Here's some fun facts about pink for you. The word was invented in the 17th Century to describe a bunch of flowers - before that, it seems everyone used "rosy." Or maybe there was just no pink until it was discovered, whereupon the guy who thought of it went charging around splicing flowers and meddling with DNA and the atmospheric composition of sunsets to introduce it into the world. Also, from the 1920s (prior to which no one cared), pink was the colour for young boys - because it's the kiddy version of red, which is nice and dramatic - and pale blue was for girls, due to the association with the Virgin Mary. The rules flipped over for no known reason during the 1940s; maybe all the girls started wearing pink to be like their mothers, who were doing "men's work" in the factories during the war. Any or all of this might be lies - I really just wanted to do one paragraph of this review that didn't involve f&#%ing.
And that was it, so let's get to business. Devinn Lane, according to... no, wait, I've actually
seen a movie she's in, so I can contribute to this one. She was in Space Nuts, a porn parody of Star Wars, and was really, really boring, though she didn't get much help from the script, which seemed like it'd been written by the same people as the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 segments with Pearl Forrester in them - you know, the ones that make you thankful for fast-forward. Devinn was kind of the Darth Maul of the film, since she had some half-assed tattoos on her face, and a few plastic horns stuck on her forehead; she spent the whole film looking bored, which may have been a shot at getting the audience to identify with her.
I'm the forgiving sort, so I've got her action figure anyway, and luckily she's not decked out in that stupid Sith ballgown they had her in. Devinn's look for Plastic Fantasy is skater roller girl, with classic white and pink skates, a white microskirt with a pink strap at the side, a pink sports bra, and pink elbow gloves. Lot of pink. Luckily it's used properly, as a highlight colour (against her skin tone), rather than abused as a primary colour itself, which is where pink always goes wrong, so she looks pretty good, actually - white and pink is a good combination. The gloves are odd: they're certainly not safety gear, though it's not like any of these figures look like they're actually going to do whatever it is they're dressed for, so I suppose she's safe. She's got no tattoos or anything, so - until we get her clothes off - the boots are the only paint worth mentioning, with adequate (though not exceptional) pink highlights over the white base.
There is a shallow sculpted line at the top of the socks, but they're so tight they look like the leg's just been painted up to there - thicker would've been better, but it's not something you notice right away.
She stands about a quarter-inch over 7", that extra being the height of her skates' wheels - the packaging claims these figures are laser-scanned from the actress's bodies, but if so, they must've mapped those dimensions onto a single basic frame, because they're all the same height; Devinn's 5'4", while hunter-gatherer hottie Briana Banks is 5'10", selah. Still, issues of scale aside, she looks quite good - not exactly like she uses those skates a lot, or any other exercise equipment beyond a decent diet, but aside from the shoulders, where the articulation messes with her a bit, she's a good-looking figure of a woman. She's got a bit of muscle tone in her thighs, I guess, so the skates aren't too silly after all.
Her face is quite characterful -
probably the main reason I like her, along with the white/pink colour scheme. She's got a slightly prominent nose, and heavy eyebrows which combine with her tight smile to give her an arch, confident expression. Her hair is a bit unusual for these figures, being quite straight and unassuming, rather than the more elaborate styles normally seen - her face is slightly chubby around the jawline, so the narrow hairstyle suits her, and the straps of her bra hide the joint to her left arm well enough that it doesn't matter that there's no hair sitting over her shoulder there.
The gloves are sculpted onto her, but the bra and skirt are, of course, removable. The bra straps join fairly narrowly on her back, but - being flexible - they tend to slip into the recess of the balljoint shoulders, making the bra, and in turn her chest, look rather broad. The skirt covers a pink g-string, although like almost all of the underwear these figures have, being made from soft material and having such thin straps makes it very prone to stretching, and all in all it's better removed and forgotten; it's not like she's shy.
Once you don't have to worry about where her knickers will end up when you prod the skirt, it can be worked into what seems to be its intended position, with the thumbs of both hands hooked into the waist, pushing it provocatively down and out. She's still decent from the front, but anyone up close to her will have quite the view.
(Incidentally the prototype photos used on the packaging show the skirt sitting up very high around her waist - so much so that it doesn't even reach down far enough to hide her underwear - but on the final figure it's sculpted to sit lower as you see in the photos here; the shape of the hands suggest that's what the sculptor had in mind all along anyway.)
Devinn's got what constitutes heavy articulation in the Plastic Fantasy line - balljoint neck, swivel/pin shoulders, and swivel biceps. Why the swivels aren't at the glove tops above her elbows I have no idea - it wouldn't have made one lick of difference to their function, and would've kept the arms looking nice and seamless. The biceps swivels aren't too ugly, though - turning them off the true to get her hands sitting on her hip (right) and thigh (left) when they're not holding the skirt isn't that bad a look. If anyone was wondering, no, the skates don't roll.
And now the moment you've all been waiting for
(though not as long as if you'd been watching Space Nuts, where practically every other character in the movie got to have their sex scene before she finally did), it's naked time. The head and arms pop off easily - the neck is tight, but not hugely tight, as it has been on some of these - and then you just slide the bra and skirt off (and the g-string down her legs, if it's still there), et voila! Without the wide-straying bra straps affecting the look of her chest, her breasts are perkier than you'd think - there's still more of a sense of weight to them (I'm trying to think of a nice way of saying "sag," because it does look good if they do it just a little bit) than your average enhanced bust. The areolae are the usual faint pink, indistinct at the edges - I just checked, and they should be clearer and much larger, so whoever did her paint didn't do their homework. She's got quite the set of labia on her though - the paint is the usual bit of pink (plus a Brazilian up above), but the sculpt is quite detailed, and doesn't understate the size of the vagina like some of these figures do. It's not, like, "Oh my god, it's the Brain Bug's face from Starship Troopers," but it's definitely a real woman, not a Playboy airbrushing job.
Her only accessory - aside from the clothes -
is the standard Plastic Fantasy base, a large hollow shiny black rectangle (according to the packaging, the idea is that you stow the clothes under there if you're displaying her au naturel). Devinn's sub-line is "Wicked Girls" (for Wicked Pictures, the film company that perpetrated Space Nuts, though thankfully some other better efforts as well), and she gets a card backing with the company logo on it; as with her fellow Wicked Girls, there's no name sticker on the front of the base, so you'll just have to remember who she is by sight alone. The base has two pegs, both for her right foot - they go into the front right and rear left wheel of the skates, which keeps her nice and stable (so long as you don't tip the whole base over), but means she can only stand on the base at one angle. Without the base she can stand alone, but she'll need a properly horizontal surface; the backing cloth I used for photos alone was enough to make her tend to tip over if not placed carefully.
So there you go, Devinn Lane - not currently busy in the industry, except for suing it over website domains similar to her name, or something; one of the defendants is Digital Playground, so I'm hoping they win, on the basis that they made Pirates, which is good, and she made Space Nuts, which isn't. That sounds like a logical argument to me - I'm on the list for jury duty, incidentally, so if the Australian judicial system starts going nuts, yeah, probably my fault. But I like Devinn's action figure - the face and hair are attractive, and the costume does a good job, with its pink/white colour scheme making her skin look healthy and fit, and covering just enough to be sexily revealing without being thoroughly over the top.
-- 02/01/09
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