POP MUSIC REVIEW : Green Jello’s Pranks Play Better on Tape

Green Jello’s new video-only album, “Cereal Killers,” really ups the ante and expectations for a band that always seemed like just a bunch of Hollywood rock pranksters. With its sophisticated satire and production values to match--all the more impressive for its shoestring-budget resourcefulness--the tape is sort of a cross of the Tubes and the Banana Splits.

Maybe it upped the ante too much. At the Palace on Friday, the Jellos were still, well, a bunch of Hollywood rock pranksters.

They’re good pranksters, with costumes showing considerable visual arts skills and satires that were often dead-on (a Red Hot Chili Peppers parody), if often obvious (a Pope ripping up a Sinead poster) and juvenile (an extended poo-poo joke). But without the conceptual continuity or the elaborate staging of the videos, the show was just a parade of big-headed foam and papier-mache get-ups in front of a fun, if unspectacular, rock band.

In a fitting pre-Halloween pairing, second-billed Haunted Garage provided the macabre side of the costumed coin. Even though Palace security confiscated the band’s trademark blood and slime squirters, Dukey Flyswatter and crew delivered, as always, a gooey and gory pageant of sex and death--though not necessarily in that order.