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Four young women - bookish and innocent Megan (Monique Gabrielle),
promiscuous Roxy (Madison Stone), Terry (Suzanne Ager) and Jan (Barbara
Dare) - are hired to clean an abandoned and possibly haunted house. In the
basement, they find a magic book, and just for fun read an incantation in
there - which brings one of the drawings in the book to life and makes it
possess Roxy. Roxy soon seduces her boyfriend (Don Dowe) as well as her
boss (Dick Miller) before the others can even grasp what's going on, but
when they find a few dead bodies too many and have no idea how to deal
with them, they come to the conclusion there must be something wrong here,
and eventually, they link everything that's going on to the spell in the
book - but alas too late, since Roxy has already been closing in for the
kill, and before you know it, Terry and Jan are dead ... while Megan
receives unexpected help from a stranger (David Carradine), who manages to
seperate the (cartoon) creature from Roxy, and when Megan burns the magic
book, the horror comes to an end, the stranger disappears into thin air,
and all those who have previously died are alive again. Michelle Bauer
plays Dick Miller's wife, but she has little more to do than to quickly
show her tits - not that I would complain ... The
concept of Evil Toons is not necessarily the recipe for a good
horror film, or how is one to turn the story about a cartoon character
that possesses a topless woman into something half decent? Fortunately
though, director Fred Olen ray knows about the limitations of his subject,
and instead of making a dead serious slasher flick, he veers towards self-
and genre-parody. And taken as a comedy, the film is rather ok and
features some really good lines (like the main characters constantly and
ironically commenting on certain plottwists, and David Carradine's
overacting is hilarious all in itself) - but on the other hand also some
scenes that could have been vastly improved by better comic timing, and
even though this is a horror comedy rather than a straight genre movie, it
would have been vastly improved by a few moody shots to bring across the
horror aspects of the plot. Still, as a party movie, and enjoyed with
beer, this one works pretty well. A side note: Towards the
beginning of the film, David Carradine can be seen hanging himself, a
scene that has turned unexpectedly macabre considering his bizarre
real-life death.
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