T.V. REVIEW: Family Guy's Three Kings

I decided to review this episode of Family Guy because it was shown after The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror episode two Sundays ago. At first I thought it was a new Halloween episode, but then I looked it up on TV.com and found out it aired earlier this year. I'm going to review it regardless because the three segments are all Stephen King parodies and I love Stephen King.

Three Kings begins with Peter sitting in front of a fireplace with a book saying he is going to read three stories from "the greatest author of the last thousand years: Stephen King."

The first segment is a spoof of Stand by Me. It shows Peter, Joe, Quagmire and Cleveland as 12-year-old boys. Peter is Petey LaChance (a.k.a Wil Wheaton), Joe is Joey Duchamp (a.k.a Corey Feldman), Quagmire is Quag Chambers (a.k.a River Phoenix) and Cleveland is Cleve Brown (a.k.a Jerry O'Connell). It's 1955 and the group sets out to find a dead body. They find the body (which is Meg), but the town bully, Ace (Mayor West, a.k.a Kiefer Sutherland), wants to take credit. Even though Petey has a gun, he lets Ace have the body because since they live in the same neighbourhood he'll definitely see him again and he doesn't want to get beat up later. I wasn't impressed with this segment.
The second segment is a parody of Misery. Brian plays Paul Sheldon while Stewie plays Annie Wilkes. Paul recently finished the last installment of his children's book series, Snuggly Jeff, in which he kills off Jeff. Annie (a cross-dressing toddler) is Paul's number one fan and takes him hostage, making him rewrite the book so that Snuggly Jeff doesn't die. This segment was pretty funny. It gave me the biggest laugh of the episode, when Paul hits Stephen King with his car and while in mid-air King says, "This would make a great story," then proceeds to write it. When he falls to the ground he says "Done!"

The third segment spoofs The Shawshank Redemption. Peter stars as Andy Dufresne (a.k.a Tim Robbins) and Cleveland is Red (a.k.a Morgan Freeman). Andy is sent to Shawshank Prison, where none of the inmates like him. He doesn't say two words (literally) to anyone for a month (the two words were vagina boob). Andy asks Red to get him a rock hammer because he claims he likes to carve figurines, but he really wants it to tunnel out of prison. He actually does tunnel out of prison, breaking into a sewage pipe while the warden was watching Friends, hammering in time with the claps in the theme song. Red is released from jail and follows through on a promise he made to Andy to go to a field and dig under a volcanic rock. He finds a box filled with money and a postcard asking if he remembers the name of the Mexican village where Andy said he would be. But unfortunately, Red does not. This was a pretty funny segment as well. I especially liked the part where Andy played Hollaback Girl for the inmates and the song confused them more than anything else.

Overall, I was disappointed by this episode. Out of all the Stephen King works they could've picked they ended up with two that aren't even horror. Granted, those have been made into the two most popular films from his work, but still.... It would've been nice if they chose something by Stephen King that isn't parodied as much. If you want to watch a hilarious parody of a horror film from Family Guy, try Petergeist.

Rating: 3/5