![]() 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. PLOT: 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. Painful to endure even by modern primitive standards, it's a freaky, funless wreck, intolerable in the extreme.QUICK TAKE: Horror: A detective tries to find his missing daughter who's been kidnaped by an Internet-based stalker who's subjecting his victims to sadistic tribal rituals and rites of passage. Genre überstar Englund is on board as a disgruntled redneck, but even he seems to realize the proceedings are well on the road to dumbville. Kudos to Brett Harrelson, who, as Gage's bad-cop partner Steve Christian gets some of the most ridiculous lines in recent movie memory and manages to utter them with a straight face. Hackers, and cybernauts in general, will doubtless thrill to the longwinded expositional scenes involving the ins and outs of teen chat rooms, and while the Net predator angle is a good one, Snider's script is a mess, oozing numbingly bad dialogue from every clogged pore. Director Pieplow conducts this vanity project with all the suspense of a Pop Tart, replete with shoddy editing and an annoying metallic score by Snider and industro-goon band BiLE. Bates hairpiece (if you're into that sort of thing). It may be your one chance to see the strapping Snider decked in both full piercing accouterments and a hideously cheesoid Mrs. When Howdy absconds with Detective Mike Gage's (Gage) daughter (Cardellini), however, he goes one step too far and the law descends on him like a ton of autoclaves. Wells, Goethe, and others in a stilted, sonorous tone. ![]() ![]() It's nothing you couldn't catch in front of any industrial/gothic nightclub on any given night, but Captain Howdy pushes the boundaries of bad taste by forcing his captives to listen to his bizarre, existential rantings, as he quotes H.G. Once he gets them in his clutches, the mohawked-and-over-pierced maniac sews their mouths shuts, subjects them to some woefully unhygienic scarification and home-piercing, and then suspends them from the ceiling. Mixing genre elements from The Silence of the Lambs, Seven, and various cyber thrillers, StrangeLand is the tale of Captain Howdy (Snider), a deranged online predator who uses teen chat rooms to lure unsuspecting (and inanely naive) high-schoolers to their doom (said doom being set in what looks like a well-manicured suburban tract home). As Snider himself would say, you can't stop rock & roll, but I suspect his film career may be dead on arrival, and not a moment too soon. ![]() Who knew the world's first modern-primitive slasher/detective/thriller would come from the thoroughly creepy pen of Twisted Sister frontman (and arch-foe of Tipper Gore and the PMRC) Dee Snider? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked – not that Snider could write and produce and star in this repugnant freakfest, but that it's so very, very bad. ![]()
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