Gather ’round, kiddies. This week’s B-Movie Enema is going to tell you a tale about urban primitives and their desire to find transcendence via pain and all sorts of fucked up shit. Oh, and also, Dee Snider is here.

Yes, this week, we’re scouring the dusty shelves of the horror section at the video store to talk about 1998’s Strangeland, written by and starring Dee Snider. Snider rose to prominence in the 80s with his band Twisted Sister. He was a hard glam rocker who dressed in a gender-bending way. I’d go so far as to say it was a little gender-bending and a little pro wrestling in style, but it was purely 80s through and through. It was Twisted Sister’s third album, Stay Hungry, that featured two very popular singles, “We’re Not Going to Take It” and “I Wanna Rock”. “We’re Not Going to Take It” is one of those 80s anthems that still gets a lot of airplay and use in movies to this day.

Snider, along with a few other artists of the time, became a favorite target of the Parents Music Resource Center who wanted to bring a warning system to music albums and singles in the pearl-clutching hope that children would not be turned into murderers or something when they listen to “Darling Nikki” or something. Snider was joined by the likes of Frank Zappa and John Denver to speak out against censorship in music. This did lead to the creation of the Explicit Content label we saw on just about every cool ass album of the 90s.

Snider was a big fan of horror movies. I also think he was a fan of the urban primitives counterculture movement. I know Snider has tattoos and whatnot, but I’m not sure if he has much in terms of body modification. However, the movement does have some body horror elements to it. But going back to Stay Hungry, Twisted Sister’s big breakout album, there was a song called “Horror-Teria (The Beginning): a) Captain Howdy b) Street Justice” that serves as the origins of this movie we’re about to dive into. This song is about a child murderer named Captain Howdy. That’s a reference to the Captain Howdy that Regan speaks to through her Ouija Board in The Exorcist. This Captain Howdy is arrested but set free on a technicality. He’s later the victim of mob justice when the outraged parents get their vengeance. Snider’s character in this movie, Carlton Hendricks, uses the pseudonym Captain Howdy.

Interestingly, the song also has some similarities to the backstory of Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. I want to bring that up because Robert Englund, the man under the Freddy makeup for nearly 20 years, appears in Strangeland.

Speaking of the cast, the movie features some recognizable names and faces. One of the detectives in this movie is played by Brett Harrelson, the younger brother of Woody. Another notable person in this is Elizabeth Peña. She appeared in a lot of stuff from the time she gained regular work in the mid 80s until her death in 2014.

The two most recognizable women in the movie that were just getting into their careers at the time are Linda Cardellini playing Genevieve, the unfortunate girl gracing the cover of this movie’s poster and box art with her mouth sewn shut, and Amy Smart, playing Angela. Smart had already appeared in nine movies before this (one of which was a TV movie), with her biggest definitely being Starship Troopers. Cardellini was in just her third movie, with 1997’s Good Burger being her first, followed by the 1998 comedy Dead Man on Campus co-starring Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar). Shortly after this movie, both of their careers would get a boost with Cardellini appearing in Legally Blonde and Smart scoring a recurring role on the TV show Felicity. Clearly, the universal hatred for this movie hurt neither of these girls.

As for the soundtrack, when Dee Snider comes calling needing some rockin’ tunes for his movie, you better believe people show up for it. Snider himself provides a couple songs with one being a solo song and the other from Twisted Sister. You also get a lot of help from popular acts of the time too like Sevendust, Megadeth, Pantera, Anthrax, Marilyn Manson, Soulfly, System of a Down, Nashville Pussy, and Kid Rock on a song that features Eminem. That last one really kind of throws me for a loop. Kid Rock and Eminem? On a song called “Fuck Off”? Well that last part fits, but Eminem is miles ahead of Kid Rock on any scale be it writing songs, performing songs, winning an Oscar, being a supporter of gay people in 2024, etc. I also believe Eminem would have far less problem with Bud Light than Kid Rock and one definitely does not appropriate a look of being a white trash good ol’ boy while growing up in upper-class surroundings. Yeah, Kid Rock, I read the Early Life section of your Wikipedia page, and I definitely saw the movie 8 Mile. I know what conditions each of you grew up in…

Wait… what’s this article actually about? Oh yeah! Strangeland. So, yeah, this movie did not get good reviews AT ALL. With that said, let’s be the judges of that for ourselves, yes? Let’s dig into some early torture porn-lite!

The movie opens with a girl, Genevieve (Cardellini) logging onto a chat room called “Teen Chat” while hanging out with her friend Tiana. Oh boy… We also have chat room terror too. Now, if you are of a certain age, you remember when the internet was just getting up and going strong, there were all sorts of stories about the dangers of chatrooms and how predators would seek out teenage girls and lure them away from home. You know, typical scare shit. Now, yes, of course, the internet can be a very dangerous place. After all, it’s the home of Libs of Tik Tok, the Nerdrotic, and vile comment sections all over the place. These people are all garbage. In fact, everyone on the internet is garbage. Sorry. I’m garbage. You’re garbage. We’re all garbage. But it’s all striations of garbage. You have your absolute shitbag piss buckets and you have your general garbage that, you know, you don’t take with you to the real world. I like to think the latter is where we’re at, dear reader.

Where was I?

Oh yeah! So a hardly recognizable Linda Cardellini that looks like every single girl I was madly in love with in the second half of the 90s meets Captain Howdy in this chatroom. She basically is like, “Hey there, stranger, wanna go on a date and fuck?” Keep in mind, Genevieve and her friend are 15 years old, but whatever… garbage internet. She pulls up Captain Howdy’s member profile and it says that he’s 20 and a student. That’s all Genevieve needs to know to set up a date. She and Tiana go out and meet up with Captain Howdy. Neither girl comes home and the next morning, the parents are rather concerned about this.

That’s when we see Captain Howdy doing creepy things like doing pull-ups in a dark, candle-lit basement. We also see flashes from the night before when Genevieve did attempt to escape, but he knocked her out and gave her a pretty gnarly head wound. Also, to shut her up, he sewed her mouth shut. About the only thing we see of Captain Howdy in these early moments is his red hair (like real red hair not like a ginger), he likes to wear goth rocker boots with maybe shorts or no pants at all, and he has filed his teeth down to jagged fangs.

I’m also going to say that I feel like this movie wants to play heavily on movies like Seven and The Silence of the Lambs. It’s like Seven because Captain Howdy is clearly a sadist. It’s like The Silence of the Lambs in the sense that he has a relatively inauspicious house in a suburb. And he has a murder basement. I’m also going to go out on a limb and say that it will be as good as neither by a preeettty wide margin.

Genevieve’s dad is a cop, Detective Mike Gage (played by Kevin Gage, how’s that for a nice coincidence?). He’s been doggedly trying to figure out what happened to his daughter and her friend. His partner, Detective Steve Christianson (played by Harrelson), is going to get a list of a bunch of known sex offenders to try to help with the search for Genevieve. You know, because that can be the ONLY thing to look into in regards to a missing teenage girl, right? You could maybe talk to her friends at school. Or, I dunno, find out if she had anyone who didn’t like her at school. Or, and just stick with me here, just do the normal fucking cop work like all points bulletins and shit?

But, nah… cool. We’re just going to go directly for the sex offender list because yeah, whatever. It’s the only possible thing that could happen to someone.

Okay, so earlier on, when it was first discovered that Genevieve had not come home, her dad accidentally woke her computer up which would have kind of tipped him off to the chatroom thing then, but, not knowing how to turn the computer off, he just unplugged it. I think in the 90s, if you just unplugged a desktop computer without properly shutting it down, it would have destroyed that thing, but whatever. Anyway, Genevieve’s maternal Aunt, Rose, and Genevieve’s cousin, Angela (Amy Smart), come over to cook dinner and kind of try to lift the spirits of Genevieve’s mom, Toni (Elizabeth Pena). Angela brings up the idea of how cool computers are. You can email, you can go onto the internet and chat and kind of shed your usual public persona. Detective Gage asks if Genevieve ever went out on a date with any guy she chatted with online. Angela confirms she did from time to time.

We go back to Captain Howdy’s place. He is sitting in the nude and spouts off about metaphysical stuff and something about how the experience of life must be painful or whatever. Check one off again for being kind of like The Silence of the Lambs because he’s naked and piercing his arm with a needle. All he says is kind of that fucked up guy’s woo-woo bullshit about experiences. It’s maybe something you’d hear Pinhead say in Hellraiser, but nowhere near as interesting. Just know that Captain Howdy is one of those guys who thinks experiencing pain and near-death experiences are the only way to live.

Elsewhere, Gage and Christianson discover Tiana’s car in a pond. They pull it out and find her body in the trunk. She’s been tortured and her mouth has also been sewn shut. Also in the trunk is a septum spike. It’s a pretty thick one too. A guy who works for the towing company that fished the car out says that it’s about the biggest septum spike he’s ever seen. Whoever put that into the trunk is into body modification. He talks about what a modern primitive is. He also says that all the people who are into body modifications hang out at a club called Xiabalba. So the detectives go right there.

Of course, Xiabalba is a heavy metal club full of piercings, green hair, tattoos, and leather. I mean I know that Dee Snider would have had an in with this kind of culture, but it’s so over the top it comes off as cartoonishly so. Like, people are there tattooing themselves right in the middle of a massive mosh pit. There are people beating the shit out of each other in a sexual way. They leave thinking they have no hope of finding their possible body mod freak in a room full of body mod freaks.

However, if they just stuck it out and went to the basement, they would have at least gotten eyes on Captain Howdy just… hanging out. Heh. Anyway, he was taking part in a ritual that would have let him experience some sense of death. However, they think he did die and let him down. When he wakes up, he’s pissed off that he’s not dead.

Why wouldn’t he just… you know… kill himself? Is the point to have near-death? That way he can still come back and tell the stories of having experienced death? Oh fuck it. Whatever. He’s a freak and I’m gonna guess trying to find consistency in his actions or beliefs is going to be a pointless affair.

Detective Gage is constantly circling the drain which should result in turning on a computer and checking out chatrooms. Instead, he pulls himself away from that drain every time and focuses on something else. In this case, he’s buying a magazine about tribal urban primitives. His police captain comes up to him and tells him about the autopsy report for Tiana. She had several puncture wounds on her face, around her breasts, and her genitals. Apparently, it was all done with a #8 surgical needle. If I understand that correctly it’s a needle that is in the category of reverse cutting needles. It’s hooked-shaped so it can easily cut through tougher tissue… like skin. It’s the needle mostly used to do sutures.

That kind of needle wouldn’t inflict wounds that could kill someone. In fact, she didn’t even die from any one particular wound. It’s said she died of a heart condition she already had. Basically, she was tortured to the point of her heart simply giving out. This might be the first interesting thing that happened in this movie. Okay, it’s kind of dry. It’s very clinical about her wounds, but it also goes into some of the detail of how that kind of needle could be used to kind of poke and prod someone and potentially could indicate repeated torture which is kind of scary and gross.

Finally, Gage decides to log into the chatroom, but he needs Angela’s help. It was mentioned earlier when she was talking about how rad the internet is that he is not impressed with the whole thing. He likes calling people instead of emailing people. Believe it or not, that would have been the prevailing opinion 25 years ago. Today? I’d rather run one of those #8 needles up my dickhole instead of calling someone on the phone.

Am I just as freaky as Captain Howdy? If it keeps me from having to actually talk to another human being on the phone, yes.

While they are looking in the chatrooms, a computer guy who was looking into the chatroom activity of Genevieve calls and finds out that the last person she chatted with before logging off was Captain Howdy. They locate him being active in the Teen Chat room. Christianson asks how they can lure him out. Angela has an idea. She helps her uncle set up his account in a way that would draw Captain Howdy out. She tells him what to type and, sure enough, Captain Howdy reaches out to his profile directly to ask if “she’d” like to party.

While the cops start to surround Captain Howdy’s place, we see that he has at least one other person in his murder basement. Of course, Genevieve is there and I think she’s in an Iron Maiden which is kind of rad if you think about Iron Maiden the band. There’s another guy he’s got strung up. That guy’s got his mouth sewn together too and it looks like Captain Howdy’s stuck some piercings into his chest too. He’s going through a catalog of penile piercings that he plans to give to this dude.

The police storm into the house only to find two old farts fucking. Again, like The Silence of the Lambs, it appears the cops are in the wrong place just when you think he’s going to be caught. In fact, they nearly kill the old man when they barge in on him because he’s about to have a heart attack. The next morning, Gage gets a message from Captain Howdy that reveals the maniac knows the girl he was chatting with was a cop. Through the use of a voice message system, he discovers he’s actually near where he was supposed to be as a dog could be heard barking in the background of the audio clip and a dog was barking just outside a specific house on the street.

Gage approaches the house and sees the windows are all blacked out. So he goes around back and finds some trash bags. Going through the trash, Gage finds all sorts of needles. He then breaks open a cellar door and goes into the house. He eventually finds the murder room. There are multiple people in the room, all of whom are naked and have various body modifications done to them. He finds Genevieve, buuuut… He doesn’t hear Captain Howdy coming up from behind and Genevieve can’t warn him because she’s still got her mouth sewn shut. Captain Howdy knocks Gage out and refastens Genevieve’s shackles.

Gage scrambles for the gun but is nearly dragged away from it by Captain Howdy. Thankfully, the bedpan that is collecting piss from Genevieve’s catheter is right there for Gage to throw in Captain Howdy’s face. Gage shoots Howdy in the leg and cuffs him. He frees Genevieve and Captain Howdy is arrested.

In the subsequent trial, Carlton Hendricks, the man known as Captain Howdy, is found not guilty by reason of insanity. Later, it’s said that he spent four years in a mental institution. Aside from his massive tattoo that goes from one of his feet up to one of his eyes that he covers with makeup, he looks totally different. He no longer has his piercings and he dresses rather normally. He also kind of shuffles about like a dweeb. He’s been taking pills to help with his mental state. Despite heavy protest by the public, he’s let out of the asylum and deemed cured as he seems to be a completely different person in attitude as well as looks.

After his release, Carlton returns home to find his home is in pretty bad shape. While he was in the asylum, people vandalized the place. Also, there are nightly protests in front of Carlton’s house. Meanwhile, Genevieve has recurring nightmares of her being hunted down and attacked by Captain Howdy. Carlton attempts to apologize to the mob outside but he’s rebuffed.

A new challenger enters the ring as Jack Roth (played by Robert Englund) says to no one in particular that somebody has to bring Carlton down.

There are about thirty minutes left in this movie. We’re kind of at an interesting crossroads. The first half of the movie was about a freak who likes to torture people by forcing piercings and body modifications onto them. We opened the back half of this movie by maybe making a little bit of a statement on the perception of who Captain Howdy is. First, clearly, he has to be crazy so therefore the justice system will fail the citizens seeking safety from a madman. Second, after he spends a few years obviously making a change after being institutionalized, he’s being hounded by the citizens who don’t accept the court’s ruling. I’m guessing the same people who don’t accept his apology for what he’s done are also the same people who say that as Christians or something they would seek an apology instead of vengeance. Yet, here they are seeking vengeance for what he did.

Now, I’m not naive enough to say that I’m giving Carlton any kind of benefit of the doubt. He very clearly did heinous things that I do believe he was well aware of what he was doing. So, yeah I do think the justice system probably didn’t consider that insane people can still be held to full account for their actions – especially when it comes to a serial crime. I admit the first half of this movie was kind of boring. It never goes as far as it really should if it wants to be a twisted horror movie. We could have seen Captain Howdy do more of the crimes instead of spending most of the time on the procedural side with the detectives.

Will this final act go to a place that isn’t exactly expected? We’ll have to see. I like the idea if Captain Howdy is truly gone and Carlton is truly trying to turn over a new leaf, it could be he who is being tortured by the town. Certainly, Englund’s character is played as kind of a redneck guy who might be out looking for a chance to hurt someone and Carlton’s release is all the provocation he needs. We could be looking at an interesting juxtaposition of the crime that occurred to kick the whole thing off. There is something you could do with the idea of a killer who isn’t exactly convicted to the public’s liking but does get help and turns over a new leaf only to then be the victim of the public.

A type of story like that isn’t really what audiences want to see because we like the idea of a bad guy or killer getting his comeuppance, but it could be artfully done. I have no trust that Dee Snider’s Strangeland can handle it properly. But, here you go, movie. Prove me wrong.

Jack is drunk and angry. His daughter not at home. Neither he nor his wife know where she is. At first, he says that she’s probably chasing some football player tail. But as he watches the news covering Carlton’s release and subsequent outcry from the people of the town, he gets angrier. So, he calls up one of his redneck friends and says that Calrton has his little girl and they need to go do something about it. Either he has convinced himself in a redneck drunken haze that Carlton has his daughter, or he’s just saying that to his buddy to convince them to come along for a good ol’ lynchin’.

They storm Calrton’s house and beat the shit out of him. They then drag him out and toss him into a car. Gage is there and considers calling it in but decides to defiantly drop the radio. As they drive off, Carlton’s meds are smashed under the car’s wheel.

I should also note that Jack’s daughter was indeed in a sleazy motel banging a football player so all this was just pure angry vengeance and using his past predatory crime against him so he could hurt a guy.

Okay… Maybe the movie is trying to do the right thing. Mob justice is wrong on this account. The cop, just as vengeful, opts to look the other way in favor of the vigilante justice. They take him outside the town and attempt to hang him from a tree. It appears they have succeeded in getting their vengeance, but, hilariously, when it begins to rain, they all decide to leave like a bunch of pussies. The already weak branch they used to toss the noose around gives away. It ultimately saves his life.

The brush with death is what he has been looking for all along. Experiencing it has reversed the treatment he got in the institution… I guess? So now he wants to seek revenge. He immediately goes to Jack’s house and slits his wife’s throat and kidnaps Jack. Captain Howdy immediately calls to taunt Detective Gage.

Well… After five minutes of the movie possibly taking an interesting turn, I can see Dee Snider’s Strangeland was not interested in being interesting. At all.

Captain Howdy goes about the business of torturing Jack. He’s sewn Jack’s mouth and eyes shut and he’s using hooks and threads to basically sew him to a torture contraption. He’s also kidnapped that Jesus freak Sunny chick and tortures her to make her more “spiritually” aware. Later, Toni calls Detective Gage to say that Genevieve left school and is not home. Both Toni and Gage hurry home to find Captain Howdy on the computer screen who shows them that he has Genevieve and is torturing her all over again. A couple uniformed beat cops end up finding all those whom Captain Howdy took captive on his revenge tour.

Hendricks leaves a matchbook from Xiabalba with a message for Detective Gage. So Gage goes alone to the fetish club that is currently empty. Eventually, Captain Howdy shows himself and says, “I oughta beat the dogshit out of you!” But then Gage is like, “No I wanna beat the dogshit out of you!” and they proceed to fight. I like that throughout the movie, Hendricks/Howdy has been spouting all this flowery language about death and experience and torture and whatever. All of that is that kind of pseudo-deep shit that people spout off when they want to try to be dark, brooding, or sound tortured. It’s boring as fuck. But when we get to the final ten minutes of the movie, our pseudo-intellectual torturer just says he wants to beat the dogshit out of someone.

I guess you might as well drop the facade of the flowery language when you’re this late in the game.

Captain Howdy believes he’s successfully overpowered Gage, but Gage regains consciousness. Captain Howdy attempts to put Gage on one of those hooks that body mod people use to suspend themselves, but Gage rips out Captain Howdy’s septum spike. That gives Gage the chance to put the hook into Captain Howdy’s back. Howdy is left on the hook and like a dumb fuck, he taunts Gage by saying something about being inside Genevieve, implying rape to her cop dad. So Gage grabs some oil from a candle and pours it onto Captain Howdy and sets him on fire.

And that’s basically it. The cop wins the day by setting the bad guy on fire and sending him to a slow and painful death.

As boring as the movie kind of is in the first half and how much the movie was uninterested in taking a turn that could have made it way more interesting in the long run, this movie is actually a near miss if I have to be truthful. But that should not be taken as a victory for the movie. It’s the kind of near miss that is worse than being outright terrible. Because the movie decides to focus more on Detective Gage than Captain Howdy, I never felt Howdy was anything to write home about. The detective wasn’t really sent on a wild goose chase like the detectives in Seven or Jodie Foster was in The Silence of the Lambs so we’re just left with much ado about nothing.

Imagine, if you will, a movie that instead of being about 85 minutes, runs about 100 minutes. And you spend some time with Hendricks/Howdy as he truly does show that he’s overcoming his issues that drove him to torture and killing people (though, he did only kill the one girl who died due to a weak heart while he was doing his body mod torture shit, but I digress, he did directly lead to her death). I don’t need to know WHY he is the way he is, but imagine writing in opportunities while he’s institutionalized to really show him being changed? Why not have him be kind to other people in the institution? Why not have him care for a puppy or a kitten or feed a squirrel outside to show that he truly did change?

Then, when he’s released, the town hounds him. He tries leaving the town, but he finds out that his record, despite not being found guilty of murder, but the fact that he was institutionalized, leads to him not being able to rent a place in another town or secure a loan to buy a house or something. Let the system take its shots at him. Then, worse, the people of the town take bigger shots at him. He’s refused service at the grocery store so he struggles to even obtain food. No one will help him when someone in town randomly knocks him over or beats him up. Then, finally, you get to that Jack portion of the movie where he sees him a lot and it drives Jack insane to the point that he’s lynched and Hendricks comes to the conclusion that the town can only see him as Captain Howdy. Worse, maybe that’s the role in this community that they need him to play and he snaps.

I guess I kind of described one of the more recent Halloween sequels, but those are actually better movies than Strangeland.

Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends took swings. Maybe they weren’t your cup of tea. The latter is the one I’m trying to figure out if I like way better than I originally thought I did. But still, those swings indicate the filmmakers wanted to try to explore other ideas around murderous rage and insanity and how that rots a community from the inside out. Strangeland could have done that in 1998. If it had, I’d probably be singing its praises right now. Its cult classic status might be one of universal cult classic status instead of a cult classic within a small counterculture group. But the near miss makes it all that much worse. It feels neutered when it could have been trying to say something either with torture gore or with an examination of how a community could recreate a monster that it needs to hate for shallow healing.

Anyway, fuck this movie! Let’s get out of here. Next week, Charles Bronson makes a LOOOOOONG overdue return to B-Movie Enema. The movie I’m going to look at is another movie that has a crazed murderer who also does some sex-pesty things, but is an overall waaaaay better movie. I’m going to be reviewing 1983’s 10 to Midnight. Make sure you’re here next Friday for that. Before then, tomorrow, I’ve got another episode of B-Movie Enema: The Series. This week’s episode is for a classic of Italian, post-apocalyptic ripoffs. Join me as I watch and discuss Warrior of the Lost World starring Robert Ginty and Donald Pleasence.

Until then, I need to hop onto the chatrooms and find some freaky fun with some crazed body mod dude for this evening so don’t wait up for me because I’m not gonna be home until morning!