Ash and Cheryl

Five friends drive to a remote cabin in the woods for a fun getaway. While there, they find the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, an ancient tome whose text reawakens the dead when rad aloud. After unintentionally releasing a flood of evil, the group must fight for their lives or become possessed. Hey, first of all, kudos to Chris Raimo for putting interesting text on the back of the box. Love that. Secondly, how is taking five people to a cabin in the woods a "fun" getaway? Like, four? Six? Sure. But five? That math ain't mathing. Not everybody is going to be having the same amount or even same brand of fun. This isn't NECA's first Evil Dead 1 action figure - they released a "40th Anniversary" Ash in 2022, showing Bruce Campbell at his clean-cut wholesomest. That may sound unusually recent for such a popular franchise to be getting its first action figure, but you've got to remember: the rights issues for Evil Dead 1 were so complicated, Sam Raimi opened Evil Dead 2 by spending the first seven minutes quickly remaking the entirety of the original movie because that was the only way he could use any of it. Thus, NECA once again worked their magic to ensure we'd get "ungettable" toys. The faces on the Anniversary figure were, to put it bluntly, bad. Ash had three heads, and on the final production figure, none of them looked like Bruce Campbell. We know the guy has a difficult likeness to capture, but that figure's box credited the sculpt to Trevor Grove and Kyle Windrix - NECA's top men when it comes to faces and bodies - so we don't know what happened. This one, though? A ton better! There are two heads, both with the same sculpt but differentiated by paint: the first clean, but painted with the eyes looking off to the side; the second bloody, but looking straight ahead. The sculpt has just enough exaggeration to look good and sell who it's supposed to be, with the mouth open slightly to give him a shellshocked look. Terrific! To further set this figure apart from the last one, he's been given bloody paint apps. He's wearing his iconic "blue shirt and brown pants" combo (it doesn't get as ripped up in Evil Dead 1 as it famously did in 2), but here there's dark red painted on the shoulders, down the center of his chest, and splattered all over his arms. His hands and neck are covered in it, too. The blood initially got on his shirt during his fight outside with Linda, but it was only the last few minutes of the film when his skin got it, too. Ash's accessories are the three main weapons he uses in the movie: a simple axe, a long, square shovel, and a chainsaw. Though that last one eventually became synonymous with the character, in the first movie it was no more important than any of the others. (Meaning don't expect to be attaching it to his arm any time soon.) His articulation is normal NECA stuff: ankles, knees, thighs, hips, waist, wrists, elbows, shoulders, and neck. The set includes a pair of variant hands to hold the accessories, as well. They're both right hands, one with the trigger finer out to use with the chainsaw, and the other with a slightly tighter grip to best hold the axe. This isn't just a bloody variant of a figure from three years ago, it's a two-pack, like Ash and Deadite Ed. Our second figure this time is Cheryl Williams, Ash's sister and the fifth wheel on this fun college getaway. The cabin they rented only had two bedrooms - best-case scenario, she was going to spend the entire weekend listening through the walls to the sound of her older brother getting some stanky on his hang-down, as the kids today say, with her only hope being that the sound of their other two friends boning would drown it out. Girl you should have stayed your ass at the dorm and studied! Cheryl is unfortunately the one who gets attacked by the trees, so this figure is wearing what she wore after (because it darn well couldn't have showed what she was wearing then!). It's a simple green shirt over black pants, which doesn't sound like much, but it's accurate. Trevor Grove and Kyle Windrix are still credited sculptors on this set, but so are Thomas Gwyn and Adrienne Smith, so it's entirely possible they're the ones who did Cheryl (though it obviously could have been a collaboration among all four). The figure includes three heads, each with a distinct look, and each representing her at a different point in the story. Right in the tray, she's got her most human look, from right after she was first possessed. When she was first possessed, her hair was in a ponytail, but it soon fell out like we see here. She's got a bandage on her forehead to cover her tree-wound (one of her tree-wounds, at any rate), and has blank white eyes. The second head is later, after she's been locked in the basement. It's slightly more decayed, with grayer skin and more blood running down her chin. The circles around her eyes have gotten darker, too, and her bandages fell off at some point. Is you watch that scene in the film, her hair here is too colorful: it was almost full granny-gray (that was a prop head, because the actors were beating her up so much at the time, so it makes sense the wig wouldn't match the real girl perfectly, especially on such a low-budget, unsophisticated production). The third head comes from the finale, when she's no longer just decaying but is instead fully disintegrating in front of everyone's eyes. That was done in stop-motion, so the face on the toy no longer needed to look at all like actress Ellen Sandweiss. At this point Cheryl's hair was falling out in clumps, and the skin on her forehead was just splitting on its own, so this is a rather disturbing look. The skin gets a bit of its pink back, but that's because of all the blood flowing out of her. The hair is even more desaturated than the previous head's. The figure includes a pair of relaxed hands, a pair of threatening hands, a right hand that can hold the included fireplace poker, and a left hand sculpted clutching a pencil like a dagger. The set includes a sketchbook for her, but this hand is when she stabbed Linda in the ankle - there's another scene where she holds her pencil like this, but that would be her right hand, not her left. (And this is why we rewatch the movies to write toy reviews!) When she was left alone in the cabin's living room (when the two couples went to their separate rooms [to study the Bible, probably]), Cheryl passed the time by drawing in her sketch pad. The set includes the sketch pad, and right there on the front of it is her drawing of the clock that hung on the living room wall. For some reason it has these odd horizontal lines across it that don't actually exist in the movie, so it's possible the tampo for this was made based on a bad screengrab? They certainly look like VHS scanlines. While drawing the clock, Cheryl's hand started moving on its own - it must run in the family! Anyway, she rips the page off she was using, and, clutching her pencil violently, begins drawing a rough representation of the Necronomicon: a square shape with circles for the eyes and mouth. In fact, she draws it so hard, the paper rips to shreds as she does it. To depict that, NECA made the sketchpad from two pieces, allowing the front page to be removed (it fits in a slot near the top of the pad) to reveal the drawing of the evil book beneath. This is so cool! They even sculpted the tear through the center. The box credits Marty Henley and Thomas Gwyn with fabrication, so presumably this is one of their work. Clever, clever idea. Finally, there's a piece of scenery. Ash may have had to kill his girlfriend, Linda, but he did feel bad about it - bad enough to give her a cursory burial outside in the woods. To that end, the set includes the rough cross made from tied branches that he jammed into the dirt to mark her resting place. It has a little pile of dirt at the base, so it can stand up, and that's sculpted with twigs and leaves. This is an unexpected thing to include with this duo, but it's not unwelcome. Not when the set costs $70. NECA's prices are up, but they're pushing how much stuff they can give us for that price, too. Interestingly, neither this set nor the solo 40th Anniversary Ash come with the first movie's Necronomicon. It had a different design than the one we see in Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness - smaller and yellower. When the film's production went long and the budget ran out, artist Tom Sullivan agreed to keep working on props if he was allowed to retain the copyright to anything he created; that meant things needed to be re-made for Evil Dead 2, and may in part be why the rights to ED1 were so complicated for so long. Back when McFarlane Toys made Ash in the Movie Maniacs line, both Evil Deads were unavailable. That's why it was such a coup when 2012 NECA finally managed to get the Evil Dead 2 license, though 1 was still out of reach. Now they've cracked that as well, and while the initial release wasn't great (the box looking like the VHS cover was more interesting than the toy inside it), this two-pack absolutely delivers. We've got an Ash who looks like Ash, and we've got a character who's never had a toy before. Thank you, Target stockperson, for putting this one on the shelf! -- 10/02/25 Are there any unmade Evil Dead characters you'd still want to see as toys? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.