VERDUGO

 

The release of Resident Evil 4 was a pretty crazy moment to live, i remember every single magazine had the game on its cover for like a year and a half and all the games that got bad reviews or were diminished just because they were not Resident Evil 4 (like Haunting Ground). For me i wasnt impressed at all. Sure it had some really good moments but overall it didnt feel nothing like a Resident Evil but in the end it was a very important point of the survival horror genre: the game that almost makes the genre dissapeare.

But in the middle of this storm, NECA, a brand new company back in that moment, had the rigths to produce the action figures series and they did a pretty amazing job with it releasing a four figure collection: Leon S. Kennedy, Ada Wong, Chainsaw Ganado/Dr. Salvador and Verdugo. And since i am not a big fan of Leon or the human enemies of the game, i skipped both him and the Chainsaw guy but one think i trully love from RE4 are the bosses and few monsters on it, and the battle with El Verdugo was one of the brigthest parts.

This guy is big, a head and a half above of the rest of the figures soo he is in perfect scale with Leon and Ada tough he came in the same clamshell as the rest and despite him being digitigrade, he can stand on his own perfectly thaks to his tail that acts like a tripod like the modern Gargoyles figures, soo he have no need of a base. Also he is the most articulated figure of the series....actually, he is the most articulated figure NECA released in a long time.

He is articulated on the shoulders, biceps, elbows, wrists, a finger in each hand, chest, legs, knees and ankles and his entire tail is bendy. The elbows are ball jointed soo they cna move up and down but also at the side and the finger on his hands are also ball jointed and can rotate freely (and that makes his hands much more weird than expected) but the rest of the articulations are very basic cut that cna only rotate to a limit. For now days standars this is very limited but it actually gives him a much bigger range of poseability than wath we had back then.

The tail is very thick but the material let it moves all around perfecly and it hasnt degraded after 20 years.

This is one of the best creatures in the game: the perfect mix of a Xenomorph from Alien and a Yautja from Predator, the sculpt of his exoeskeleton covering sections of raw muscle looks really good. The rocky texture of the exoeskeleton sections contast very nicelly with the organic sections and the spidery limbs make it really firgthing. The soft plastc material on the tail dosnt loose any detail on the sculpt deparment either, specially with the big lance ending of the apendage.

The head looks extremelly alien with the insect like pincers on the bottom jaw like the Predator, and the skull looking top and this section is the most colorfull since its painted in white with two brigth red eyes. The skill is not just plain white but it have some very soft greys and yellows mixed on it soo it looks like made of bone and the jaws have also black, but some blue and greys as well.

The organic sections are painted in dark red but the rest of the exoeskeleton, while looking black, it is not but its a sinphony of colors mixing different tones of grey with yellows on the arms and deep nlues on the legs and soft blues on the feet and the tail have a beautifull purple mixed with the black, all this colors placed only to enhance the sculpt details. Not even playing the game is posible to see this many details soo this figures pretty much was the only way to seen this creature up close and Capcom did an amazing job designing it.

He had no accesorys at all, pretty much the rule back then but he didnt need anything at all since this was one of the most impresive Resident Evil toys back then and even today it still is since no other company has done a figure based on this creature.