NECA recently released the newest series of Harry Potter figures, and I scooped up the ones I wanted. In my continual love for villians I couldn't pass up a chance to grab both new versions of the Death Eaters. I'll be honest right now, I hate Harry Potter. These guys have a visual appeal that strikes me. So I bought them.
As with many NECA figures with multiple versions or variants, at first glance the two appear to be pretty much identical, if not evil, twins. There are a few differences however. They have the same cloak w/ hood, the same head under the mask and the same set of legs. Sculpt-wise, those are the only true rehashed portions. The torsos feature slightly different designs, but are ultimately quite similar. The main differences come in the form of mask and arms, making the figures distinct enough from each other that you can consider them two truly different
characters.
The masks are fairly well done, and painted much better than I expected. The details are crisp and match up pretty well to the photos of the source material I've managed to find on Google. The silver/copper depending on what kind of paint application you got (sniff, sniff... unintended paint variants) is an interesting design. I actually prefer the scheme of the black mask, but the design of the other. If they swapped paint apps I'd be quite happy with them myself. They're good for what they are, though.
Under the mask is a different story. As you can see from the following pic, they for some reason decided to spend the time and money sculpting more under the mask than need be, as well as painting the detail. It really makes you wonder why this was done, considering the 5-head that results from the unfinished hair sculpt and the fact that the maskless face sports the peg hole where the mask connects. I understand striving for realism, but this is a case where it seems excessive, since the mask essentially covers all the details and most of the paint, while the hood hides the hair sculpt and there's no real way to display them without the mask and not have them look like they lost thier noses to frostbite.
Paint is a bit of an issue. The blend of blacks and silvers is fairly good for the most part. The washes on the masks look ok. The paint on the masks and the detail on the bodies completely blows away the paint on the hands. It's like they forgot to take the same care and the end result looks like they were playing with chocolate frosting. There's a lot of slop and lot of splotches of brown and fleshtone.
While not quite an accessory, each Death Eater has an identical, mostly functional wand holster. That's right, a wand holster. Accurate? Yes. A hilarious euphamism? I like to think so.
Speaking of accessories, these guys are packing pretty light. They come only with thier identical dark brown and possibly blackish wands. They are fairly fragile and I almost broke one trying to place it in a hand. The hand could have been slightly more open to fix this problem. The only other accessory you could count is the standard flat, plain, boring, black NECA stand. This is a bit of a kick in the teeth considering how usesless the base is for these figures. They have no problem standing on thier own, and the base actually causes them to have balance issues since the single peg is about a quarter inch too far towards the center of the base and it makes the left foot stick off the base if you pose the foot at an angle that looks normal and not like the entire shin was twisted in a nasty, painful way.
They've got ok articulation, with the soft plastic cloak working in a classic NECA way with the hard plastic arms. The tradeoff in realism is minimal and these work much better than previous times they tried this, like with Marv. They also have a ball-joint head, the standard NECA ball/hinge shoulder, a swivel wait, swivel shins and only the black one has a single wrist cut on his right hand.
I don't know how badass these guys are in the books and movies, but the figure score a slightly better than average 3 out of 5 with me.
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