Contains extreme violence, nudity, profane language," they made us add, "and scenes of torture." No movie’s ever had that put on it before. He explained the new warning, and his fondness for pushing the MPAA, to Lollipop magazine: The final edict from the MPAA arrived close to the film's release when the board insisted that the film required more edits than previously established, sending Snider and the rest of the post-production team back to work. Rather than completing another re-edit, however, Snider simply had to add an extra warning to the film's rating descriptor. Snider has spoken at length about his back-and-forths with the MPAA and having to make cut after cut - in some instances removing scenes that simply suggest something happens without actually showing it. Released in 1998, long before Saw and Hostel brought extreme gore to the mainstream, Snider's film was a shock to the MPAA when the initial edit of the film arrived on its doorstep. Even for seasoned gorehounds, the film's images of women with their mouths sewn shut and people kept in cages can be hard to watch. 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.Strangeland isn't an easy movie to watch. 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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