DEE SNIDER'S STRANGELAND A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 1998 David N. Butterworth
** stars (out of ****)
"Dee Snider's Strangeland." To movie buffs, it doesn't have the familiar ring of, say, "John Carpenter's The Thing," "Russ Meyer's Vixen," or "Sidney Sheldon's Bloodline." And it's not nearly as funny as the recent "Jane Austen's Mafia!"
I wonder what made Dee Snider, best and perhaps only known for his heavily made-up persona as the front man for the heavy metal outfit Twisted Sister, associate his name with this film directly. Because he stars in it? Because he co-produced it? Because he wrote the sick and twisted thing? Maybe because he thought his name alone would rock the box office.
So what was going on in Snider's mind when, perhaps while awaiting the encore during the latest Sister tour, he sat down at his word processor and dreamed up "Strangeland"? Did he plan to revolutionize the horror film by conjuring up a uniquely shocking movie-going experience, or did he simply hope to cash in on a genre made profitable by those undiscerning enough to tell a "Scream" from a "Scream 2"?
If you said B then go to the top of the class: "Strangeland" is as by-the-book as horror movies come, but as such it's no less watchable than any number of "Psycho" rip-offs. No less watchable if "gross body piercing, nudity, sexual situations, profanity, psychosexual themes, near-naked women, and tortured men" happen to be your cup of tea.
Perhaps if I hadn't expected it to be so bad I might have approved of it less.
As it turns out, "Strangeland" owes more to "The Silence of the Lambs" and the "Hellraiser" series than it does "Psycho" (if you were hoping for a little mother fixation, the remake of Hitchcock's classic shocker with "Return to Paradise"'s Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche is coming to a theater near you this Christmas). In "Strangeland," Snider plays a sadomasochistic deviant who prowls the Internet's teen chat rooms with the handle Capt. Howdy (Twisted Sister fans thrill away), luring unsuspecting minors to his basement of body-piercing depravity.
The online conversations are a little difficult to follow, visually, but it doesn't much matter since Capt. Howdy wastes little time in handing out the party invites. One victim proves to be the daughter of small town cop Mike Gage and his wife Toni (played with equal and adequate concern by Kevin Gage and Elizabeth Peņa) and it's find-and-nail-the-psycho-before-he-kills-again time.
There's a strange climax of sorts halfway through the film, when Howdy is tracked down and arrested rather easily. But if you've seen "Halloween" 1 through 7, you'll know you can't keep a good psychopath down. Howdy is reformed and rehabilitated as Carleton Hendricks who looks like he crawled off the pages of a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, and this meek, apologetic personality is almost as creepy as his "Spawn"-like, rhetoric-spouting alter-ego.
Of course the townsfolk hassle Carleton and his medication accidentally gets run over. Oops.
The body-piercing focus and Snider's eerie dual performances keep the film interesting. While it's nice to see Robert Englund (aka Freddy Krueger) on the receiving end of the suffering for a change, there ain't buckets of creativity here. As for Dee Snider's drawing power, well, there was only one other person in the audience and he left before the film's closing metal track banged to an end.
So much for advertising.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@mail.med.upenn.edu
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