Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 7:7	Budget Medium

If that girl says "Let's do it" one more time, I'm going to shot her.

We open with a prologue where some spooky guy in a spooky house commits suicide rather than succumb to the will of an evil book. We seem to flash forward some number of years and watch as a van pulls up in front of the same spooky house. He deposits some co-eds who will be spending the weekend cleaning up the place for the new owners. While they don't get much cleaning done, they do manage to explore the house well enough to find a trunk with some interesting things inside. The spooky guys returns from somewhere and drops off a book which combined with the contents of the trunk release an evil spirit that inhabits the body of one of the girls. She proceeds to kill off everyone in the house except for Megan who with Spooky guy's help manages to send the spirit back to hell and also bring all her friends back to life.

An odd turn of events lead to doing this review today; a request from a friend and actually having a copy of the movie and some spare time. In doing some checks on the actors, I found out that David Carradine had died three days ago. David did a great job following in his father's footsteps and provided some solid acting in any number of B movies. (One of John Carradine's last roles was Fred Olen Ray's Evil Spawn). He is going to be missed. I will remember David from dozens of films including the horrific "Future Force" (an unbelievably bad RoboCop ripoff featuring a significantly out of shape Carradine), "Kill Bill" (Tarantino's ode to B movies", and "The Warrior and the Sorceress" (my all time favorite "Yojimbo" ripoff/homage).

Anyway, Fred Olen Ray produced, wrote and directed this masterpiece. It is easily one of his best films and probably one with the most financing. He spent a fair amount of money on special effects and a couple of better known B actors (Carradine, Arte Johnson and Dick Miller) and the writing is actually pretty good. The photography is significantly better than what I normally expect from Fred and he gets decent performances out of most of his actors. I was surprised at how much the film reminded me of "Scream". The characters knowingly talk of "there is always a creepy basement", "getting picked off one by one" and generally discuss the basic plots of dead teenager films. While films like 1981's "Saturday the 14th" made direct fun of slasher movies, Evil Toons' characters seem to know they are in a horror film but do all the dumb things anyway. Dick Miller is shown watching one of his old films on the TV and we hear him mutter "Why didn't this guy ever win an Oscar". No one ever speaks directly to the camera, and with the exception of the titular Evil Toon saying "I'll get you in the sequel", all of the comments fit the scenes pretty well. I suppose that if you were a college girl who had been hired to clean up a creepy old house and you were staying overnight and dressed in lingerie and you heard a blood curdling scream, you might make a reference to a horror movie.

Perhaps one of the things that kept this movie out of main stream was Fred's choice in actresses. Susanne Agar had just finished up "Bikini Car Wash". The rest of the cast consisted of two Penthouse Pets and two pornstars. Specifically,they are:

Michelle Bauer: Penthouse pet and although she did a couple hardcore scenes early on as Pia Snow, not really a pornstar. She is, however, one of my all time favorite scream queens with over a hundred credits to her name.
Monique Gabrielle:Penthouse pet. In a span of 15 years, Monique was in about 50 movies. No small number of these she only had small parts that included nude scenes. Oddly enough it turns out that Monique had a non-hardcore part in Bad Girls IV while Ms. Bauer had a small hardcore part in the original Bad Girls. (Gotta love the porn industry, Bad Girls was released in 1981 and Bad Girls IV released in 1982.)
Stacy Nix (Barbara Dare): Pornstar. Barbara was in about 100 movies also, most of them hardcore.
Madison: Pornstar. Star of about 150 movies and apparently currently a rock musician. At the time of filming this movie (1992) Madison only had the little Minnie Mouse tattoo near her ankle. She has since become known for her multiple piercings and tattoos.

Normally a director can sneak an adult actress or nude model or two in a movie in a non-speaking part and not upset the film's distributor or the ratings board too much. But having three of the four main roles played by adult actresses probably took its toll on the film's bottom line. This film is one of Fred's more expensive productions and really needed wider distribution than "Bikini Drive In" to make any money. In 1992 if Blockbuster did not pick up your Straight to Video movie you did not have a lot of other options. Plus there would have been a lot of nudity to cut out for TV broadcast. I don't think I ever saw this on TV but I do know I had some trouble finding a copy. It seems to be currently out of print, though you can still get a new copy from Amazon for two hundred dollars!?! Does Fred know about this? Maybe it's not too late to make a couple bucks off the movie.

Often the acting in B movies is not all that great and the bar is lowered even more when the actor in question comes from adult films, but Madison does a pretty good job here. Despite the fact that Monique got the top billing, this is Madison's film. She is in all of the key scenes and gets to play both comic relief and a possessed bad guy. She did a pretty good job and it is too bad she didn't do more B movies. I think I remember her playing a corpse in another B movie, but the name escapes me at the moment. Some of the advantages of working with adult movie actors is that they work in front of the camera a lot, so they are pretty used to being on set, they are used to having sex on camera, so being asked to take their shirt off doesn't really faze them, and even bad dialog tends to be a step up for them. Madison spends a lot of time trying to open a bottle of wine with a twist off top. After twisting it doesn't work, she tries her teeth and eventually lies on the floor with the bottle between her thighs and wrestles the cap off. It is not hilarious, but it makes for a reasonable sight gag.

A common failing in B movies is that there is the main plot but no subplots or threads. In a straight ahead action flick, this is not too big an issue. The movie just goes from one action scene to the next. But in a horror film, you have to let the suspense build. In a low budget movie frequently this time is spent watching characters drive cars, wonder through the woods, or possibly yell at (or have sex with) each other. In this case Fred was actually able to drop in enough dialog and distractions to keep the pace up and the film interesting. That being said, the plot seems rather muddled. It is safe to say that the book is evil, but most of the dialog seems to point to opening the trunk as being the beginning of the trouble. While the trunk held a blanket that would send a soul straight to hell, it also contained the dagger that would kill the Evil Toon. Also Carradine's Gideon Finch is shown hanging himself so that the book could no longer make him do his bidding, yet all Monique has to do is toss the book in the fire and it is destroyed. Wait, the fire? The girls are being chased all over the house by the reanimated homicidal corpse of their friend and somebody stops to light a fire in the fireplace? Maybe Madison's character lit the fire before her boyfriend came over. Now there's a scary thought. The girl can't get a twist cap of a bottle of cheap wine and somebody trusted her with matches and kindling!?!

I've commented before that Fred is notorious for having opening sequences that have nothing to do with the rest of the movie. The aforementioned "Evil Spawn" features a rocket ship returning from space, references it in a dialog frame and then never mentions it again. In this one, the opening sequence implies one plot line and then goes off on a tangent. The plot ambles around in a couple of different directions until the girls ask Arte Johnson what he thinks about the book. He then makes a "wild guess" that exactly explains who owned the book, who wrote the book, and what it was doing there. It is so much easier to have an Exposition Guy than to actually write dialog for the actors to explain the backstory or to actually film the backstory. Still Fred remains one of my favorite movie makers if only because he seems to really like to make films. There frequently is a sense of humor to his movie that goes beyond merely making a funny film. His films always seem good natured to me; movies made by a man who likes being around his actors and enjoys the process of making a movie.

So, I suppose you are wondering about the "Evil Toons" mentioned in the title. You are probably expecting hordes of 3D demonic cartoons interacting with (and by interacting with I mean ripping to pieces) the cast. Hoping for tons and tons of carefully drawn, cleverly animated characters running around causing all sorts of trouble. Really? What part of "Fred Olen Ray movie" don't you understand? This is not a big budget film and the few minutes of animation must have been very expensive. It was done with "cel animation" where artists draw each frame on a piece of acetate that is then merged with the original film image. All things considered, the animation is not too bad but it will not replace "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" as your favorite animated feature. Then again, Jessica Rabbit never got naked, so maybe. Actually, no. What we have here is a B movie from a very prolific B movie producer and despite the fact that this had a much bigger budget and a much more ambitious design than most of his films, it is still a cheesy film with bad dialog, corny jokes and frequent nudity. Not a classic like "Roger Rabbit" but a classic none the less.

Got a comment or different opinion? Send a message.