Monster High - Party Ghouls, Garden Ghouls - Abbey, Rochelle, Venus

So I went shopping

Yeah I know I keep saying i'm done with MH, but... SALES happen and i'm weak.

The Frightmares were £3 in Asda. I've been eying up Penelope for a while. They had all of the second wave ones, so fire, ice, steampunk, deer and rerelease of the green seamonster one.

The zelf was the only one they had. He was full price but I haven't bought a Zelf in ages and he's a werewolf so.. yay.

I was waiting for electrified Clawdeen to come down in price and was umming and ahhing over the garden ghouls.
Then Argos had their 7 days of deal sale and Clawdeen dropped from £20 to £13 and the garden ghouls dropped from £16:99 to £11:29
Sweet.

I ordered three in and knowing Argos and their price rubbish (you pay the price ON THE DAY not the day you ordered unless you pay in advance) I opted for their collect in store but pay now option.

I wasn't sure they'd give me one of each because Argos keep putting assortments under ONE catalogue number. So you order and you can get any random dolls from the assortment. You can't pick unless you physically go into store and view them.
I figured i'd get duplicates, but hoped to get at least 2 different ones. Going in to pick them up had the advantage that 1: I would only pay the sale price and 2: I could easily and immediately return any errored or duplicated dolls.

So my order took almost a week to show up but I picked them up on Monday. The staff member brought out three dolls. 2 Venus, 1 Rochelle. One of the venus dolls had a seriously errored face, her eyes were shunted to the right so one eye was almost on her NOSE and the other was on her damn temple. wtf?
I asked if they had any more, I knew they had at least one more in store because I had checked their stock the night before. So the staff member wandered out back and came back with Abbey.
WHOO.

So I picked less wonked Venus and off we went.

I'll be looking at them today, saving Clawdeen and the frightmares for later.

First up Rochelle. I decided to open her first because my eldest stood on her box and crushed it. So it was coming apart anyway. Heh.

The Garden Ghouls (US name) are called Party Ghouls here in the UK. Go figure. Maybe we don't know what gardens are?
Their boxes are slim line blister pack style boxes with a sort of party balloon motif which.. actually might make the "party ghouls" name make more sense. But their outfits are all garden themed so.. yeah i'm just confused.
Garden Party?
Do those usually involve balloons and streamers? Because when I think Garden Party I think tea and cake, big hats and poshness.

The back of the box features a really cute picture of Rochelle holding these flower things that are supposed to clip into her harness/suspenders/bracers. She has no bio, international box so it just says "daughter of Gargoyles" over and over.

the box also tells me she has a purse shaped like her pet Roux and that she has "snap on accessories", which actually means little flower charm things.

Interesting note, the flowers on her shoes in the image are black. but they're pink in the box and promo images. Uh... random.

Take special notice of that diagram there that illustrates how to remove the arms, that's going to come up later in this review.

I have the same problem with these boxes as usual. They're kinda painful to open by sticking your finger under and running it along between plastic and card to separate the two. If you don't do that you end up just tearing the backing card to shreds, that glue is STRONG.

Her backing card is.. some sort of large lighted mirror with some inexplicably still working cracked bulbs. How does that even work?

Again, I don't get this. A big mirror like you'd see in a changing room backstage doesn't make a lot of sense for a party.. or a garden theme. What is this even about?
I'm just bewildered.

Anyway, Rochelle comes with no stand and no brush, but a whole lot of plastic crap! Whoo *waves flag*

For some reason Rochelle's eyes are printed sort of... looking upward. Some of them like this one just look a bit dazed and faraway, but some have the eyes printed so high they look like they're having a seizure. It's bizarre.
I admit, I kinda... hoped i'd get a seizing Rochelle for the comedy review value but mine's face is actually pretty decent to my eye. She looks dreamy, like she's not really in the present.

Her wings are packaged not attached to the doll but rather attached to a piece of plastic which is in turn plastic stapled to the backing card through her hair.
I couldn't yank her hair out without first snipping and removing these staples. Wth?

The wings are really light plastic, more like later Rochelle releases than the nice rubbery ones she used to get. They feel a bit fragile to me, like, ramming them into her back slots I was worried i'd snap them. Maybe i'm extra paranoid. 

I was worried about Rochelle's hair when we saw her promos because curls seldom translate well to actual dolls. As suspected, Rochelle's hair isn't really curly, it's faintly wavy. However, it isn't the frizzy mess I was expecting. It's actually quite a nice dense fiber that holds a curl well and has nice, neat, unfrazzled ends. WHOO.
It has some sort of product in it that makes it slightly greasy (detangler?) and her bangs are gelled but they're not rock hard, they're actually soft and pliable. Omg.. could.. could it be Mattel FINALLY learned how to gel hair without making it feel like cement!?

Straight out the box her hair is pretty messy from those stupid staples and elastic bands, but it brushes out fine.

It's a pretty soft pink colour with a mint green streak through one side.

I THINK her eyes are supposed to be pink but they're a rather strange colour to my eye. Sometimes they almost look reddish and i find them a little strange. Older Rochelles always had a little paler pink in the iris to clarify that it was in fact pink but these are solidly one colour and it's almost a terracottish tinge to the pink, there's a redness to them I find a bit unusual. Sometimes they even look almost brown.
Hmm. Odd.

Her skin is still grey but she's not got nearly as many speckles as old Rochelles did. She has a few big ones on her face which are like beauty marks. One near her eyebrow, another on her chin. I dig these. I always kinda liked that every Rochelle was different and unique, each and every one has a different speckling pattern. I remember spending ages trying to decide which signature Rochelle I liked best in store based on their facial speckles lol.
Reboot Rochelle is way less speckly, but there are enough speckles to make her look adorably freckly.

She has quite heavily blushed cheeks as well.

Her outfit is a really very nicely made little dress with a sort of harness thing made of plastic over the top. The harness thing has holes you're meant to clip the little charms into (I keep wanting to call them pops, they remind me of the pops that came with Cutie Pops)

The harness is a bit... odd I think. Like, I don't feel like it really goes with the dress. Hers is the least effective of the three I think.

Under the harness you can see how damn cute her dress actually IS. It has a blue sleeveless top and a pink ruffle down the front. A high waistband and then two tiers of ruffled skirt in this funky Fleur-de-Lis, flower and dragonfly pattern. No, I have no idea what dragonflies and flowers have to do with Rochelle.
The flowers have the little Fleur-de-lis inside them too.

The top fabric is stretchy but the bottom skirt is a thick cotton, the top part of the lower ruffle is sewn to pink stretchy fabric like her ruffle which saves on bulk while giving her genuine real tiers. They're sewn together at the back just to keep them together. 

Her shoes are huge chunky things covered in swirls. They look familiar to me. I can't quite pinpoint why. Bonita's ugly as hell yellow boot things maybe? These are cuter than those.

and they have one little hole in them at the side for the pops (screw it, i'm calling them pops okay?)

Rochelle's harness has moulded on detail but it's hard to see because of the black. It's more swirls and architectural motifs.
the actual clip on the back of it is really difficult to get off. The thing is made of rubbery plastic but for some reason I couldn't get the thing undone without using my teeth.

I'm saying now, by the end of this review, my fingers REALLY hurt for various reasons.

Anyway, here's all of Rochelle's little clip/pops. She comes with one big flower crown.. thing which looks totally OTT and huge.
Her purse which is the same mint green (which is odd as Roux's grey), a dragonfly, 2 green flowers and 2 pink flowers that don't match any of the pink anywhere else on her.
Huh... why? black like the image made more sense, or even a soft pink like her hair, or purple like her skirt. This bright vivid barbie pink is kinda jarring.

For some reason I didn't get a good pic of Roux. He looks oddly pig-like to me and has a huge black bow on his/her head. I can't remember if Roux was canonically male or female, it's been a while. I do recall that Roux was however a sort of griffon thing and thus had a BEAK not a pig snout. Hmmm

Roux, a griffon...


I didn't actually realise until I got to Venus' doll that the little bows on the pet purses are also removable and can be swapped out for any of the other clips. But in Roux's case, the clips are as big as his/her head and obscure most of her face if you try to use anything other than the black bow. 

Anyway, the clip on like this. The crown this is RIDICULOUS like omg.
Also, ow ow ow omg ow. the headband thing of hers is rock hard and so are the clips, I couldn't get them to go in without a lot of force and it huuuuurt so bad.

No way could a kid do this.

the harness was tricky and involved a lot of force too, but it wasn't as bad as the headband bit. Still, the only part the clips went in and came out without adult strength were her shoes.
Wth Mattel?
this is the core gimmick of the line and it requires adult assistance? Screw you, I don't want to assist my child, that's why I bought them a TOY! So I could throw that at them and go do other stuff while they played on their own and stopped demanding my attention. Isn't... that the point?
toys that require adult assistance totally defeat the damn point man.

I decided I preferred a more minimalistic approach with Rochelle's look. So I got husband to put the dragonfly into the headband after failing to do so myself and just bruising my fingertips. He used all his "man strength" and ended up with huge dents in his fingers, but the damn thing went in.
Seriously Mattel!??

I like her dress better without the harness, and the silly pink flowers that match nothing.

Her shoes look kinda fun with the little pop of green on them.

And I like the dragonfly even though i'm scared of them irl. (yes i'm scared of dragonflies, they just... those long bodies gross me out so much okay? and one time the cat brought one of those HUGE ones in and broke the body in half and it was still alive and writhing and I was freaking out and I had to mercy kill it but it wouldn't die no matter how much I squished it and... and... traumatic man... just... traumatic.)

Rochelle's faceup is also VERY simple so a very minimalistic outfit look I think works for her. She has pale pink lips in a faint little smile, big reddish pink eyes and grey eyeshadow. Her eyebrows are also grey and thick and have no detail in them.
and pink blush on her cheeks. That's it. It's simple but it's cute. She's really stinking cute.

She looks NOTHING like original Rochelle though, like.. at all. They have the same nose but that's it.

The cut of their outfits is similar though, with the fitted sleeveless top and very full skirt. I like that.

Signature Rochelle has this pretty teal in her hair rather than the mint green, her skin is also slightly darker and her hair a little duller but that could be age related discolouration. g1 is slightly.. yellowy.
She also has a lot more makeup, worried eyebrows which reboot oddly doesn't have (Clawdeen musta stolen them) and obviously PINK eyes.

Reboot also doesn't have claws anymore.
Huh.. that's weird.

Overall I actually really like this Rochelle, which is funny because I didn't think i'd bother getting her. But her dress is ADORABLE and very nicely made, she has a bright friendly face and her hair is actually pretty good. I think it'll curl nicely for anyone who wants to go that extra mile.

My only gripe would be the gimmick of the clip/pops, they are honestly difficult to put in, at least on Rochelle, and i'm not convinced they really ADD much. Once you come up with a combo you're happy with, you're likely to just put the rest aside and forget about them. Though I do like a bit of customization. I had fun decided where to put the clips, but it was very short lived fun. It took like one minute. Putting the clips IN is so painful and difficult though, that I didn't want to continue to play around with looks for the sake of my poor aching fingertips.

If they were a bit easier to insert and remove then yeah...
but they're hard to get into the holes and the flowers particularly are rather pointy and sharp. Ouch. I sure as heck wouldn't have been able to do much with them as a child, I barely had the strength as an adult and pulling them off again got really painful after a while. I can't see kids using this gimmick more than a couple of times.

Still, she's adorable. I love how wistful she looks. Like she's gazing in the distance, daydreaming.

Next I opened Venus and I warn you, this is the point where my review will get pretty ranty and more than a bit sweary.

I knew this venus had some eye misplacement, but it was slight so I figured it'd be fine.

Back of hte box features Venus and there's a few interesting things to note here. 1: Her dress is way shorter and poofier in this image.  2: she has her usual external vine wraps and 3: her lips are green. They're pink on the doll.

Hmm odd.

The Chewlian purse I love, it's a plant pot with a venus flytrap in it, I mean COME ON, what's not to love about that?

I do however draw your attention to the bottom of the box. Remember with Rochelle I told you that diagram would come up again? Can you see what's missing?
Yes, they've reshuffled the back of the box to ommit the diagram.
I didn't notice this when deboxing, someone on MHdolls pointed it out, but it should have been my first clue of Mattel's bullshit.

I didn't do so well getting the plastic off this one without ripping the backing card. The glue was REALLY strong on this box.

You might notice there's something going on with her arms. I noticed this in store but thought it was just packaging oddness.

Oh ho ho.

Taking a closer look, it looks like all her joints are... out. Like they're all loose right? Hey that's no biggy, i'll just push them back into their sockets once I get her off the backing card....

Oh... they... don't go back in. and they don't come out either.
Her arms are unremovable, as are her hands, but the sockets look like they're too small for the rods, meaning there's these ugly as hell gaps between each joint.

I'll get to that. Let's look at the rest of her before I become fixated.

So Venus has really bright green hair and vividly pink streaks. It's long (knee length), shaved on one side (flocked, yay) and really... really choppy.

Like, why the hell is it all different lengths?
I kinda want to just cut it off at that shorter bit so it's even.

She has a pretty face with arching eyebrows in very dark brown, big blue eyes with grey eyeshadow and dark pink lips with all her little fangs painted on.

She has unpierced ears, all the dolls in this line do. I think that's a shame because they could have incorperated the mix and match thing into those too.

Anyway, she has a headband thing on that looks weird without the clip in pop attached to it, and a vine thing all around her body which looks a bit unfinished. It needs POPS!

Her arms are crazy stiff and hard to bend because of how they're haphazardly constructed. Mmmm.

Her harness is a bit complicated to get off but then it reveals this dress. I don't like this dress. I mean, I like the top part with the studden bits but it has TWO waist bands. What kind of dress has two fricken waistbands? It looks stupid. There's a sewn on decorative fake belt and then a dropped waistline. It looks really bad to my eye, like.. fashion police bad. Two... waistlines? Who's bright idea was that?
and it's a pity because had they just had ONE FRICKEN WAISTLINE it wouldn't be a bad dress. The top is nicely tailored and sort of reminds me of some of Jinafire's outfits in the cut and the skirt is a sort of circle skirt with ruffles at the bottom. The whole garment is made from shiny satiny fabric.

The top part is half print but I think that's stylistic rather than cheapness.
Even so...

The pattern is angry faced flowers.

This dress is honestly pretty damn similar to Venus' Gloom and Bloom dress I think, only that dress was better designed with only one waistband and full print and all that.
Yeah, i'm not getting over the dumb waistband thing okay?

Her shoes are kinda cool. They're little wedge boots with vines all over and a little buckle at the top. I like these. Note the hole for the pops.

Venus has a new body sculpt... in more than one way.

She has vines now moulded onto her lower legs, one lower arm and one upper arm, kinda like Honey Swamp did. I think it's a cool solution to those rather annoying vine wraps she used to get.

However, Mattel have done something else with Venus (and ONLY Venus's) sculpt.

Her arms as I mentioned before cannot be removed. Which means her hands have been sculpted with closed fingers which look.. honestly.. kinda lifeless. It's so clothing can fit over her hands but why the hell would you do that when every single other doll just has removable hands? It makes no sense.
And the joints don't even fit together correctly, leading me to think it's an error they're just hastily covering up.

Allow me to show you in more detail:

This is the Electrified Venus shown off at comic con. Notice how her elbows and wrists fit neatly into the sockets? Notice she has the moulded on vine detail but her arms fit correctly?

Now take a look at this arm.
See how none of the joints fits flush with the socket? Each peg is sticking out from the socket a little too far? Do you know why? Because the pegs are too large for the sockets, or the sockets are too small for the pegs.

You know what I think happened? Someone miscalculated shrinkage of the mold, and instead of admitting a mistake, they just rammed the bits on anyway and then realised "oh crap, we can't get these OUT again. I know, make it a feature! Quick, someone cast some narrow profile hands so you can still dress her! Nobody'll notice, it'll be fine!"

Both her arms are like this. And it not only looks ugly, it also messes with her articulation. Her limbs are stiff as all hell and worse than that, the wrist because it's not inside the socket properly is just a very veeeeery slender piece of plastic which will be snapped SO easily and SO quickly in the hands of a kid, or even a collector who doesn't realise her hands aren't meant to come off.
Usually that thin plastic peg is protected by the socket of the wrist around it, but noooo, these are loose and taking the full strain of every... single... movement you make of that hand.

there's no way a body would be engineered like this on purpose. It looks bad and it's not structurally stable. It's clearly a mistake, one Mattel WANTS us to believe is intentional. I call BULLSHIT Mattel, utter fucking bullshit.

Also take a look at her legs. See how huge that gap is between upper and lower? Yeah, again, the PEG IS TOO BIG FOR THE SOCKET.
it gets weirder, the back of her upper leg doesn't have the same indent the other two dolls have, it's sort of all... flattened. Which means her legs are very stiff to bend and again, all the strain of the bend is on those pegs with no socket around them to reinforce them. they feel fragile, I feel like i'm going to snap them right off moving her legs.
This is not a toy I would give to a child.
She's not made right.

Now, you might be thinking "Oh maybe it's an error and it's just yours" and I admit, i considered that.
and sent Mattel and email about it.

but then I looked at other pictures of Venus dolls.

Electrified venus... notice her oddly awkward looking arms?

Or the new casketball one? (mintypinkdarling at tumblr) 
See her elbow? how the joint is sticking out?

yeah, the more I search, the more I see. EVERY reboot venus looks to have these broken looking joints. 

What... the hell? 

And that just raises more questions. Because if it was a factory error, why the hell wouldn't mattel have fixed it? And if it's intentional. WHY? Why would you make ONE character and ONE character only have a completely different body construction to every other doll? That makes NO SENSE and isn't how toy lines work. 
It's utterly bizarre and means there's no way in hell i'm buying another Venus till they fix her damn body.
Because it's not acceptable.

Rochelle's body is fine and normal, see how her arm looks correct and all the pegs insert fully into the socket? And her legs are connected properly and securely? 

How the hell can ANYONE claim her legs are "SUPPOSED" to look like this? It's obvious the joint is wrong! WHY IS NOBODY TALKING ABOUT THIS!???

Okay... okay.. i'll breathe... and.. look at her pops.

Venus comes with one big flytrap one which goes on her headband, and four bright pink angry faced flowers. 

Chewlian has a blue fly on his pot. It's cute. 

The harness is actually very clever, because of the swirls of the vines the holes for the pops are quite well hidden amongst it all. That's very neat I think. 

Chewlian's fly can be replaced too.

For instance with a large flower. But i'm not sure the scale really works. Also, i'm not sure a fly is something you really want a doll to proudly wear on her clothing lol, even if she IS a flytrap.

But it does fit the holes so theoretically yes, you could make your doll wear a fly charm. 

Her headband looks SO much better with the flytrap attached.

From what I can establish, 2 go on her shoes and then 2 on her harness.
there's not really much mixing and matching to be done with Venus. I mean, the big flytrap bit clearly HAS to go on her headband as it doesn't fit properly anywhere else, it's too bulky. And the four flowers are all identical so... what's the point?
You CAN put the other doll's on, in this case the two middle ones are from Rochelle, they're the same colour pink but a different shape.

But still, seems wierd because Rochelle had options. Venus' pops really can only go on in like.. one way. Maybe if the four flowers had been two different colours like Rochelle's were?

Honestly I do quite like her face. She's got attitude which I find so lacking in much of the reboot. Her hair is very soft but it's quite thin and really unevenly cut. But it looks nice without the headband too. 

She's SO much brighter than her original doll. This new Venus has very vividly green hair and a bright pink, while signature Venus' hair was a sort of dull grungy olive colour with an orangey pink. 

I actually like the very vivid green, it's a lot prettier than the ugly drab olive colour.

and it's even more watermelon-like!

Venus' new hands are still kinda cabbagey but I hate their sculpt. They look like Barbie hands. They're expressionless and they just don't look like they belong to the rest of the doll. the proportions are too realistic for Monster High and the pose is so... bland.
Also they're really roughly cast with a lot of fuzzy edges to the plastic.

I don't like these hands at all.

and if you look back up at the promos for electrified Venus, she didn't have these hands. She had hands like g1 Venus, with the splayed out long fingers. Why would you change that?
The only reason for her hands to be like this is so you can dress her without removing her hands.
Which makes me think they're an afterthought to fix a problem they couldn't be bothered fixing with her elbows.

but then you'd think they'd get the damn wrist at least correct! but it doesn't fit either!

So wtf?

Venus still has her cool leaf ears. I love these ears. In fact, having them not pierces allows me to appreciate them better with nothing distracting.

I like how the flytrap mouth is kinda heart shaped.

Her headband is really ornate with the swirling vines.

It doesn't stay on her head without elastic or plastic staples though. Booo hissss.

I couldn't get a decent pic, but Venus has a lot of mold release marks all over her. Little dots on her legs, her arms and two teeny little dots on her forehead that look like air bubbles or something. 
Also the makeup on one eye is a bit scuffed and there's a black mark on her nose that I can't get off.
Hmmm... 
Nothing major, but what with her body issues, it's just another thing to add to the list that makes me rather regret her purchase.

Overall? I think reboot Venus is VERY pretty. I do really like her face. I also quite like her hair even if it does need a trim.
I love her vine harness thing and her boots are cool, as is her purse. 

I hate her dress. Like.. I actually hate it. It just doesn't work for me and doesn't seem to really be Venus' "eco punk" style you know? 
Also I hate her body. I absolutely LOATHE her body. I've not been this fiercely disappointed by a doll in a long while. Her body is borked, and it's absolutely disgraceful to me that Mattel are trying to pass it off as intentional and think nobody'll notice how badly put together it is.
It feels fragile and it looks UGLY. Her hands suck, her joints suck, her moulded on vines are nice but kinda ruined by all her joints being SO FULL OF SUCK.

I'm honestly just not sure I can keep her in my collection because her body is so bad to me and the contempt Mattel has for their customers that it illustrates honestly makes me feel a bit sick. I'm glad I didn't pay full price for her, but i'm disgusted that they've released now 3 different Venus dolls and they ALL have this fucked up body bullshit.
FIX IT Mattel.
Christ.

I emailed them with pictures, we'll see how they fob me off. I'll be sure to update you with that because let me tell you, mattel is about to learn an important lesson. Don't fuck with a collector who has no day job, because they have SO MUCH TIME, so much passion and they can spam the shit outta your inbox and social media and really annoy the shit outta you. 
Prepare yourself Mattel call center people, shit's gonna go down. 

Seriously though, i'm horribly disappointed by her. I like her face but her body ruins it for me and makes me want to just put her in a box and forget about her.
She's spoiled by those ugly barely functional joints and hideous shit hands. Like.. no pose I put her in looks right with those shitty hands, she looks stiff and awkward and terrible.

ARGHHH WHY?


So after that crushing pain, I opened the one I was most enthusiastic about back when they were leaked. Abbey.

I really didn't think she'd keep her blue lips. I thought "nah, Mattel will pussy out and give her pink lips because Mattel have no balls."
Glad to see someone did in fact have testicles, because here she is and her lips are indeed blue. YES.

See her diagram?

I like her art, she looks sweet and friendly. 

The Shiver purse is a bit... odd. I mean, Shiver was a mammoth right? Her purse is just a ball of fluff with eyes. 
Wth? Did Mattel forget what a mammoth looked like?

She's a damn striking doll. She looks severe, sort of.. modelesk to me. 

She doesn't have glued on glitter like her older dolls, instead she has a very light white flecking with paint. Which gives the illusion of sparkle but doesn't make her feel gross.
I approve. 

Also no tinsel shit in her hair. Again, I approve.
and no pink in her hair either, it's just white, purple and blue. Ooo I like. It gives her a much darker look.

Her eyes are large and purple with a sort of star (or snowflake?) shape in the pupil. No idea why she has decals in her eye when nobody else does but hye, it looks cool.
Her eyebrows are purple and have little extra hair details which is how I always draw eyebrows on dolls heheh. 
Her makeup is grey like the other two, which thinking about it is quite cool. It ties all three dolls together.

Her lips are a really pretty desaturated blue with her little tusks painted on. 
I have always loved Abbey's face sculpt with her strong jaw and stern looking mouth. Reboot Abbey still looks stern as heck and I love it.

Her hair is a bit thinly rooted, but it looks nice. It's in a sort of tied back style but I don't think it can really be taken out of this and put into anything else. It's rooted for THIS style and this style alone.

Still, at least it's styled. So many g1 Abbeys had really bloody boring hair with no clear style going on, it just... was. YAWN.

Her dress has an asymetric hem line and is made from satiny fabric like Venus' dress. It's got a sort of ice, uh... Chrysanthemums? Zynias? I don't know what sort of flowers they are...  and moth? or firefly or... some other flying insect motif. Random. Anyone got any suggestions on the relivance of these?
Because they seem pretty arbitrary to me.

Still it's a cool pattern in purple, white, blue and black.

Over her dress she wears a fur collar thing and a blue ice harness for her pops.

Her boots are beautiful ice boots. Abbey's had similar shoes before but these are a really vivid blue and have two holes in each for pops (ooo 2 holes instead of 1? spoiled)

Abbey actually oddly comes with one more pop than Venus. She and Rochelle both got 5 little ones and 1 bit one for their headpiece while Venus only got 1 big one and 4 little flower ones.
Huh?

Wierd. 

You can see "Shiver" here. That is NOT Shiver. Where's his trunk? Where are his elephanty ears? Where are his tusks? That's a tribble purse, or possibly a yeti, it's NOT a mammoth. What the hell? 
An elephant purse was too hard? I mean it's cute and all but I thought the point was their purses were meant to kinda look like their pets. 
I mean not that Rochelle's looks much like her pet griffon goyle but at least it's gargoyle shaped. So it was like... at least sort of in the same ballpark.

This is Shiver.

Shiver is NOT a yeti. Shiver is a mammoth.

Did Mattel just forget what character's pets looked like?
Like.. i'm really freaking baffled.

Abbey has the same body sculpt as reboot Clawdeen, with moulded fur on her ankles and wrists.

She's also one of the few characters to retain her original hand sculpt. Giant claw hands yes! 

Under the fur stole thing Abbey has this complicated looking harness/bandoleer thing with shoulder pads and a choker/collar. 
It looks cool, I actually really like it just as a piece without any pops inserted.

Under that is a high collar and the whole style of this dress really feels rather oriental to me. That collar makes me think of a mandarin collar and the fabric print reminds me of brocade. 

Sadly the dress is half print. 
DAMNIT MATTEL

Rochelle's harness thingie works kinda well too.

Her outfit starts to look a little girlguide sash-like with the pops inserted. I don't care for it. 

And while her boots CAN take two pops each, it looks a bit messy and clumsy to me.

This was the look I opted for in the end. With "Shiver"'s little moth bug thing as a sort of bow tie and all the purple bits used. 
She has no pink on her so the pink flowers really felt out of place to me. Like.. why on earth would you introduce yet another colour? Why not blue? Or black? to tie in with everything else?
I guess mattel just HAD to add pink somewhere didn't they? Can't have a doll with no pink at all, that'd be blasphemy or.. something.

While rather a lot of the reboot dolls have lost a lot of their personality in the reboot, Abbey is one I think has actually GAINED. She looks so much sterner, so much grumpier and her face just has this real attitude to it. She looks like she's clenching her jaw and it emphasizes how square her face actually is. 

The lack of glitter helps too, older Abbeys had a tendency to not only feel kind gross but also to look a bit sweaty in photos because of the glitter. Also the glue yellows over time. My original Abbey has a distinct yellowish tinge to her which i'm certain is the actual GLUE holding the glitter on. Glitter wasn't embedded into the plastic with these, it was just painted on as a thick, chunky, sand textured layer. Ew.
I vastly prefer glitter free abbey.

Notice her tusks are painted differently now. They're not to the side, they're in the middle of her lips. Interesting. 

I'm actually delighted with Abbey. She's beautiful.
Yes the box lies about the purses and yes the pop things are a bit pointless, but I do really adore her face and the dark makeup and her overall look. She's very "dark" for a reboot doll, and that delights me. She feels like a bone thrown to old fans, a sort of appeasement to make up for all the toddler crap they've been spewing out. 
But there are issues.
Like the half print dress. Half prints bother me less than a lot of collectors, but it IS a bugbear for a lot of people and feels like a bit of a "fu" from Mattel. I mean, did it NEED to be half printed?
Her fur stole thing isn't very well made and I don't think will last with child play.

the pops were tricky to get into her harness, though not as hard as Rochelle's, it still wasn't easy.

Her boots are quite hard to get off and you really have to ram her feet in to get them back on correctly.

As a display doll, she's stunning. For play? there's a few things I think are limiting like her very thin hair. But no glitter! YAY! and moulded fur! YAY! and a faceup that emphasizes her unique face sculpt, yessss. 
Like Cleo, I think I actually prefer reboot Abbey's face to her original. It just has... more attitude. She looks like a catwalk model with this fierce sort of glower and I dig it so so much.

She helped me end this review on a high note.

So thank you Abbey you gorgeous Yeti girl you.

She and Rochelle are definitely going up on the shelf, as soon as I find them some stands. 
Venus though? I'm still upset about her.
Though i'll give her this, she IS the only one who actually had her real pet as her purse.
So.. round of applause for Mattel for remembering that Chewlian was a plant. 

Overall, I can't really give this line a score because there are two great dolls and one shit one. So individually? 
Rochelle 7/10 - She's adorable but I feel like she needs just a little something more.
Abbey - 9/10 - What can I say, I really love her.
Venus - 4/10 - lovely face, okay outfit, cool shoes, horrible, awful, absolutely unforgivable body. 
Sorry Venus, but if Mattel continue to use this borked up body, I shall never be buying another Venus doll.
I just cannot do it.

Don't buy Party Ghouls Venus unless you intend to rebody her, because this body is crap and I don't think it's going to withstand play... at all. I expect to see a lot of broken ones reported pretty quick. Here's hoping Mattel learns a lesson here and FIXES this bullshit.
If more reboot dolls start getting this sort of not fitting together correctly body, then i'm definitely outta here. Mattel can kiss my ass, i'm not sucking up to them and i'm certainly not tolerating their coverup bullshit. There's no way Venus' body was SUPPOSED to look like that and there's no way they purposely designed ONE character to have limbs that couldn't be detatched when every single other doll can. That's totally illogical. It's a mistake, a mistake they haven't yet owned up to.
One they may never own up to.
And one people just don't seem to want to discuss.
Come on people, stop being blind and stupid. Make a fuss! We pay good money for these dolls, we deserve bodies that are actually put together correctly!

And while i'm at it, GOSH I miss stands.