Spooky Season is in full swing and 31 Days of Horror 2023 is approaching the home stretch! A couple recent acquisitions have arrived just in time to help me celebrate Samhain. The Bride of Frankenstein and Creature From The Black Lagoon are the latest additions to NECA’s Black and White versions of their Universal Monsters line. Let’s perform an autopsy on these two monochromatic monstrosities and find out if there’s still life in the line or are these two dead on arrival.
The Bride of Frankenstein is everything that I was hoping for from this line. NECA has beautifully captured the likeness of actress Elsa Lanchester. The iconic hairdo gets included twice in this offering. Once on a screaming head and once on a head with a distant stare. A third head is included wrapped in bandages from the scene where the Bride is created. The Bride has a fully sculpted bandaged body draped in a white soft goods gown. She’s extremely photogenic and really shines in group shots with Frankenstein.
The Creature From The Black Lagoon was the main reason I got into this line in the first place. I recently shared my thoughts on the standard colorized version of Gillman and I’m happy to say, it’s more of the same for the Black and White variant. There’s obviously less paint this time around, and it seems like he could benefit from a bit of shading, but overall the black and white look is achieved pretty well. You get four sets of claw hands and three heads including one with an articulated mouth. The Creature rarely disappoints and once again, NECA has delivered the goods.
After getting the Black and White version of Creature, I’m a bit disappointed I was unable to secure the Glow In The Dark Remco tribute that was a San Diego Comic Con Exclusive. To NECA’s credit, it was also offered online briefly, but if you blinked, you missed it. Hopefully with the recent announcement that we’re getting The Monsterizer playset, NECA will package up a few of the harder to get exclusives (The Phantom of the Opera was recently a NYCC exclusive) and offer them at retail. I think that if more people would have known they would ultimately get the Monsterizer playset, they would have been picking up more of the Remco tributes as they were released. You’ll probably see a bit of an increase in demand now that the line has expanded.
NECA has done an incredible job with the Universal Monsters franchise. Short of Toony Terrors, there isn’t much left to do. My experience with the Black and White versions of the Universal Monsters has been a great one. Early in the line I was feeling some buyer’s remorse for not going with the colorized versions, but when they’re sitting on the shelf together or being photographed as a group, they look fantastic. When I close my eyes and think of the Universal Monsters, I see them in Black and White, not the colorized versions of those films that never quite looked right. I’m glad that I decided to collect this line. Now I just need to figure out the how, when and where to get the Black and White versions of The Invisible Man and The Phantom of the Opera to round out the set.
