantage of the format to draw you deeper into the story, though unfortunately it’s so effective that I wished the game found even more ways to use it.
There are a couple clever moments that make for unique ways of delivering twists or doing extremely light puzzle solving, but most of the time it’s just used to allow your friend to give you instructions on how to move the narrative forward.
All these mechanics come together to give the illusion of tension without actually fully delivering on it. When you get to a situation where you’re under pressure, a timer bar will appear on the top of the screen, indicating how long you have to get to safety. It’s a fine gimmick, but it comes off as a little hard to gauge. Since you don’t have direct control over your character, all your actions are very heavily animated, and sometimes your choice ends up taking longer than you think it will not because of the idea behind the choice, but because of the length of the animation. Fortunately, if you die, you’ll just pick back up at a checkpoint right before the choice, and you’ll even be treated with a voiceover discussion between police officers examining the crime scene, describing how you died.
So in theory, there is tension, counting down as the killer gets closer and closer to reaching you, but what you’re actually doing almost never feels like it’s testing you in any meaningful way. Actual choices come up very infrequently, making most of your interaction with the game world just scanning your pointer across the screen looking for an interaction point to progress, hoping the animation doesn’t take up too much time before the timer runs out. I didn’t hit a ton of friction points with it, and there’s even a Story Mode if you want to take out all possibility of death, but I found myself wishing there were more ways to affect the world around me. The phone calls and texts felt really fun and clever, but the rest of the gameplay just didn’t match that, making me wish there was more emphasis on the unique interaction model rather than the more traditional one.
Even though the mechanics aren’t necessarily pushing the tension as hard as they could be, the actual content of Unhinged’s story contains some pretty brutal situations. The villain isn’t the most unique or fleshed out, but he’s responsible for some gruesome moments that raised the stakes to make the game feel more intense. It makes your fight for survival feel that much more desperate, so even if you’re just highlighting icons on the screen, it feels more visceral thanks to what Ava is witnessing.
While I appreciate the game being lean and mean, I wish it was just a little bit longer. Thirty minutes is a pretty short runtime, and it doesn’t feel like the story for Unhinged has the time to come up with something that really sets it apart from other stories of its kind. The focus on the hurricane at the beginning made me think that was going to be more integral to the plot, but it didn’t really do much aside from explaining why the apartment complex was so empty. Thrillers like this live or die on how memorable their killer is, and there wasn’t anything really clever or unique about him. If this game doubled its runtime to the length of a standard Netflix show, it might have given them more room to build character relationships that made the action more meaningful, or at least given it a bit more personality of its own.
Night School Studio is on to something with the format of Unhinged. The combination of on screen and on phone prompts makes the game feel more immersive, drawing you in even when the narrative itself doesn’t feel fully formed or unique. The short runtime is both a help and a hindrance, keeping the pacing tight at the cost of adding any depth to the proceedings. This feels like a great first draft, and I hope that Night School is given the freedom to continue experimenting with the model, as the level of polish shown here was promising.
Even with its flaws, if you’ve already got a Netflix subscription, there’s no reason not to sit down for half an hour to check out Unhinged. If you can keep your expectations in check, it’s a nasty little thrillride that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Unhinged is streaming now on Netflix.
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