• Written and directed by Devin Hamilton
• Starring
  • Julie Strain
  • Brinke Stevens
  • Joe Dain
  • Steve Malis
  • Karen Smyth

Compared to the other films made by director Devin Hamilton for executive producer Charles Band under his Shadow Entertainment banner, this one is really no closer to the character of the classic (and not-so-classic) Full Moon productions, but at least it faces more or less in the right direction; the idea of a cannibal sorority certainly possesses the potential for camp value, which is one of the hallmarks of the well-remembered Full Moon fare. Alas, camp can only carry you so far, and in this case camp doesn’t begin to cover the multitude of sins. The premise is simple to the point of being simplistic, and the execution is timeworn and derivative. There’s really nothing here that you haven’t seen in far better condition elsewhere, and that includes Julie Strain’s breasts.

Yes, her breasts, on camera so often that they deserve their own credits. Despite the fact that Strain is in her early forties for this movie and plays the House Mother of Delta Delta Pi, she leads her entire chapter in the omnipresent nudity department. But then again, Delta Delta Pi isn’t exactly a normal sorority. (Or rather, this chapter at SoCal State isn’t exactly a normal chapter of what is probably a very normal sorority on a national scale.) Mother Fitch (Strain) oversees the activities of the four-girl chapter in the activity that gives the sorority its local fame: Bake sales of meat pies. ( Like that wasn’t a hoary old cliche when the first silent version of Sweeney Todd was released in 1926).

“Look, they’re sorority girls. We’re frat boys. It shouldn’t be this much work!”

The setup is the standard one: The four girls — Patrice (Tiffany Shepis), Clarice (Rachel Myers), Mandy (Lizzy Strain), and Simone (Jennifer Johnson), and don’t bother really trying to differentiate them — lure young hunks back to the sorority house by virtue of being all hawt, whereupon the menfolk find themselves the raw ingredients for the next batch of the house specialty.

With this as the status quo, three events coincide to bring our plot to pass:

- Homecoming is next week, and along with it the chapter’s twentieth anniversary. Fitch and the girls are planning for a big celebration bash, and that means more meat pies than normal. So half of the movie is concerned with the girls’ attempts to lure men back to the sorority house. (Because this movie’s more about the exploitation than the horror, we concentrate more on baiting the hook than gutting the fish, if you know what I mean.)

“Hey, you guys wanna hang out? Because we are.”

- Hannah (Karen Smyth), Mother Fitch’s assistant (like she’d need one in a house with four girls!), got hot ‘n’ heavy with a guy herself, and went a little cannibalistic on him herself. That doesn’t seem like it should be a problem, but she apparently crossed one of the lines of the sorority by biting off his schlong. As Mother Fitch intones for the girls to recite, “The penis is filled with germs and sperm!” For this infraction, Hannah is grounded and locked in the basement for a month. So that means that through the movie we keep cutting back to her getting nuttier and nuttier in her confinement, until she bursts out during a climactic moment in the plot. (Hope that doesn’t ruin too much for you.)

- Toby (Joe Dain), a responsible student who works in the dean’s office, has seen enough missing student reports come across his desk to sense a pattern that centers on Delta Delta Pi. Dean Wilkins (Steve Malis) won’t pay any attention to his suspicions, so Toby is reduced to peeping in windows and other forms of amateur sleuthing. It doesn’t take him long to realize that Dean Wilkins isn’t just discounting those suspicions, he’s actively covering for Mother Fitch and her girls.

Duct tape: Now in new pina colada flavor!

Thanks to the fact that Dean Wilkins likes to keep his most incriminating circumstantial evidence close at hand in his office, Toby tracks down the other founding chapter member besides Marilyn Fitch: Rhonda Cooper (Brinke Stevens), now Mother Fitch’s mortal enemy. She helpfully flashes us back to two decades previous, when young Marilyn Fitch (Katie Adams), young Rhonda (Julia Marchese), and young John Wilkins (Jordan White) were undergrads together. During an argument in Wilkins’ parents’ pool, the fourth friend Patrick (Nic Oram) was accidentally killed, and to cover up the death they decided to dispose of the body by cooking and eating it… and having a bake sale. (For this plan to dispose of the evidence, Patrick would have to have been one of those rare individuals who possessed no bones in his body. Either that, or some of the meat pies came in “extra crunchy.”) And since that first bake sale was a phenomenal success, they kinda kept luring young fellows along to provide the filling. It’s a flashback that explains everything, except how Marilyn Fitch grew about eight inches in her adult years (from Katie Adams’ 5′4″ to Julie Strain’s 6′2″).

Armed with that knowledge, then, Toby and Rhonda set to stop Delta Delta Pi. Actually, Rhonda does most of the stopping while Toby arranges a distraction to lure Fitch out of the house. Brinke Stevens’ performance as Rhonda seems desperately under-directed; as soon as she gets a phonecall from Toby, she takes the lead in deciding to stop Marilyn, as if her conscience were fine with waiting for two decades until someone reminded her to put it on her to-do list. Oh, and a memo to anyone who deals with dialogue out there in WriterLand: People very rarely use to word “must” when they could say “have to” or “got to.” Go ahead, listen to the people around you and tell me I’m wrong. So having Rhonda declare, “We must stop Marilyn!” over and over makes Brinke Stevens sound like she was auditioning for one of the Beastmaster movies.

“WHO says I can’t change a tire?!”

There are indications that maybe, in an earlier draft of the script, feints were made at greater depth to the story. Marilyn’s revulsion at the penis, plus the fact that she insists on killing and stripping the meat of all their victims herself, hints that maybe there’s a deeper man-hating motivation behind twenty years of bake sales. But those hints are all we ever get of that particular subtext; having compelling characters takes a distant backseat to “Sorority girls play strip poker before guys get killed.” And that’s ignoring the fertile horrific material that could still be wrung from a premise as threadbare as this one; I mean, if you can’t evoke at least a little bit of male terror at the premise of a sisterhood of literal maneaters who seduce and emasculate and then feed their victims to the public at large, you simply aren’t trying.

The official meat pastry of emasculation phobias.

On the other hand, if one of the great joys of your life is to watch six-foot amazons camping it up, you may be the target demographic. Julie Strain may not be a great actress, but she’s certainly not bashful – not just in exhibiting her surgical alterations (which certainly don’t stop at her breasts), but in chewing the scenery and vamping out around men and women. I almost feel embarrassed not to have enjoyed a movie which ends with a catfight between Brinke Stevens and Julie Strain, a size differential that brings to mind the climactic bout in Rocky 4 (1985).

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 9
• breasts: 8
• male butts: 4
• sausages: 1
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0