Strangeland (1998)

 

Director: John Pieplow

Screenplay: Dee Snider

Cast: Kevin Gage as Mike Gage; Elizabeth Peña as Toni Gage; Brett Harrelson as Steve Christian; Robert Englund           as Jackson Roth; Linda Cardellini as Genevieve Gage; Tucker Smallwood as Capt. Churchill Robbins; Ivonne Coll as Rose Stravelli; Amy Smart as Angela Stravelli; Dee Snider as Capt. Howdy / Carleton Hendricks

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #236

 

Tinsel, buttmunch. Tinsel Bomb!

[Major Plot Spoilers]

You would immediately think that, if you had an R-rated and explicit horror film starring, written and produced by Dee Snider, of the band Twisted Sister, where he is a bondage /body mutilation fixated villian, we would have something very odd and/or interesting on our hands. Baring one moment where it looked like Strangeland was going to take an actual moral complexity, with a real risk, no this unfortunately not the case. Even when it feels like a time capsule of the late nineties, of the big scary new thing called the internet, and with a soundtrack full of nu metal before that was fully a codified trademark, it is not really that interesting either. At least we go Snider do the opening title theme.

It is instead a very dry film, and actually, a pretentious film for what is a lurid premise. Snider is Captain Howdy, a man who abducts people, including through chat rooms online, and tortures them in various forms of body modification and mutilation for what he calls ascendance. This is where we get into an immediate issue with the film that, referring to the Modern Primitive subculture, this is vilifying it within context, never successfully putting over the clear goal that Howdy is meant to be the cool villain. Dee Snider makes an impressive form, by being built, and having a great makeup team provide his body painting and piercings, but the film decided to have him be the philosophical killer post David Fincher's Se7en (1995), who has a perverse morality to their horrifying acts. Snider will provide commentary as Howdy to his pathology, but this is where the film amongst its many flaws is missing its own point.

And, bear in mind, Strangeland is deceptively lurid. Likely, because of how bland and lacklustre the film is shot and presented, you could forget you still have scenes of people (male and female) naked with sewn up mouths, spikes impaled into them and tied up in a way closer to a BDSM dungeon. Howdy is capable enough to micromanage multiple victims without them escape and ganging up on him, but even without that to consider, his work is twisted. There is not a lot of gore, but Snider gets to explain to one male victim the precise way to pierce the head of the penis, so this film is pushing at the glass ceiling preventing it from becoming truly extreme. This is however juxtaposed against the sluggish film we have where nothing works. Snider is playing the smart BDSM killer, which is awkwardly distorting an underground subculture, clearly meant to look cool onscreen but demonising it. The main police officer lead, despite his daughter being a kidnapped victim, is not likable, and the less said about his younger and more obnoxious police partner the better. For the first act, this movie drags.

It would be an insult to Dario Argento's The Card Player (2004) to compare them, but they are both films dealing with the internet with very stark looking appearances, where in spite of the fact he had a future heavyweight in cinematography in Benoît Debie early in his career, Argento's film was shot in a stark naturalistic way, in mind of a lower budget but also a clear visual change. His was also a tale of a serial killer who taunted the police by challenging them to online card games for victims' lives, so technology in this later film was something to look at with morbid curiosity. The comparison has to be made though Strangeland is a flat, bland looking film in comparison and paced like a snail in the first act. It has humour in that the internet is a new and scary thing here, where having extreme sports like snowboarding in your text only profile on a chartroom is a way to lure a killer, and that a young Amy Smart has to explain to the police both how the internet works and how there is this arcane new tool called a search bar.

Where Strangeland could have taken a turn into something idiosyncratic, and this is where spoilers were created, is Howdy is captured by the police early on. He follows the cliché of escaping prison due to insanity, but the film has him go through a transformation through therapy and being released back into the world. For a moment, for a slither even with clichés, Strangeland suddenly gets a tantalising idea now that Howdy is a changed man, Snider to his credit making a meek alternative version of the character work, demonised by the locals as a monster still. Robert Englund, ever the charismatic presence, makes a worthwhile appearance as a stereotypical scumbag, a figure who, when not clearly watching deeply dubious porn in how it was put together, is going to lynch Howdy on a tree with Christian zealots whilst the detective does not help him. An enticing potential is found here - suddenly forcing you, even with a real monster like Howdy, to see him as a human and the protagonist, even with a traumatised daughter, failing to show a non-bias judgement call, one that will create an even worse monster when Howdy could have been redeemed as a good person.

But it does not do this. His daughter by the way, whilst having one sequence of being traumatised by horrible dreams of her experience, is merely a prop with that plot point never continued with, and this complex narrative turn is a mirage. Our detective will have his hero moment, without his morals questioned, and Howdy is just the same killer as in the first act. Strangeland offers a compelling turn and then dashes it without realising what it wasted. Far more compelling, than waste this final paragraph talking about the disappointment of the content is an amusing tangent on this really pointing where music was going as this does have to be considered. It was playing throughout, a bulky soundtrack to the film, and is meaningful to consider instead.

Alongside a trawl through a stereotypical Goth nightclub from an outsider's point of view, with erotic yet violent dance choreography between a bad nu metal performance, you still however have early System of a Down, alongside Megadeth, Pantera, Anthrax, and bands like Hed PE and Soulfly. Here you have a fascinating time capsule, in spite of Strangeland not being worth seeing, of older metal bands trying to capture the zeitgeist again, bands like Pantera who grew in the nineties, and the coming crop of nu metal I grew up with into the early 2000s. Knowing the same year Strangeland was released, at the same time this was released in October 1998, the first ever Family Values Tour with Korn headlining was in full swing, this is a weird piece of an entirely different medium in transition, including Dee Snider himself, when Twisted Sister was a popular band in the eighties and he tries here to adapt to a new world, as well as partake in a type of filmmaking he was interested in. It does not work unfortunately, so I cannot go further than admit disappointment.