Favorite Figure: Marvel Legends X-Men '97 Cable
Collection Size: 380 releases...709...834...887...900...987....1006...1015...1182... 1234
Want List: Shard, Frenzy, Cypher, Magma, Synch, Vibe, Naomi, Vixen, Katana, Jolee Bindo, Jocasta Nu, Bail Organa, and Depa Billaba
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The 2000s saw many a toy company come and go, and one of the most recognizable was SOTA Toys. While best known for their Street Fighter line, they've had plenty of other lines as well. Years after its shutdown, SOTA frontman Jerry Macaluso teamed up with retailer Toynk to form Syndicate Collectibles, who's put out a variety of products so far, but not much when it comes to action figures. One of the few action figures they've done so far is Stan Winston's Pumpkinhead, who, coincidentally enough, was made by SOTA years ago. With the standards for horror figures having changed since SOTA's days, it's time to see how their successor handled this creature.

Pumpkinhead comes packaged in a large, blue box with its visage on it. It's pretty simple in appearance, aside from the darkened woods background, but I feel it fits the license well, though it wouldn't have hurt to actually credit the people involved with creating the figure like SOTA did. This is a fifth-panel box, similar to NECA, and the reverse side of the front flap has a shot of the film, tinted blue, and accompanied by a quote. There are a few ties to remove for the figure, but it's nevertheless easy to get everything out.

Jerry was able to work with Tom Woodruff Jr., who played Pumpkinhead in the film, to scan a casting of the original suit to ensure accuracy, and you can see it paid off. Despite its name, Pumpkinhead doesn't look very pumpkin-like, but is still monstrous. It has a bulbous head, blank white eyes, and sharp fangs and tusks. There are three heads to work with: one roaring, one snarling, and one with a closed mouth. I would've liked a smirking head, but the options here fit the character well. All three heads suffer from the same issue, that being the softness and lack of detail. Don't get me wrong, it's accurate to the film, but the detail is lackluster for the price and character. The paint is pretty good, with clean work and plenty of wash, but more detail to the eyes would've been good, alongside yellower teeth.

Pumpkinhead is a 1:12 scale figure, and it stands around 9 1/2" tall. It was an imposing creature in the film, so the tall height works great for it. The design reminds me a lot of an Xenomorph, what with its long arms and tail, sharp claws, and animal-like legs. Syndicate's crew did a great job with the sculpt, even if, again, the overall product is very soft-looking. The nails are still plenty pointy, but the fingers are a softer plastic to prevent them from being too painful to handle. The character is primarily tan, with wash all around to bring out the details, and the lines for the nails are very clean. It’s also covered in veins, which are both sculpted and painted blue to help make them more visible. There are some small black marks on the tail, but aside from that, the paint is very well done.

The articulation reminds me a lot of something you'd get from NECA, with plenty of joints (though I'm sure NECA would've given it more than Syndicate did). Pumpkinhead has a barbell neck, swivel/hinge shoulders, elbows, wrists, tail, knees, hocks, and ankles, ball-jointed chest, waist, and hips, swivel thighs, and a bendy wire in the tail. The joints move smoothly whilst still being able to hold their position, though the single ball-joints are a little loose. I would've loved more bend out of the leg joints, to allow for deeper stances and more dynamic poses, but you can still achieve quite a bit with what they can do. The neck and waist both work better than the chest, and the heads swap easily. Aside from the extra heads, there isn't much for accessories here, as Pumpkinhead's only other extras are a wooden cross and an extra right hand for holding it. The hands are tough to swap at first, but after that first time it gets easier. I would've liked a base to help it stand, as well as a rifle to recreate my favorite kill from the movie.

For Syndicate's first figure, Pumpkinhead turned out very well. Sure, it's quite lacking in detail, and articulation could've been better, but I love the end result nonetheless. There's also a 1:6 scale version that's really just this one but larger, but for $300, I'll pass on it. Given that NECA did their own, better version of the other horror monster Syndicate did (the werewolf from The Howling), I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they do Pumpkinhead as well, but until then, I'm happy with this one.

- 11/12/25...[See More]

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Comments: Just a teen who likes collecting Misfits figures and other figures that I like
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Current Projects: Jill valentine, Stryder Hiroyuki,
Honorable Mentions: Hyato
Favorite Figure: Jill valentine
Favorite Series: Capcom
First Figure: Iron Man
Collection Size: 40
Currently Collecting: Capcom
Want List: Megaman, Jin Satome
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So here's The Thing.
If you clicked on this, you know the drill: Rampant paranoia ensues while a shapeshifting alien runs amok. What we have here is one of a pair of monsters from McFarlane's Movie Maniacs line, which was kind of a crapshoot in terms of articulation, but generally looked good.
The Final Form here takes fewer creative liberties than the Norris Monster, more or less nailing the on-screen beast. The sculptors were absolutely on fire here, lovingly crafting squirming tentacles and ambiguous nodules alike. While a few small aspects are cheated, it hits all the major notes. I even fancy I can see a bit of Wilford Brimley in the face there. Good times. I like the way they used the tentacles to balance out the crooked lower half, too. Not even a hole in the foot; there's already three points of contact.
Paint is.... bland. The sort of muddy mess that kind of blends together at even a short distance. That's not Todd's fault, of course. Flesh tends to stick to fleshy colors, no matter what shape(s) it's in. The only break from it is the horrid little canine bursting out of the abdomen, bluish grey with a primary red strip of caul draped across the muzzle and arm.
Articulation, naturally, is where things fall flat. This is not the kind of design that permits super-poseability, particularly when you're just cutting swivels into a static sculpt. We get three wrists, five shoulders, and two necks, and all of them drastically break the sculpt when moved. In fact, a couple of them don't even sit flush. Also, mine was broken inside the package, hence my decision to just open it and fix that. The glue also gave way on the dog body while I was drilling it out, so that doesn't seem sturdy either. Oh well, everything else actually moves just fine, which wasn't a guarantee even then.
As a pile of malevolent stem cells from a hundred worlds, Thing carries no accessories when it's being obvious, so all we get is the usual (roughly in-scale) movie poster in a bony frame. This was before they removed one side from the frames, but warping is still a problem due to the construction. It's a nice enough backdrop, I suppose. A section of splintered floor is too much to ask here anyway.
I've complained a bit here, but them's the breaks with the early years of McStatues. Factor in the prices compared to a modern release of this kind, and the flaws seem easier to swallow. I guess it helps if you're old enough to remember how awesome it was just to have this thing squaring off against Snake Plissken, or Norman Bates dueling Ghostface. Besides, NECA hasn't done this one yet....[See More]

SDCC was a while ago, and usually NECA's exclusive game is strong. This year's exclusives had a bit of a summer theme, including a surfing Chucky and a Tiki-headed Ben Cooper kid, but the only one that interested me was TMNT's "Bodacious Beach Bros." set. It's another toon exclusive, but it's their first SDCC release to feature outfits not from the show. We've seen line-exclusive variants for a while (including a beachgoer Slash that looks fun), and I'm always open to stuff like that. Even though summer is long gone and we're close to winter, I may as well review this set before it gets any colder.

The packaging is really cool, as it has an illustration by Ken Mitchroney on the front. He's been doing all the illustrations for the Adventures figures, and seeing his style for the cartoon line is a pleasant sight. It has the turtles riding the waves on a giant board, with the Technodrome and an unmanned Turtle Blimp in the background, making for an active scene. This is actually a sleeve, as inside is the more-standard type of packaging, with illustrations by Aaron Hazouri, as well as a larger, windowless box for accessories. There are some big accessories here, but I'll go over those later.

One thing to note about the sculpts is that there's no reuse here (save for the pizzas and their boxes), with everything done by Tomasz Rozejowski. This means new heads for the turtles, and I feel these match the show a bit more than Jason Frailey's heads did (though the heads Paul Harding did for Samurai Mikey/Space Don are still the most accurate IMO). Each turtle has a different look, as Leonardo has a top hat and shades, Donatello has a beach hat, Raphael has a baseball cap and more determined-looking eyes, and Michelangelo is just bareheaded. Both he and Don have open mouths, while Leo and Raph have closed ones. These are two-piece heads, but if you're planning to use them with previous heads, don't bother; these are too big to work with those.

The turtles each stand between 5 1/2" and 6" tall, with their headgear determining their height. Leo, Don, and Raph are all dressed in funky Hawaiian shirts with various colors and patterns. Leo has a yellow shirt with blue flowers, Don has a pink shirt with yellow trees, and Raph has a red shirt with blue lines and some weird yellow shapes. While Leo and Raph have the same short mold, Don has a larger shirt that goes down more to his thighs. They're also wearing shorts, and those are fabric, ensuring a good look while retaining full leg movement. The colors are much like the previously released Punk and Pizza Club figures, with bolder colors and no shading, and the paint work is very clean.

Mikey is different from the others as he has no shirt; just a pair of swim trunks, and those are also removable fabric, allowing for a better comparison to the previous turtles. Despite being around the same size, these turtles are a bit chunkier in build. The bodies here feel more accurate to the show, and that's probably why NECA opted for new sculpts. The work on them is great, and while I don't mind the belt initial just being painted on, being solid black is something I'd change. The new bodies also mean some changes to articulation, as these are the first plain turtle arms to have double-hinged elbows. This means a deeper bend, but they look somewhat awkward when posed. The mask knots go back to being just swivels, which is a bit of a let-down, but a minor one. The rest of the movement is the same, with barbell head, neck, and chest, swivel/hinge shoulders, wrists, and ankles, ball-jointed hips, swivel biceps and thighs, and (now pinless) double-hinged knees. There are tons of hand options here, with four pairs of grips, four pairs of fists, four pairs of thumbs-up hands, and five pairs of relaxed hands. The larger size unfortunately means they won't work very well with previous turtles, and vice versa, but it's nice to have a lot.

The main draw of this set, aside from the new sculpts, is the surfboards. There's a board for each turtle, including an orange one with a turtle shell, a light purple and yellow one with a carapace pattern, a pink one with a red stripe, and a solid purple one with a windsurfing sail. The boards all span about 8 1/2" long, and have both foot pegs and ball-jointed stands. The plastic for the boards is very stiff, and I wish it wasn't, as it's partially the reason the stand pegs got stuck in them, separate from the ball-pegs (which also led to the windsurfer's stand becoming very loose). It also made plugging in the sail difficult, and it doesn't help I had to reglue two pieces of that damn thing already. My advice is to shave out some plastic in the sockets, so that the add-ons won't be so tight in them.

Then we have the reason this set needed two boxes: the giant surfboard and wave. This solid yellow board spans an impressive 11" long, and bears a rough texture the smaller boards don't have. The wave is even cooler, as it's semi-transparent to give off a watery look, alongside white paint, and it's stiff enough to support the board, which plugs into the tip of the wave with a barbell joint. The joint is somewhat loose in the wave's socket, which can make getting it to support all four bros impossible. If you don't have that issue, then you'll have plenty of fun displaying them all together with it. I mentioned there being pizzas earlier, and there are three of them, two of which are the same one the Pizza Monster had, and one reused from the Punk four-pack. There are also two boxes that are the exact same, and both have hinged lids to put the pizzas inside.

NECA probably assumed this set would be a tough sell due to the basic beach outfits that didn't come from the show, so they offered $40 off through their online store, and it got me buying it, especially since it helps offset the fees for shipping and tariffs. While there are more flaws with this set than I'd like, such as the boards and incompatibility between these new turtles and the previous ones, it's still a cool, unique release. And if you missed out on these and/or weren't in the mood for giant surfboards, then the Vacation Turtle two-packs (with outfits actually from the show) should interest you. These boards kind of suck anyways.

- 11/11/25...[See More]

Favorite Series: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
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