Christmas seems to come earlier every year, and now we know why.

One of the coldest places on earth is getting hotter. Naughty and nice, Mrs. C. finds a new way to work the North Pole - just doing what she can to keep Santa happy on those cold winter nights.

Seeing as Santa is a gasmasked, claw-handed maniac in McFarlane s Twisted Christmas line, that is a rather disturbing thought. Continuing in the tradition of such fed-up Monsters series as Twisted Oz and Twisted Fairy Tales, this set targets yet another family-friendly subject and delivers a solid dose of grotesque deviance.

As it happens, Mrs. Claus is actually rather sedate compared to her monstrous siblings in this line - granted she is not going to pass muster in a G-rated holiday special, and her pet elves aren t pretty, but compared to such wholeheartedly psychotic figures as Camille Noire or Red Riding Hood, a pole dancer doesn t seem like she is very high up the evil scale, unless you are one of those fundamentalist crusaders who regard everything from genocide to foreplay as equally deviant. Still, she is married to the aforementioned claw-fiend, so perhaps it is just guilt by association.

So far as quality of design and sculpt goes, this is a McFarlane figure, which is to say she is excellent - they may not know what a balljoint is, but McToys knows how to make a plastic statue Mrs. Claus is flawless from head to toe, with every detail lovingly sculpted from the indentation in her lower lip, through the lacy trim and tiny crinkles in the fabric of her lingerie, down to the sleigh bells stitched to her boots. Her figure is slim but grown up, without defined muscles but with enough of the shape of them to justify her being able to do her moves on the pole - it is a physically demanding discipline - and enough sexy curves in front and behind to have something to show off while she is doing it. Her body sculpt shows a good command of the intricacies of anatomy, how a body moves and responds to motion, especially (compared to the liberties often taken in action figures) in the area of her chest: she is leaning slightly to her left, and her right breast is appropriately swelling out of her bra cup compared to the left. It is attention to detail like that, breast-related or otherwise, that separates a good sculpt from a great one.

Mrs. C. s skirt and the mini-babydoll fringe on her bra [Santa baby, hurry down the chimney for me] are separate pieces, the latter glued in place, the former free-floating on her hips so it can be positioned exactly against the pole which is pushing up against its edge, and both are especially good work. They are sculpted in clear plastic, painted white on the fluffy edges, but given a thin frosted white coat elsewhere, making them semi-transparent - whether they would translate from the highly-finished prototype to the mass-market figures, but they are one of the most impressive uses of sculpt and paint we can recall.