Strangeland 25/21/2023 There are several references to a black dog. Many conversations and visual metaphors end up being about the self, and self-image, and how to change oneself. Its whole vibe is like an episode of Twilight Zone via an episode of American Horror Story via if Tim Burton got trapped in a secret vore nightmare, and every second inhabitant tells the protagonist he's an idiot loser who makes everything he touches worse. And if you've seen any prestige horror films in the last few years, or even just engaged with any horror tropes before, you'll figure out what Strangeland's deal is in about 30 seconds. You immediately fixate on saving this woman, and set about doing so in a point 'n' click puzzle fashion. It is explained to you - by a raven, a head-in-a-box fortune teller, and a payphone caller who hates you - that she does this repeatedly, because death doesn't work the same here. As soon as you arrive, you see a woman throw herself down a well inside the welcome tent. It is rendered in lovely pixels that make everything look fleshy, even if the colours are all muted. The "where", it soon appears, is the titular land, a sort of grimdark carnival floating in a terrible void. In Strangeland you, a man in a half-undone, old-timey straightjacket, wake up with no memory of who, what or where you are. Certainly, Dee Snider is not enough of an actor, not much of one at all really, to be able to make the complexities of the part convincing.ĭee Snider has announced a Strangeland 2: Discple for all of the 2000s but this has yet to emerge.Strangeland does interesting things with genre tropes, but it's stuffed with as many metaphors as it is great puzzles. It is this central confusion of sympathies, with the film wanting to portray Hendricks/Howdy as someone irredeemably evil yet also sympathetically persecuted, that gives Strangeland such an odd mixed message. The final act of the film has the diligent detective pursuing and eliminating Hendricks, seeing him as entirely evil, something that the film has no doubts is a good thing. Here the film changes its sympathies from seeing Hendricks as an insane, sadistic monster to being on his side, where we see that it is the conservative parental groups that drive him over the edge, before in the final act he returns to being a sadistic psycho again. Oddly about halfway through in an abrupt and not at all convincing change of pace, Hendricks is turned into a pathetic figure of sympathy – going from a roaring sadistic tormentor to a painfully shy social reject (with Dee Snider looking for all the world like the man out of Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting) being persecuted by parental lynch mobs. Dee Snider as the freakish Carleton Hendricks/Captain Howdy There is the shock rock role he obviously relishes, and one that he was charged with by parental groups of the 1980s – of the demoniac figure corrupting and torturing children. One senses there is something oddly autobiographical to it upon Dee Snider’s part. Its moderately charged wildness aside, Strangeland feels confused. There are some fairly wild images of whippings, seeing Snider strung up and being hung by his nipples and victims with their lips sewn shut, their bodies pierced, impaled through spikes and hung on chains (even if in the end all the body-piercing, BDSM imagery has only been borrowed for old hat shock imagery). Snider cuts a freakish figure with tattooed body, red mohawk and with piercings all over his cheeks, nose and brow, even his eyelids. As such, the film co-opts the imagery of 1990s body piercing, tattooing and body art counterculture – there is even a speech about the right gauges of metal to pierce with. Snider clearly still desires to cause parental outrage but all his crossdressing theatrics are passé and here he now models himself as a Marilyn Manson copycat. Dee Snider is still about, performing with other groups and even maintains his own website The oddest reappearance Snider made was as the star, screenwriter and producer of this peculiar vanity production. Beyond the five-minute appeal of the single, Twisted Sister failed to sustain their shock theatrics into any substantial musical content and the group disbanded in 1987. Twisted Sister had a big hit with the single We’re Not Going to Take It Anymore (1984) and incurred the wrath of much parental outrage, due to Dee Snider’s garishly over-the-top crossdressing antics and ghastly makeup. In the 1980s, Dee Snider was the lead singer with the heavy metal band Twisted Sister.
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