Dear readers, though I often pride myself on the originality of my prose, I do still employ the shortcut of prepackaged expressions to put my point across quickly. Whoever coined the phrase, “cleanliness next to godliness,” was clearly unfamiliar with some of the older gods but nevertheless, it is an adage I often find useful and I try to keep my own abode as tidy as possible. Sadly, my sweet Penny Dee's constitution is unaccustomed to toils of any magnitude and so much of the old dusting up is left to yours truly but I find that polishing the silver and sweeping the corridors are chores that wipe away both literal and mental cobwebs alike.

This liberating sensation is not the primary focus of Evil Toons, in which a group of coeds are left to spruce up a recently sold estate. The audience is left to wonder if cleanliness and godliness find some proximity once their task is interrupted by Gideon Fisk (David Carradine), a mysterious stranger who appears in the middle of the night and hands off a package marked “open immediately.” Happy to oblige this written instruction, the girls discover an ancient tome and Megan (Monique Gabrielle) the brainy one of the bunch, is game enough to examine its contents. “It looks like ancient Latin,” she declares, announcing herself as the rare scholar who can distinguish the stuff from modern Latin before translating the words in English. Her recitation lets loose an illustration from the book, a snarling cartoon wolf imbued with murderous life. This little monster pops into the first “live action” body he can find and steadily picks off both the coeds and anyone else unfortunate enough to wander into the house.

The two dozen films director Fred Olen Ray helmed prior to Evil Toons indicated rather clearly his enthusiasm for the female form and this effort is no different in that regard. He is a mammary-minded auteur, building on-camera costume changes and strip teases into his story with ease. But Evil Toons also features plenty of winking allusions to the film’s warm embrace of cliché and its daring appropriation of iconic horror imagery. One scene features the beloved Dick Miller watching his own performance in Bucket of Blood (1959) and wondering aloud how it never won an Academy Award. While these additions don’t remove the fourth wall entirely, they do ding it up quite a bit. Fred Olen Ray’s level of self-awareness adds a profound dimension to what might sometimes seem a lecherous lark, announcing that Mr. Ray is gazing not only at breasts but also at himself. 

It is difficult to ignore, however, that amidst all this meaningful inward reflection, Mr. Ray neglects to include the film’s presumed antagonists. Evil Toons provides but a single animated assailant despite the title’s promise of plurality and this lone toon makes only the briefest of appearances before being substituted by a human proxy. The near total absence of evil toons might turn the tide of opinion against this particular semi-nude bloodbath but I, for one, am willing to adopt a forgiving attitude. This was Fred Olen Ray’s 25th directorial effort in just over a decade behind the lens, a pace that most anyone would have to admit is fairly brisk and I find it difficult to begrudge such a prolific artist a little self-indulgence.

Evil Toons runs 90 minutes and is rated R for nudity, comic sex-related violence and some language.