While Gage is also less than thrilled about this, his fears grow as the actions of a group of local activists, led by redneck Jackson Roth (ROBERT ENGLUND), set into motion a series of events that begin the sadist's madness once again. Supposedly reformed and okay as long as he's medicated, Carleton receives a less than enthusiastic response back in his old neighborhood. Carleton Hendricks (DEE SNIDER) is released from the mental asylum. Nonetheless, four years after being found not guilty on grounds of mental illness, Captain Howdy, a.k.a. Arresting the madman, Gage thinks he's closed the case. Gage not only finds his daughter bound and with her lips sewn shut, but also many others in similar predicaments. Later, however, he figures out the madman's location and discovers the sadist's torture chamber of horrors. Meeting the mysterious Captain Howdy online, Gage gets the stranger to invite him to a party, but his planned bust there goes awry. With the assistance of a younger detective, Steve Christian (BRETT HARRELSON), Gage tries to unravel this mystery, and while they quickly find Tiana's body, there's no sign of his daughter.Īlthough they discover that the killer is into "body art" that includes great quantities of tattooing, piercing, branding, and scarification, it's not until his niece, Angela (AMY SMART), informs him of her cousin's penchant for meeting strangers through the Internet that he gets his first lead. When neither has returned home by the next morning, Genevieve's mother, Toni (ELIZABETH PEÑA), sounds the alarm setting husband, Mike (KEVIN GAGE), a local detective, into action. Upon "meeting" another apparent student who goes by the screen name of "Captain Howdy," Genevieve and Tiana decide to attend a party at this person's house. The film’s most amusing flourish is definitely the casting of Robert Englund as a concerned parent of a teenager, a clever bit of meta-irony if there ever was one.Fifteen-year-old Genevieve Gage (LINDA CARDELLINI) and her best friend Tiana Moore (AMAL RHOE) are typical high school students who spend their idle time surfing the Internet and sending messages to strangers via chat rooms. Strangeland is no classic, but it’s smarter than it has any right to be director John Pieplow also knows how to work the industrial-gothic atmosphere, and Snider delivers a not-bad performance as the killer (though you kind of keep expecting - and hoping - that he’ll suddenly burst into singing “Burn in Hell,” the Twisted Sister song performed briefly in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure). However, years later, the bad Captain is released from a mental institution‚Ķ and proves to be rather dangerous when he doesn’t take his pills. The father of his latest victim (Linda Cardellini, pre- Scooby-Doo) happens to be a cop (Kevin Gage), who manages to bust the freak and put him behind bars. The scope of this brutal fable (which is oh so much tamer than the “torture porn” films that would be all the rage in the next decade) is rather epic, covering several years in the legacy of Captain Howdy (Snider himself), a body modification fetishist who lures young victims to his dungeon (via the aforementioned Internet chat rooms) and proceeds to do very bad things to them. Dee Snider’s Strangeland īefore Rob Zombie started making movies, Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider penned this ahead-of-its-time tale of the dangers of Internet chat rooms.
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