The Direct to Video Connoisseur

I'm a huge fan of action, horror, sci-fi, and comedy, especially of the Direct to Video variety. In this blog I review some of my favorites and not so favorites, and encourage people to comment and add to the discussion. For announcements and updates, don't forget to Follow us on Twitter and Like our Facebook page. If you're the director, producer, distributor, etc. of a low-budget feature length film and you'd like to send me a copy to review, you can contact me at dtvconnoisseur[at]yahoo.com. I'd love to check out what you got. And check out my book, Chad in Accounting, over on Amazon.

Saturday, March 25, 2023

Delta Delta Die! (2003)

In looking to get more Julie Strain on the site, I saw this on Tubi and figured it would do the trick. I also hadn't done horror in a while, and this looked like a fun one, especially considering it was produced by the great Charles Band. With all this going for it, let's see how it did.

Delta Delta Die! is about a sorority that is renown for their fantastic meat pies. Turns out, those meat pies have a secret ingredient: the flesh of meathead jocks. Led by their house mother, Julie Strain, the ladies need to lure as many men as possible to the sorority house so they have enough beefy man flesh to fill their buffet. The problem is, intrepid intern Tobias is onto these ladies, and he has a plan to stop them: call in former sister Brinke Stevens, who has a history with Strain. Stevens is up to the task, so she comes to town to help Tobias take these women down. But will Julie Strain go down that easily? 

This was fun, but kind of unremarkable. Except for Julie Strain. She comes in and really gets after it, killing poor jocks, throwing their parts into a blender, chewing on them and spitting them out, all while wearing a top that shows off her boobs. Then we have Brinke Stevens, another B-movie horror legend, who's on a collision course to wackiness with Strain, and we're treated to a Russ Meyer-style wrestling match between the two of them for an end fight. I think from the unremarkable standpoint though, there wasn't much going on in the scenes the two of them weren't in. Yes, if I take myself back to 2003, as a 24-year-old I would've easily been lured into the sorority house by the ladies, but fortunately in 2003 I was a bit heavy, and at 5' 7", definitely no chiseled jock, so I guess I could take solace in knowing I wouldn't have been a target of them. And to that point, I think turning the usual serial killer targeting women thing on its ear was a nice change of pace, and Strain is the woman you'd want to deliver that kind of evil. I don't know if this is a go out of your way for it movie, but if you want something that brings you back to a different time, this is a fun one.

We're now at 5 films for Julie Strain on the site, so we have a long way to go to get her tag count up to a respectable level. This is also our first film since her Hall of Fame induction back in October of 2021, so we've had ample opportunities since then to review more of her stuff. And watching her here reminds me of why I should be getting more of her stuff up, because she took what was a rather unremarkable low-budget horror film and made it something more. She just has such a fantastic presence, and she absolutely goes for it in every scene. It's a shame we lost her, and a shame I'm only now catching up to getting more of her films on the DTVC, because she's one of the true queens of DTV and low-budget films. I think one fear I sometimes have when I see one of her films listed, is that she might not be in it as much. Another concern is, like Battle Queen 2020, that the Tubi version is edited so we don't get the whole thing--and I'd love to cover that one, because it's her and the great Jeff Wincott! Either way, I need to get over those concerns and just review more of her stuff, and I'll start making that happen.


Remember when sending emails looked like that? I didn't, I was so used to how they looked now, I'd completely forgotten. Even the Arial font doesn't look like that Arial anymore. It's an interesting thing about time and this movie, because it also felt like a 90s movie that was made in the 2000s. Like the clothes and technology--like emails and cellphones--were definitely early 2000s, but the vibe of the movie was like something from 10 years before. So I was watching a film from 20 years ago that felt like it was made ten years too late. It was a difficult thing to wrap my brain around. And then in that mental miasma, Julie Strain showed up in a top where her boobs came through, and killed two jocks and ground their flesh up in a blender while chewing on and spitting out bits of their flesh, and it all made sense again, only to have the scene change and my brain warped again by the mix of something from 20 years ago that felt like it was made 10 years too late. Is there a term for that? "Deja vu all over again"? "I'm older than I'm younger than I was"? Maybe the Germans have something for it, like "Scheissezeitgehirn"?

The other B-movie legend in this is Brinke Stevens, someone who also hasn't been on the site much. In Droid Gunner she played a mutant with feline features; and then in 24 Hours to Midnight, she was the voice of the Rothrock ninja called in by Fong to add in scenes Rothrock wasn't there for after she quit the picture. The thing that makes Brinke Stevens great here, is she's the only person who could take Julie Strain down, anyone else we wouldn't believe it. Unlike Strain, who I know needs to be on here more and it's my bad that she isn't, Brinke Stevens, while someone I've always enjoyed seeing, does much more horror, and over time the DTVC has slanted more action. That wasn't our intention, but the action reviews always garnered more engagement from readers, which led to more requests and recommendations, which then led to more action films getting reviewed on the site at the expense of the other genres. Perhaps if I do get to more horror stuff down the road, we'll see more of her here, because Stevens is truly another one of the greats.


Getting back to the lack of horror on the site, in the 90s and 2000s, my friends and I watched as much, if not more, DTV horror, and something like this would've been a rental we'd have gotten for a get-together. As I've mentioned above though, as I was posting reviews, the action ones were getting more engagement. One area where you see why, is a DTV horror film might have 20 or 30 external reviews, whereas a PM flick might only have 5-7. The action review ecosystem was much smaller then, and people looking for that kind of thing had fewer options. The result is, we're at a place now where the last horror film I reviewed was Ash and Bone in February, which was a screener request, and then the last one I did on my own before this was Black Friday back in November. I don't know if that will ever change though, because we have become so action oriented--compare the now 146 horror tags versus 809 action tags--but I could stand to mix in horror more often I think, if only because it was such a huge part of my DTV origins, and I don't think we'd have a DTVC without it.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Here in the States you can get this on Tubi. Outside the US, I'm not sure, and I'm not sure you need to go too far out of your way for it. Strain is fantastic, and Stevens is a great foil to Strain, but beyond that, it doesn't have a lot going on. 

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0349343

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