Off the back of Dean Knight's video showing the improvements he made together with video he did of the Big Chap Alien in which he put them side by side, my curiosity got the better of me and I opened my Mezco Predator.
Well, I will say that it feels like quality - the mixed media at this scale - the real netting, the real loincloth, the LED features, the more pliable dreadlocks - these are the things that I'm sure persuaded some youtube reviewers that it's better than the NECA......but it's not. It's really not. There's only one aspect of the sculpt I like better than NECA and that's the waist-hip area - NECA has the womanly hips/thighs thing going on and could do with a wider waist and thus probably a slightly bigger torso overall which would in turn make that figure taller - reckon it's a smidge too short for Kevin Peter Hall when compared against Dutch. And sure, it'd be cool if NECA's had real netting, a real loincloth and an LED lazer sighting. That's where Mezco's improvements end. Literally everything else is better on the NECA.
Putting the NECA mask on the Mezco head improves the Mezco head - but just the head in isolation. Everything else still looks wrong. The armour seems too dark to me (I'm open to correction on that) while as we've already pointed out they completely screwed the paint on the Predator's body itself, managing to forget to add the dark areas and spotting he's supposed to have on his skin.
The unmasked sculpt is a Predator, I'll give it that. But it sure aint the Jungle Hunter. And the seams of the interchangeable mandibles are way too obvious.
The other major problem is his general proportions. This is a 1/12 scale figure while NECA's is 1/10 and yet the heads are the same size, the plasma-casters are pretty much the same size, various parts of the armour are the same size and even the bone trophys are the same size. Yet the Mezco is clearly shorter - as a result he looks like a young teenager in Predator cosplay. That is now beef number one of mine and I can't get it out of my head as I look at the figure.
Anyway, I just said screw it and put the Mezco bio-mask back on it, there's simply too much else wrong for it to be worthwhile correcting just one thing. Might aswell leave it stock. Either I'll sell it or keep it as a curiosity - it's part of Predator action figure history now....such as it is.