Is Carmella Creeper good?

Yes!! Not only is it my undying delight to see a new Monster grace shelves—the first since 1987’s Fruity Yummy Mummy—but to see an actual female cereal mascot for once is refreshing, especially in the sausage fest that is the breakfast aisle.

(No, mentally unstable bovines and anthropomorphized marshmallows don’t really count as representation.)

Furthermore, Carmella is just cool. Billed as the long-lost cousin of Franken Berry (however the murky genealogy of lab-created lifeforms works), she’s a hip ‘n’ happenin’ DJ who would never be caught un-undead with the likes of someone lame enough to still use the phrase “hip ‘n’ happenin'”. Though that wouldn’t stop me from uncool-ly inviting her to get gas station sushi and play Kirby Air Ride (she’d decline, but politely).

…

Wait, you were asking whether Carmella Creeper the cereal is good?

Oh, heavens, no. Not at all. No no no no.

If nothing else, Carmella Creeper’s cereal is so, so radioactively GREEN. Probably the greenest cereal since 2003’s Nickelodeon Green Slime Cereal.

Okay, I’m overreacting a little bit. Sure, Carmella Creeper isn’t a particularly good cereal, but it is a fun cereal. In the same way that we still eat fruit cake, sweet potato pie, and sugar cookies around the holidays, even though there are far tastier options (I said what I said), eating at least one Monster Cereal is just a mindlessly munchable Halloween tradition at this point. So even though the incorrigible scourge of corn flour has long-since decimated any legitimate claim to deliciousness the Monster Cereals may make, I still enjoy watching scary movies while eating ’em like popcorn.

And in Carmella’s case, her cereal might just pair well with caramel corn. Because the caramel apple flavor here isn’t actually half bad…it simmers off at more of a cool, like, 28% bad.

See, this is only, like, the fourth caramel apple cereal to ever exist. One I never got to try, one was awful, and one was…actually really good, and way better than Carmella Creeper, but it’s foolish for any mere puffed cereal to pit itself against a master of the genre like Honey Bunches of Oats.

So the best I can say is that Carmella nails the blending of caramel and apple way better than Apple Jacks. There’s a distinctly tangy green-apple-Jolly-Rancher flavor here, accented by subtler notes of caramelized sugar. Granted, none of it is super pronounced, and it has to fight hard against its intrusively corny, unpleasantly mealy base, but Carmella Creeper still manages to retain a little charm simply by presenting a flavor you can’t find elsewhere in the cereal aisle. And considering how the other Monster Cereals consist of A) a chocolate cereal vastly inferior to Krave, B) a strawberry cereal vastly inferior to Strawberry Frosted Flakes, Honey Bunches, or Cheerios, and C), an ambiguously berried cereal that’s vastly ghastly inferior to just about every other fruity cereal ever created, Carmella suddenly becomes an appealing choice for someone seeking a Monster cereal with creature (ha!) comfort and novelty alike.

Add milk or don’t: honestly, it’s not going to heal any of Carmella’s faults nor make her strong suits any more flattering—it’s simply a matter of consumption preference.

Because the truth is, at the end of the day, this is just another of the countless new cereals getting churned out nowadays with little-to-no care paid to whether they’s actually good or not…this one just happens to have great branding. As much as I’d love to see General Mills bring back oat flour in their Monster Cereals, they’ve shown time and time again that they do not care what cereal fans think and will continue to pinch pennies on their recipes to make more money. A tale as old as time and timeless vampires alike. All I’m saying is that, if you want to mix up your Halloween breakfasting, you could do, well, not a whole lot worse, but at least a little worse than Carmella Creeper.

Monster Mash Remix’s only saving grace is that some of the ghost pieces present a transfixing fusion of Carmella’s atomic green and Boo Berry’s ashy blue.

Oh, yeah: there’s Monster Mash Remix, too, which combines Carmella’s caramel apple ghost pieces with Boo Berry’s boring berry ones and a whole bunch of marbits. Despite Boo’s cereal being so remarkably bland that it tastes like both no particular fruit and all of them at the same time, it still manages to completely subsume any caramel apple notes into itself, leaving being a cereal that’s just a more interestingly colored Boo Berry. Frank(ha!)ly, it’s not worth your time.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my gas station sushi is starting to fossilize.

The Bottom Line (Carmella Creeper): 6 minutes left in this round of City Trial out of 10

The Bottom Line (Monster Mash Remix): 2 unfriendly ghosts out of 10