Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Paloni Show! Halloween Special!’ on Hulu, Where Swears, Blood, And Gut-Busting Laughs Populate A Series Of Frightful Animated Shorts

Justin Roiland’s Halloween spirit has been Hulu-fied. The Rick & Morty co-creator already has the Sinister Halloween Scary Opposites Solar Special popping off for the streamer, and now it’s time for The Paloni Show! Halloween Special, featuring Roiland as the oldest Leroy, Zach Hadel as his younger brother Reggie, and Pamela Adlon as their sister Cheruce. The hook here? The squabbling Palonis are hosting a spooky season special full of animated shorts from directors and creators who are new on the scene. Also appearing are the voices and talents of Steve Agee, the late Gilbert Gottfried, Matthew Lillard, MaCaulay Caulkin, Robert Englund, Olivia DeLaurentis, Sydney Heller, Emma Chamberlain, and Michael Cusack. 

THE PALONI SHOW! HALLOWEEN SPECIAL!: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “Live from the front yard of Mr. Winchell’s spookily-decorated house, it’s The Paloni Show! Halloween Special! featuring performances by Philvia Crim, Michaels Smith, Tony Shandals, Guy Shrunt”  – in the cartoon polaroids appearing, Shunt is dressed like David S Pumpkins – “Mustard Girl, and of course, Mr. Winchell and his one-man puppet show!” The announcer’s list of scheduled guests turns out to be a little bit of best laid plans gone scarily wrong.

The Gist: Your hosts for this extravaganza are Leroy Paloni (Roiland), Reggie Paloni (Hadel) and Cheruce Paloni (Adlon), three siblings with the oblong heads, wide eyes, and oversized choppers common to the animation for Rick & Morty; they consider this Hulu special their big opportunity, but spend most of their screen time arguing with one another over plan and intent. “I had ideas for this fuckin’ special!” Cheruce complains. She’s tired of having her ideas left on the cutting room floor by her brothers. “We should’ve wrote a story! It’s a Halloween special! It needs practical effects, gore, suspense. Oh, I don’t know, maybe somebody getting stabbed in the fucking face? That’s what Hulu wants, baby!” And as it turns out, that’s pretty close to what the streamer gets.

In the first short introduced, “Banana Party” (created by Daniel Cole), a guy in a store bought banana costume gets more than he bargained for when a woman in a banana costume brings him to an exclusive party full of billionaire bananas who begin peeling off their skin to the exclusive vibe of Eyes Wide Shut. Back at the makeshift stage in front of Mr. Winchell’s the Palonis are interrupted by Aunt Stephanie (Kari Wahlgren) and her son Little Long Legs (Vatche Panos), who disrupt the show’s flow. “Let’s throw it to our next short while we figure this out.”

In “Plopsie and Friends,” created by Olivia DeLaurentis and Sydney Heller, their live action co-hosts and a studio audience full of cheering kids encounter Plopsie, a gruff puppet who looks like a drunk Toxic Avenger and derails the mailbag segment of the show by imploring the kids writing in to come to the set and kill him. In “Camp Death Lake” (created by Echo Kellum and Nate Caywood), a teenager avoids being murdered by a masked goon when his attacker instead drives him to the hospital for more cancer tests, then back to camp for rehab, physical therapy, and long nights reading stories from Rubber Face’s book of human skin. But just wait until he’s cancer-free. And in “The Dreston,” created and directed by Brian Wysol, Gilbert Gottfried is a harried apartment manager, “Gott F. Reed,” who has to deal with a pair of zombies/deadbeat tenants in his building. One of them’s nude, one of them’s into yoga, and both of them are susceptible to Reed’s “repairs” via pistol. This sketch was Gottfried’s final performance before his passing in April 2022.

With periodic check-ins on our hosts, who are becoming increasingly frantic as Little Long Legs leads them on a chase around the neighborhood, including into an abandoned and very haunted house, the shorts continue. “Werewolf Jones” and his companions get into some drug-addled trick-or-treating trouble, an unwanted surprise party – “What those people did to me at that party was ‘terror-ism’” inspires a decades-long sick burn, a luxury cannibal restaurant runs into trouble with its hired talking beetle help, and in “Shitty Beetlegeuse,” a tiny character not at all unlike Michael Keaton’s famous frightwig concoction grants wishes to a timid hobbyist, if only he’ll utter his utter un-utterable name three times in public. There are 13 shorts in all, and the style is short, stabby, sick, salacious, and – oh yeah! – scary.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Paloni Show! Halloween Special! would make a great back-to-back viewing party with the Solar Opposites special, also on Hulu – this stuff is funny, often gross-out so, and with all of the sick visuals, would even work on mute (with captions, for the swears and jokes), playing on a loop at your Halloween bash.

Our Take: You’ll recall how exciting, and yet how awfully hit-or-miss Halloween night could be. Out there in the evening wilds of a subdivision or city block, running up and down walks and staircases to knock on doors, you expected the tooth-shattering mother lode each and every time, and believed the legends told by other kids about houses in certain cul de sac that handed out whole candy bars. It’s like that with the Paloni Show! Halloween Special!, where the excitement for whatever gross or crass or bloody bit never wanes, because everything is always tumbling toward the next moment of chaos. Leon and Reggie can’t get on the same page with what their special should look like, but they do their best, and even though Cheruce was left out of the planning sessions, its her demand for gore, suspense, and face-stabbings that ultimately wins out.

Not everything here works. Some of the shorts feel unfinished, like a quick sketch of a larger idea. But that largely works in the special’s favor, since it lends an unsettling air to the entire thing – you really don’t know what’s coming next. Is it a house handing out entire candy bars? A masked maniac sharpening his machete? Or even a haunted spaceship populated by undead, bloodthirsty astronauts? It’s Halloween, and a celebration of All Hallow’s Eve in animated short form! Anything can happen. And in Paloni Show, anything is usually accompanied by blood and gut-busting laughter.

Sex and Skin: Maybe the evil demon Turvok – sort of a stand-in for the Cenobites of Hellraiser – really is looking for an oral sex act that will open the evil box and make him reveal himself to the cloaked individuals who are committed to sacrificing Leroy and Reggie.

Parting Shot: “Well folks, despite what we thought was a complete disaster, off-the-rails nightmare, we pulled off one hell of a Halloween special,” Leroy says. “We even got Mr. Winchell to keep Cheruce alive in sort of a Jim Henson Weekend at Bernie’s way.” But there’s always another fiasco brewing with the Palonis, and while Leroy is trying to end on a high note, Reggie is playing with the Hellraiser-like puzzle box. “Why is it glowing?” Leroy asks, and Reggie thinks he might’ve solved it…

Sleeper Star: The animation for the short “Bet it was Becca,” created and directed by Jaime Rodriguez, might be the most striking of the bunch featured in Paloni Show, with the titular character transforming a bobbing-for-apples situation reveals her many-mouthed, many-headed talent for the Halloween pastime, as well as her ability to shapeshift into a bat. It’s like the sickening visuals of The Thing and From Beyond getting in on all of the Halloween frights.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Maybe this is all a bad dream and everything will be back to normal after this next short!” It doesn’t, of course, and we never actually get to witness Mr. Winchell’s one-man puppet show. But the chaotic pace of The Paloni Show! Halloween Special! manages to make a lot of its bits appear and disappear with the frequency of a dwindling bowl of “honor system” front porch treats.

Our Call: STREAM IT, particularly if you’re a fan of Justin Roiland’s other animated outlets – there’s a shared style and potty mouthed voice to The Paloni Show! Halloween Special! as well as some interesting, disgustingly funny, and visually appealing animation work in this special’s thirteen included shorts.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges