1/16/2024 0 Comments Dee snider strangeland medicine![]() ![]() ![]() But it is not until Mike's niece Angela Stravelli ( Amy Smart) informs him of Genevieve's penchant for meeting strangers through the Internet that Mike gets his first lead. Mike discovers that Captain Howdy (Dee Snider) is into "body art," including significant tattooing, piercing, branding, and scarification. The case takes an unexpected turn when Tiana's car is pulled out of a lake with Tiana's tortured body inside and no sign of Genevieve. With the assistance of a younger cop named Steve Christian ( Brett Harrelson), Gage begins searching for Genevieve and Tiana. However, when neither Genevieve nor Tiana returns home by the next morning, Genevieve's mother, Toni, alerts her husband, local cop Mike Gage ( Kevin Gage). After chatting with another apparent student who goes by the screen name of "Captain Howdy," Genevieve and Tiana decide to attend a party at Captain Howdy's house, which is a trap. Standard horror movie score is slightly improved upon by the inclusion of Goth-influenced heavy metal, including a Snider original over the end credits, an element that is likely to be the only thing Twisted Sister fans will enjoy.15-year-old Genevieve Gage and her best friend Tiana Moore are typical high school students in Helverton, Colorado who spend their idle time chatting with strangers in chat rooms. Otherwise, tech credits are straight-to-video sloppy, with the editing particularly loose and imprecise. Yugoslavian lenser Goran Pavicevic does a solid, if not particularly imaginative, job of shooting the gruesome torture. Snider is also literally kept in the dark for first half of the film, a particularly strange choice considering he reps the only would-be B.O. ![]() Snider tries hard, but his constant sneering and muscle-flexing are more cliched than frightening, and his thick Long Island accent more suited for a sports-talk DJ than an emissary of evil. 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. 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. 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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