Playmates Skullcrawler

 

With the upcoming release of Godzilla vs. Kong, I went ahead and purchased the Playmates Skullcrawler from the film. This monster first appeared in Kong Skull Island. It’s an odd but unique creature that resembles a 2-legged lizard with a skull-like beak. 

Playmates, which picked up the Godzilla license after NECA lost it, has been producing figures from the upcoming film, as well as older kaiju. Their releases haven’t been too great (some being quite awful and cartoonish), but this Skullcrawler actually looked decent, so I got it. He comes with a small plastic ship called a Heav from the movie. He also has a battle damage piece on his back that’s removable, revealing a blood red spine. It snaps into place and stays on snuggly, so you don’t have to worry about it falling out every time you pick up the figure.

His articulation points are his mouth that’s on a hinge and can open very wide, his tail which is on a ball joint, his shoulders and elbows, which are on hinged ball joints, and his head has a neck swivel, but it has very minimal range. The Heav ship is a solid plastic with a black windshield and the body molded in a dull grey. While it has some detail, it’s mostly crudely done and resembles the cheap plastic vehicles you could buy in packets in the 70’s and 80’s.

The sculpt is pretty decent, minus the obvious hinges and pins that show on the joints. The body is a grayish brown with reddish lighlights along the spine, bone grey at the beak, and yellow and black for its beady little eyes. This is probably one of Playmates’ better sculpts as it captures the monster’s look pretty well. Their Kong figure also looks pretty decent as well, though I’ve pre-ordered the Monsterarts version that will drop in May.

The Playmates Skullcrawler figure is a nice release if you want an articulated version of this Monsterverse  beast. He was the main villain kaiju in Skull Island, so I’m curious how big a role he’ll play in Godzilla vs. Kong, which I’ll be watching at the end of this month on HBO Max. I doubt we’ll get a Monsterarts version of this creature as we never got a M.U.T.O. from them, so I figured I might as well pick this one up. Skullcrawler is an unusual and strange monster, so I’m glad we got a decent figure of it.