The Monster Squad by Alek J. Talevich - Horror - When an ancient and bloodthirsty evil awakens and sets forth to destroy the world as we know it, four heroes prepare to rise to the challenge... provided they can save humanity before curfew.  155 pages - pdf, format 8)

Some very obvious problems here...

I only read a few pages, but I can tell what I would be getting myself into, so I stopped.

155 pages - WAY too long!  Got to cut this baby down to a max of 120 or so.  Most likely due to over-writing and redundancies throughout.

Big blocks of text everywhere - you don't want to go over 4 lines per paragraph or passage, IMO.  The vast majority of your passages are all 5 lines plus, which brings up a new issue...you're already at 155 pages, so you can't just break up your long passages, or you'd have an even longer script on your hands.  So, the only answer that works is a massive cut.

You also want to use all CAPS when you first intro a character, which you didn't do with your first 2 characters.

I'm sure there are many, many more issues, but these are the most glaring early on.

Hope this helps.  Best of luck to you with this.  Take care.

I briefly opened this file.  Is the spacing set for 1.5, instead of 1?  There's a lot of spacing between lines, which might explain the high page count.

Is the author even around?  I don't want to read anything if the author's not present.

Oh, and you may want to fix your title page.


Phil

I too skimmed through this for about thirty minutes trying to get a feel for it.

As already mentioned the margins and spacing are off.

Dreamscale already hit on your large blocks of narrative description.

I read most of the story as I was thumbing through this and couldn't help but notice that after the first 5 pages we don't see or hear from the antagonist again until page 29. Even then it is a brief glimpse with no dialogue, which in itself is not a bad thing but then we don't see him again until page 42. Everything in between is a lot of character interaction that doesn't really seem to lend anything to the story. It is great for building up you characters but doing too much will bore a reader and ultimately an audience. A great deal of those first 30 pages could be trimmed down. When we see the antagonist again in page 46 he is there straight through to page 54.

If you look back through the script you see that KAZIGLU is hardly even in it and is never given the time or characterization to be presented as evil or scary. Work on building him up and adding more scenes of him to break up those first 30 to 40 pages.

The only other thing that stood out was your scene headings. Some of them were too short with no indication of day or night. Some scene headings changed even though they were actually the same place. On page 48 your scene heading is INT. THE CHERRYMOUNT ASYLUM but when we return to the action on page 50, which is clearly a continuation of the earlier scene, your heading is INT. THE OPERATING ROOM. When writing out your scene headings, try to make sure there is no doubt in the readers mind exactly where and when the scene is taking place.

The last thing I will note... Not only is the title the same as the 1987 movie written by Shane Black and Fred Dekker, but there are similarities between your script and the movie. Both have kids fighting monsters. Both have vampires, werewolves, and zombies. The werewolf is enslaved to the vampire. etc.

I do think you have a gift for writing and you have no problem with characterization or narrative description. Just need to find your throttle and scale it back. Write leaner.

Good luck and hope to see more from you.

John

Ya the big blocks of text are distracting as it makes it feel more like reading a novel than a script.  Not sure about other people but to me scripts should be a fast read and pretty easy to take in, they should not take 15 mins just to read the first few pages.  However I do love monsters (especially Werewolves) and I am a fan of the original Monster Squad movie so I am determined to read this all the way through.

Oh and not sure if it was intentional or not but I love the fact that there is  a character called "Mrs Gilman"  (Gilman being the name of the fish monster creature from the original film)