Strangeland was one of those random bubblecase VHS horror rentals from the local video store that made you feel like you’d won the lottery. An absolute blind rental that ended up blowing your mind and making you feel like you knew something no-one else was aware of. It had it all. Scares, a kick ass metal soundtrack, the birth of internet horror and Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider (who wrote the film as well) coming off the top rope and shocking the hell out of you with one of the scariest villain performances ever.
“Someday we’ll meet, marry and have cyber sex with the man of our dreams online.”
Genevieve Gage (a gothed-up Linda Cardellini) is explaining to her friend the intricacies of early internet AOL style chat rooms. Watching today, it’s a wild reminder of the days when you’d meet someone who “sounded hot” on their personal profile and would instant message them knowing next to nothing about them. This was a time when we didn’t even have profile pictures available to us. Real or fake. It was the Wild West of human connection via the internet. But we were so enamored with this new technology, nobody really thought much about safety at the time. Which is another reason why Strangeland felt like such an original exercise in depravity. We hadn’t even thought of this shit yet.
The girls meet a cool sounding dude in the chat named “CaptHowdy” (probably should have been their first red flag). His profile says he’s into “Street hockey, snowboarding and going to concerts,” and his favorite quote is “Hey bud, where’s the kegger?” He invites them to his house for a party while his parents are out of town; as you might expect, they soon go missing.
Genevieve’s dad, Kevin Gage (Mike Gage), is a noir type, rough around the edges detective who’s burning the candle at both ends and suffering deeply working his own daughter’s case as his wife begs for answers. When they find Genevieve’s friend dead in the trunk of a car with her mouth sewn shut and an overly large septum gauge, it leads them into the body modification underworld. It’s there we meet Captain Howdy and his whole bag of what the fuck.
“We must all go through a rite of passage. And it must be physical. It must be painful and it must leave a mark.”
It will forever be a mystery that Dee Snider’s performance in Strangeland isn’t talked about more. Captain Howdy is both visually and physically intimidating. By that I mean he’s not only tall but jacked as hell. Mostly naked and covered in large piercings and even larger tattoos, he spends his time either hanging from a pull up bar or hanging from his own skin off large hooks in the ceiling. You know, the usual. He’s also mentally intimidating. Howdy speaks only in freaky-ass, deep philosophical quotes like “There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who strikes at its roots.” And he also isn’t above testosterone-fueled one liners like, “How about I come over there and beat the dog shit out of you?”
To round out the bad guy unholy triumvirate, there’s also the way Captain Howdy chooses to torture and murder his victims. Sewing their eyes and mouths shut before practicing the most extreme body modifications one can imagine on them next to candle light. Some of them include genitals. I don’t want to talk about it.
The pacing of Strangeland moves at breakneck speed as there’s really two films’ worth of content happening at once. First, there’s Detective Gage’s tireless effort to catch this internet serial killer during an age where people are having to explain to each other what e-mail even is; it makes for a nostalgic look at the early days of the internet when we’d receive “100 free hours” of AOL CD Roms in our mailboxes daily. We had such power at our fingertips that many of us (especially the youth) didn’t stop to think about what the evil forces of the world could conjure. Like a shark swimming next to the shore on the Fourth of July weekend, we were all at risk for something like this. We just didn’t know it yet.
Eventually, the showdown and capture of Captain Howdy and rescue of Genevieve is both harrowing, frightening and depressing. The thought of a father finding his missing daughter naked and locked in a cage with her mouth sewn shut as huge-ass Dee Snider lurks around the corner is horror at its very core. Even after the ordeal there’s the emotional trauma for their whole family of dealing with her being captured and tortured by an unforgettable psychopath who haunts her dreams.
Then it all starts over again.
“Death is but an old friend.”
It’s a shocking development the next time we see Captain Howdy. He’s now being referred to by his given name of Carleton Hendricks. The piercings are gone. His wild hair is now a reserved ponytail. Carleton is Tim Burton film white from head to toe, using mass amounts of makeup to cover his tattoos. His muscles looking unnatural hiding beneath his old lady cardigan. Due to technicalities in the law, he has been discharged back onto the streets of small town Colorado. He’s a changed, medicated man.
This sounds unbelievable. But let’s be honest… these days you can probably imagine it.
Director John Pieplow somehow manages to turn the same character we hated with a passion and were deeply frightened by just moments ago into an almost sympathetic character (I want to emphasize the word almost). As he tries to sit dormant in his dilapidated and vandalized home, Carleton is kidnapped by drunk redneck Jackson Roth (Robert Englund) and his buddies who run over his medication, beat him up and hang him from a tree in the woods. You can sense the IQ of the angry townsfolk when mere seconds after committing literal murder, a light rain scatters them all back to their homes, leaving Carleton hanging in the woods on a creaky tree branch. The tree branch breaks and Captain Howdy is back with an axe to grind. Or a dick to pierce. Or whatever. My point is he’s pissed. Specifically at Detective Gage, who watched the attempted murder happen and (understandably) drove away and let it happen.
In the same way you can see someone in a movie be repeatedly punched in the face and you think to yourself “they’ve had enough!” as a fist pummels into their bloodied face, your heart aches for this family as their already damaged daughter is once again abducted by her previous tormentor. He’s now moved up to sending grainy video messages taunting the mother and father.
When they catch up to each other again, Howdy forces Detective Gage to unarm himself, setting up a man-to-man fist fight with everything at stake. Snider’s Captain Howdy is not only scary looking and scary sounding but the price of a loss for Detective Gage is the death of both himself and his daughter. The stakes are high and this entire goddamn movie is shockingly intense from start to finish. It all ends very apropos with Captain Howdy hanging from a meat hook, and Detective Gage’s family finally safe from harm.
Strangeland is from top to bottom a gnarly horror thriller that’s as entertaining as it is depraved and speaks to the horrors that exist in the real world without reserve. Of all the abduction thrillers I’ve seen, I can’t think of a single protagonist as frightening and intrusive as Dee Snider’s Captain Howdy. Be careful in the chatrooms, folks. Strangeland was a warning.
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