LIVING DEAD DOLLS... BACK FROM THE DEAD

Once more from the mouth of hell itself (well, okay, MEZCO), the fifteenth set of the chilling LIVING DEAD DOLLS will be unleashed soon, and personally I'm stoked. For the tenth anniversary (ten years of terror!!! A decade of deviance! A very long time in toys!) of the hugely popular range of pint-sized terrors, the makers over at MEZCO have outdone themselves once more with an even darker menagerie of tiny evildoers than the previous one! Y'know, it must be getting pretty damn hard to come up with set after set of malevolent miscreants in infant form, but they do keep on rolling them out (digging them up? Jeez, I have my pun head on today), and why the hell(mouth) not? People love the demonic sprogs, and the items themselves are consistently ghoulish, gruesome and great.

Reportedly being unleashed upon the public in April 2008, the latest line of coffin-bound kiddies contains: Judas, Countess Bathory, Death, Flamingo, and Gypsy. Death and Bathory? Someone likes their old-school death metal don’t they? That aside, the inclusion of little Death and Countess Bathory is just the coup the LDD creators needed to make this set special. Granted, the dolls are all excellent, but there did have to be something unique about this set, and it doesn’t get much better than a little reaper and Erzibet in miniature form. Blood and virgins not included. Still packed with their own death certificates in their individual coffin boxes, these are cute and chaotic in equal measure. I mean, could you seriously picture getting much sleep with one of these beasts staring at you from your shelf?



Also, if you get all five dolls, you’ll find a special little extra in there with them… No, not festering entrails or maggot-ridden slabs of necrotic flesh, you strange, twisted creatures. You can put all five extra pieces together to form the ‘Talking board’ accessory. Now, pictures of this completed accessory are proving a tad elusive, but I would imagine it will be a Living Dead Dolls themed Ouija Board of some description. That sounds like the perfect thing to go alongside this awesome latest set of dolls. Just be careful not to contact too many other demonic children while you're at it, otherwise the world will end up overrun by rotting, zombified youngsters, without the aid of a games console!

As ever, the workmanship on these things is immaculate. The sculpts are excellent, especially on Death, and the fabric costumes boast a high standard that has been noticeably improving over the last few sets of dolls. All in all, this is an exciting release, and a little different to the usual Living Dead Dolls set, which is just the right thing to celebrate the tenth anniversary. Here’s to the next ten years of scaring the wits out of friends and family members all over the (under)world! Aah, (after)life is good.