For fifty years now, the General Mills Monster Cereals have been harbingers of Halloweentime. When they start popping up on shelves around late-August, a vortex of orange and black seems to seems to swirl outwardly around them. July 4th fireworks become Pop Rocks, watermelons become pumpkins, campfire roasters become big plastic devil pitchforks, and you can feel a palpable chill in the air—probably from Target turning up the AC because, y’know, it’s August, but still.

One might even call the Monsters the Five Horsemen of the Halloween Season, though I’m not sure how I’d assign them apocalyptic analogues. Chocula is definitely Conquest, since he’s the ringleader. Towering powerhouse Franken Berry feels built for War, while Boo Berry is Death because ohhh, you know how ghosts are. I guess we can say Frute Brute is Famine, since he’s the biggest cult favorite fans have hungered for, while Yummy Mummy represents Pestilence in the form of some ancient Egyptian plague unleashed when someone drank sarcophagus juice like it was Ghoul-Aid.

Anyway, now that we’ve picked a group Halloween costume for this crunchy quintet, let’s talk about their 50th anniversary mega-cereal: Monster Mash. Hotly anticipated for months now—I swear, people get more excited about Monster Cereals than 1,031 new Toast Crunches—Monster Mash Cereal, debuting on store shelves everywhere this month, brings all five Monsters together in one box, for the first time. But on a scale of “eerie sight” to “graveyard smash,” just how good is it? Well allow me to grab my finest aged sarcophagus milk and find out.

One word will suffice for Monster Mash Cereal: Boooooo. And this is for two reasons.

First, though I said Monster Mash Cereal brings together all the Monsters, it doesn’t do so in the evenly amalgamated way you’d hope/expect. Rather, it’s more of an aesthetic representation for three of the five. The crunchy ghost pieces here, which constitute the vast bulk of any given Monster Cereal’s flavor, only hail from Franken Berry and Boo Berry. Meanwhile, the variously hued marbits represent Chocula (swirled ghosts and bats), Brute (orange monster heads), and Mummy (yellow monster heads)—there are also Frank and Boo marbits, as if this cereal needed more marshmallows!  Obviously, though, this is a bit disappointing, as the marbits themselves have no inherent flavor on their own. Even when I ate the marshmallows on their own, any notes I thought I could discern were pure projection and placebo.

This leads to the second reason for my prolonged Booooo: the whole cereal just tastes like Boo Berry. Since Boo’s cereal has always tasted like an indecipherable blend of generic fake fruit flavors, chucking strawberry Franken Berry into this witch’s brew adds almost no detectable dimension to the overall swirl of sugary swill.

Add to this the fact that Monster Cereals are still corn-based—despite the many pleas of super fans to restore the old oat-base recipe—and you’ve got a Monster Mash that’s mostly Monster Meh. On one sharp-clawed paw, I’m sad there’s no real presence from FB and YM in Monster Mash (I can excuse the lack of chocolate), as a burst of citrus would go a long way toward enriching the overall cereal. But on the other, colorfully bandaged hand, I feel like I’m getting too old to really get outraged about a new cereal not appealing to my specific demands.

There are a lot more important things in life to direct my ire towards, and let’s face it: at least for me, my love for the Monsters has almost always been more about aesthetics than taste. They’re slick seasonal decorations that just happen to be edible, too. Berry blandness aside, Monster Mash Cereal is certainly edible. I can totally see myself mindlessly munching this stuff during an old-school Goosebumps marathon come October.

What’s more important is just how gorgeous the box is—I want to simultaneously frame, enshrine, and tattoo this thing on my lower abdomen. And when you consider how Monster Mash Cereal will also be flanked by fruit snacks and retro boxes for the big 3, you’ve got a recipe for an especially exciting Monster Cereal season.

Err, I mean Halloween season.

The only thing I can mark Monster Mash down for in terms of presentation would be the QR code on the back. It’s supposed to lead to an actual cover of the “Monster Mash” song, performed by the Monsters, but at the time of this writing, it’s still not live, simply leading to a teaser page.

That said, if you can set your taste gripes aside and enjoy the thoroughly themed ride, Monster Mash Cereal is still worth indulging in—though I’d wait ’til October, as it’s still pretty hard to find right now. My sincerest thanks to Matt from Dinosaur Dracula for hooking me up with a box.

The Bowl: Monster Mash Cereal

The Breakdown: Basically just Boo Berry & His Technicolor Dream-Mallows, this generically fruited ambrosia cereal won’t wow you with flavor, but like candy corn or a bad slasher flick, it’s more about the spirit than the medium.

The Bottom Line (cereal): 5 too-friendly ghosts out of 10
The Bottom Line (presentation): 8 Van Ghost paintings out of 10