There are a lot of succubi around modern fantasy, but most of them are pretenders. Amberlash of World of Warcraft
is typical, suggestive but safely PG, and even more adventurous demonettes like not-Lisa from Castlevania tend to behave like aspiring actresses starting out in slasher flicks, doing a topless scene here and there but still shying away from anything that may prove embarrassing later in life. The subject of today's review may not hark from any kind of serious fantasy milieu, but at least she very definitely does what succubi are famous for doing.
"Like any creature we have a dark side. A side that's flawed and vulnerable but strong and, of course, sexy. This is one of the reasons I'm so attracted to horror stories. They get right to the heart of the human condition."
That's from Jenna's introduction in issue #0 of Jenna Jameson's Shadow Hunter, a fairly imaginative horror comic that sadly got canned after issue #3 because everyone assumed it'd just be monster-fighting T&A and didn't bother reading it; Virgin's decision to give renowned cheesecake artists
like Greg Horn, Gred Land and Joseph Michael Linsner the covers didn't help. Jenna co-developed the storyline (actually, rather than just lending her name to someone else's work), and it's worth hunting down if you're interested in what she's done other than turn the horizontal tango into an eight-figure net worth. Don't bother with Zombie Strippers, though - whoever wrote that hadn't got the message that Shaun of the Dead upped the bar for horror-comedy.
[Instead, get Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! - Strippers vs. Zombies, which is apparently an entirely different movie --ed.]
Nowadays there's a new crop of porn megastarlets doing the rounds, and Jenna's more or less retired to sitting in an office raking in the cash as a studio head (and spending it on not entirely successful face jobs, sadly), but at the turn of the millennium when Plastic Fantasy came onto the scene (zing), she was still the biggest name on the front lines of porn. Naturally what would become SOTA wasted no time immortalizing her in plastic when they swung into action, with a cheerleader-themed figure in the first Adult Superstars series, but unlike her fellow performers Jenna got revisited, with a special Halloween series cross-promoted on the clubjenna website.
All three of the Halloween figures are variants - a witch in black dress and pointy hat, a regular human Jenna in a she-devil costume, and this figure, which swaps the usual skin tone for devilish red for the full satanic look. The Halloween figures are a new body, with no re-use from the original cheerleader figure -
though naturally it fits right into the general Plastic Fantasy range, at 7" tall (plus heels) with a rubber costume over a nude body, with detachable arms and head to facilitate said costume's removal. The costumes on these figures are always a bit of a gamble, due to the necessary thickness the rubber needs so as not to just tear at the first twinge - some outfits hide that, some can't and look mediocre because of it. Jenna's little red dress is one of the better efforts in technical terms, with its simple cut minimizing the amount of cloth/skin boundaries where the thickness can show up, and the gloss contrasting well with the flat texture of her skin. On the down side, unlike the Caucasian version, full-demon Jenna's red skin does little to contrast with the dress colour-wise - the change in finish saves it, but it's still not ideal - and the design is pretty basic, with only a thin black buckled belt to liven it up.
Along with the new body - hips canted left rather than right, and with slightly less of an arched back than the cheerleader version - demon Jenna has a new head sculpt, both face and hair. The faces on Plastic Fantasy figures tend
to be good on their own merits but not always exact to their sources (of course, judging how much plastic surgery the subject had had when the facial scan was done is a consideration), and here the red skin makes the likeness even more difficult to spot; regardless, she's a good-looking women, with clean paint on her eyes and lips, and a slightly haughty, but not overly harsh expression - kind of the tongue-in-cheek version of an arrogant demonic glare. The new hair is very similar in style to the original, long and free-flowing without too much overt styling, but incorporates a little pair of horns - linked in the middle like a headband, rather than separate, for the purposes of the human-wearing-costume variant.
Articulation is a cut above the standard (between two to four cuts, depending on the figure you're comparing her to), with a balljoint neck, swivel/pin shoulders, swivel biceps and swivel wrists. The arms, laser-scanned like the rest of the body (allegedly; there's definitely been a sculptor taking artistic license with some of these figures), aren't perfectly round in cross-section, so turning the swivels will show, but not a great deal. With both arms irrevocably bent at the elbows there aren't truly a lot of posing possibilities, but the joints are useful for fine-tuning the accessory holds.
Said accessories comprise a red pitchfork - pure red and glossy, very toy-like,
which suits either a Halloween costume demon, or a real but cheesy-looking demon, whichever you want to pretend Jenna is being - and a jack o'lantern pumpkin, which all but demands a pun, especially with the default pose being holding the pumpkin up next to Jenna's... well, there you go, you just want to say
"pumpkins."
Also technically an accessory, I suppose, is her tail, glossy
red like the pitchfork, but plugged directly into a hole in the small of her back. It swivels freely, and it easily removed and replaced - indeed, doing so is part of the undressing process, since it pokes through a hole in the back of the dress.
With the red dress consigned to the spare accessories drawer (or stored beneath the hollow base, according to the manufacturer's vision) Jenna's down to a blue thong, and if you really want to display her with both dress and thong in place, you really don't want to undress her to begin with. Even with the arms and head removed, moving the skin-tight dress is a tough job, and you'd have to be very, very careful to get it back in place without displacing the thong, or having to stretch the dress unduly to avoid doing so. With the thong quickly slipped off her legs, Jenna's down to just her headband and her sculpted-on platform heels - revealing, among other things, the only tattoo to survive the transformation to demonic form, the "heart breaker" on her bottom.
If you've seen one of these figures in her birthday suit before you've seen it all really, but I do find that the red skin is complimentary to Jenna's figure, smoothing her curves and absorbing shadows in just the right way - especially on her breasts, which under natural light look a lot more plausible than those on the cheerleader version, despite the actual sculpt being close to identical. The usual nudity paintwork is in place, with pale pink labia and darker red areolae.
Besides her tail, Jenna gets one more enhancement over the everyday Plastic Fantasy starlet: a detailed base. Mounted on top of the usual black block (with the usual not-quite-properly-stuck-on name sticker) is a thick sculpted layer representing a pumpkin patch, with several pumpkins scattered about - painted very much like the jack o'lantern but missing its face,
obviously - surrounded by leaves and thick, tendril-like vines. There are two holes in the sculpt, allowing Jenna's shoes to plug directly into the black base - the thickness of the sculpted layer is such that the shoes appear to lose a couple of millimeters as they sink into it - and the fit is very tight, making this one of the least likely figures to shift from her base in the entire range.
She is, let's face it, one of the goofier figures I've got around here - but that's all part of her charm. If you don't take your collecting too seriously, Jenna-devil makes a great little Halloween ornament, with the bonus that (unlike some of the others) she works just as well out of costume as in it.
-- 10/21/09
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