Film Review: Evil Toons (1992)

SYNOPSIS:A group of four hot teenage girls must spend the night in an old haunted house in order to receive a large amount of money. On the night of their arrival, a strange man arrives at the house, delivering an old book. Once he is gone, the girls examine the book, where they find a sketch of a wolf-like monster! As time passes, the drawing emerges from the book and becomes an evil Toon! At one point, eventually, the girls must do whatever it takes to make the monster returned to the book.

REVIEW:

Evil Toons is one of those films that has to be seen for its odd combination of elements. Cartoons mixed with real action is not entirely new as we have all grown up on a helping of it whether its Jessica Rabbit of Dick Van Dyke dancing with penguins. However, Evil Toons really has a 80’s style approach painted all over it regardless if it was released in 1992. For starters, lets talk about the 80’s hairdo hot chicks that are hired to clean an old reportedly haunted house for the new owners. Even when they are greeted by the creepy older Arte Johnson, they waste no time in getting naked for no apparent reasons. Roxanne played by the actor Madison Stone performs a random strip dance for the other 3 girls as she demonstrates how she nailed the captain of the football team.

Which in itself is probably worth the price of admission as one hot unexpected number for viewers. Add to that that all the girls have no problem undressing in front of the camera for something even as small as putting on their sleeping attire for the night. The lineup of women include: Monique Gabrielle, Suzanne Ager, Madison Stone and Stacey Nix (aka Barbara Dare). In research its looks like many have gone on to more adult themed features, so this early reveal comes as no real surprise.

David Carradine stars as Gideon Fisk, an evil wizard of sorts that comes back from beyond to unleash some horny, nasty cartoons onto the ladies. His main instrument of choice is an old spell book that looks alot like the Necronomicon from the film “Evil Dead”. By delivering the book to the girls he actually tricks them into reading from it to release some of the evil.

Suzanne Ager who plays Terry is sort of the leader of the pack but plays probably one of the most monotone expressionless performances I’ve seen. Her real knack is as the token scream queen which seems to excel at scream cues like a pro.

David Carradine really must have been needing some play cash as most of his appearances are hiding behind trees and looking mysterious. The FX are old school driven using camera tricks and edits. Nothing we haven’t seen on Saturday morning cartoons but it still has a certain charm.

You have to expand your threshold a bit as these toons mix with the ladies and attack them in sexual ways on screen. Though it provides also a bit of adult meets child in you dirty visual experience that feels both wrong and right at the same time. Your not really used to seeing Wiley Coyote go for the ladies, but in this case all best are off. The film really only features 1 toon and that toon is rarely seen. In the interest of making it work the filmmakers have the toon taking on the form of each of the actors by possessing them and then transforming into them. Really when you get down to it, this film is about 4 hot ladies who don’t mind running all over the house thinking that a crazy cartoon demon is after them.

The body switching trick becomes old though as the cartoon takes various identities of main actors. I cant call this a classic but it is a fun little oddity of a film. Monique Gabrielle who plays the nerd book worm Megan is by far the stand out beauty who actually downplays this most of the film with a dorky innocent role character. Fred Olen Ray is the creator behind this product who has a long running list of cheesy b-grade bikini films.

In fact well over a 100, his earlier works seem to stand out more in mind than any later releases. Films such as Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988) , Evil Spawn, and Scalps, just to name a few. Take it all with a smile and grain of salt.

Evil Toons (1992)