STRANGELAND
Could've been a lot stranger

  Dee Snider had been planning to put together this movie for some decade or so before it actually saw production and release.  He's had a lot of time to think this through; why he chose not to, I don't know.

Snider himself (who wrote and, I think, produced) stars as Captain Howdy, a tattoo-and-piercing enthusiast who hangs around teen chat rooms and lures victims to his house with promises of a bitchin' party.  There, he turns his guests into his own piercing experiments (not unlike Bruce Dern's "human tableau" in Tattoo).  But he makes the mistake of luring one cop's daughter into his lair, and all hell breaks loose.

The plot is pretty silly stuff all around, particularly how this cop (Kevin Gage playing a guy also named Gage) not only works his own daughter's disappearance, but is later left in charge of guarding Howdy from an angry mob.  How many conflicts of interest can fit in one guy?  Never mind.  Howdy leaves a fairly big clue in the trunk of a car early in the film; in a town of 350,000 people, how many of them do you think have a hole in their septum so big you could pick their nose sideways?  A lot of little things just don't ring true either, like when Howdy wins over one girl with the line "Do you like hip-hop?" to which she responds with a way-too-enthusiastic "DO I?!?!?"

Snider himself is awful for the bulk of his time in the film; when we finally see him, he looks clownish instead of frightening, and his inane soliloquies about the power of pain aren't much help.  He gets some good moments about halfway through the film when he looks like the old guy with the pitchfork in American Gothic, but they're not enough.

There are some annoying scenes, like one heavily tattooed/pierced guy's "Welcome to my world!" rant about the "modern primitive" (hang on, my pretension alarm is going off), and of course a very clumsily-handled montage of newspaper headlines.  The rock soundtrack is mostly weak, coving a lot of that overhyped nu-metal Limp Bizkit-type stuff which, to say the least and with VERY few exceptions, isn't my bag.  Swedish sludge-rockers Drain S.T.H. are thanked in the closing credits, but again, no songs.  What a rip!

There are a few good bits, like Robert Englund chewing scenery as the head of the lynch mob, and Snider gets a little better towards the end, although the climax between him and Gage is far from convincing.  You get to learn a little about piercing, although it's mired heavily in pretension.  And of course the idea of cyber-predators is, while nothing new, waiting to be marvelously exploited somewhere.  What good there is is all outweighed by the bad, and by the end of the film, it's hard to care about any of this.

Overall, this wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd hoped.  Snider's still got my vote for an ideal fourth vocalist for Van Halen, but his cinematic vision leaves a lot to be desired.  Directed by John Pieplow.

BACK TO MAIN PAGE BACK TO THE S's