Review #259: Strangeland (1998)

This review was originally written in October 2023.

Gabe's Horror Movie October Review #13 - Strangeland (1998)

Strangeland follows a detective, Mike, whose daughter gets abducted, raped, and tortured by CaptHowdy (played by Snider), a local sadist with an obsession for body modification (tribal tattoos, extensive piercings, and even self-torture used to achieve enlightenment) who uses 90s chat rooms to find and lure victims. After getting a lead when someone discovers and recognizes CaptHowdy's septum jewelry at a crime scene, we're treated to the most absurd cat-and-mouse game I've ever seen between Mike and the kidnapper: Mike finds CaptHowdy in a chat room while posing as his niece, and CaptHowdy looks at Mike's fake profile. Mike changes his profile to include one of CaptHowdy's interests, and CaptHowdy immediately notices the change and somehow automatically recognizes it as an indicator that Mike is actually a cop conducting a sting operation. When the sting fails as a result, Mike is sitting in his car on his inexplicably-internet-connected laptop when CaptHowdy sends him an audio message taunting him, challenging the detective to come find him. Mike realizes from the background noise that he's sitting directly in front of CaptHowdy's house, so within five minutes of being challenged to find him, Mike finds him, arrests him, and rescues his daughter.

I feel like that should be the end of the film but it's actually only 30 minutes in. CaptHowdy goes to jail following an insanity plea, and we fast-forward four years to him getting released. He's medicated, he's gone through therapy, and he seems to be regretful for what he did. But the locals are still mad at him, so they round up a posse to lynch him, while Mike watches on and doesn't interfere. It starts to rain, and CaptHowdy looks dead, so everyone leaves, but the branch breaks and he survives the lynching, immediately reverting to his old self. He instantly starts kidnapping and torturing people again (seriously, it seems like it happens the next day or even that same night) and is somehow able to abduct Mike's daughter again, from her school, even though he's the most recognizable person in the entire town and this guy with bright red hair, a giant facial tattoo, and a dozen huge piercings in his face clearly is not her father.

CaptHowdy taunts Mike again (this time with a video chat message), but although the movie makes it seem like they'll never be able to find him, the immediate next scene is the cops arriving at CaptHowdy's new hideout and rescuing all of his captives. But he's not there- so the immediate scene after that is Mike showing up at CaptHowdy's actual hiding spot, where Mike casually challenges him to a fight. Mike very easily manages to hang CaptHowdy on a meat hook, then lights him on fire instead of taking him back to jail. The end.

In case I didn't make it clear, this movie is very, very bad. It has a serious pacing problem: numerous times it felt like it had set up a scenario where time was going to need to be spent looking for CaptHowdy, but instead of showing a montage of failures, it just immediately cuts to CaptHowdy being found. Even in the part where he goes back to kidnapping after being hanged, he kidnaps his first victim (the guy who rounded up the posse to hang him) and then calls the police to taunt them, but when the police get the call, it's clear they were already waiting for that specific call, as if there was supposed to be an intermediary scene where they find out about the kidnapping and somehow deduce CaptHowdy is both not dead, and back to his old ways. But no such scene exists in the film, it just jumps straight from He's Hanged -> He Kidnaps the Guy -> Cops Are Ready For His Phone Call, seemingly all in the same day. Either this movie was extremely rushed, or had to cut numerous scenes for time, or it was just poorly-written. I could believe any of them.

It was a fun watch because of how ridiculous its portrayal of various subcultures is and because of how extremely 90s the chat interface looks, but nothing about this movie is well-made. The performances are bad, the effects are bad, and it's just a bad story structure. I don't recommend this film in the slightest except as a curiosity.

Overall Rating: 3/10 Rave Clubs

Dee Snider Is Weird: According to the DVD Commentary, Dee Snider said that the scenes where he was rehabilitated were the hardest parts of the movie to shoot, because he hated having to wear a cardigan.