STRANGELAND – This is a shout from the late nineties horror wilderness, caught between post-‘Scream’ nouvelle slasher spectacle and pre-torture porn grot. Twisted Sister Dee Snyder plays a red-maned body mod fanatic who likes to string people up in candlelit rooms and pierce them until they reach some plane of spiritual emancipation; Kevin Gage basically resembles some guy from a cop show. It’s a long and winding road, but along the way we get to see Robert Englund watch questionable porn in his underpants and lead a mob of angry, right thinking townfolk. ‘Strangeland’ is total schlock that’s still quite enjoyable. You’ll have to humour the wooden set-up and hope those stiff-as-a-board detectives just get the police procedural over and done with, because what really makes ’Strangeland’ tick is its overload of dated pop culture sensationalism. Its take on the underground is so plastic you’d think it was posing photographs for the tourists; chatrooms from the internet of yore are places where the young are lured to their doom, goths in fetish gear writhe to Nu Metal just like they do in any late nineties nightclub scene, people with facial tats and piercings are scary and often seem like they might be quoting Nietzsche… etc. It’s fascinating to feel so weirdly outside times I lived through. I’m deducting a few points for the gratuitous use of an ‘Exorcist’ reference (Snyder’s character is called Captain Howdy), and ultimately it has to be said that ‘Strangeland’ does not push any envelopes and fails to offer any real genre novelty, but all those candlelit rooms, mild scenes of S&M torture sleaze, and vibes of clumsy-smooth nineties artifice give it some pull. It's also nice to know Snyder is such a gent that he’ll catheterise you if he feels you’re going to be immobilised in his dungeon for any length of time. Titillating, awkwardly formed trash that’s good for a laugh.
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