The clumsy dialogue, ridiculous plot and slow-motion direction defeat the actors, with talented indie actress Elizabeth Pena seeming particularly lost playing Gage’s long-suffering wife. Its half-hearted attempts at suspense sequences are borrowed from “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Seven,” and allow the audience to stay at least 10 steps ahead of the dimwitted detectives.
It is hard to say which is the film’s biggest crime: not being scary or not being funny. Pic ends indecisively: It’s unclear whether Howdy is dead or kept alive for a sequel that no one will ever ask for. Howdy quickly extracts revenge on the would-be vigilantes, then re-kidnaps the detective’s daughter, leading to another limp face-off between Howdy and Gage. The hanging doesn’t kill him, and somehow the benign-looking Carleton Hendricks has a serial-killer makeover, compete with the facial tattoos, piercings and hairdo. It’s left open as to whether Howdy, properly medicated, is truly reformed, but it doesn’t matter: Within hours of his return home, he’s hanged from a tree by an angry mob led by a redneck (Robert Englund, trading in his Freddy Krueger claws for a beer bottle). Unaccountably, the child-murdering Howdy, having traded in his bright-red dreadlocks for an Ichabod Crane-style ponytail, is released from the institution in less then four years. Dee Snider as Captain Howdy in ‘Strangeland’ (1998) Nevertheless, Snider insists that we will see Captain Howdy again some day, hence his reticence at revealing too much of the story. Despite his ineptitude, Gage finds the culprit and his captive daughter in the film’s first 45 minutes, resulting in Howdy being hauled off to a loony bin. For those of you who might not know, next year marks the 20th anniversary of STRANGELAND, which was released October 2. Howdy, make a date and, before you can sing a line of “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” one of the girls (Linda Cardellini) is strung up by her wrists with her lips sown shut.Īny potential is quickly doused when story switches gears and becomes a badly staged police procedural documenting the bumbling work of detectives Christian (Brett Harrelson) and Gage (Kevin Gage), the latter of whom just happens to be the captive girl’s father.
Initial five minutes provide the only real scares: Two young girls innocently flirt in an Internet chat-room with someone named Capt.
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