Strangeland

Released 1998
Stars Dee Snider, Kevin Gage, Elizabeth Peña, Brett Harrelson, Robert Englund, Linda Cardellini, Tucker Smallwood, Ivonne Coll, Amy Smart
Directed by John Pieplow

The glow of the screen illuminates his heavily pierced, tattoo-stained face as his fingers dance nimbly across the keyboard ... searching, hunting. His computer handle is Captain Howdy, and he surfs the local chat rooms for young female prey. Girls such as Genevieve and Tiana, who mysteriously vanish after an online conversation with the cunning cyberpredator. Detective Mike Gage has a personal stake in the case: Genevieve is his daughter. When Tiana's corpse - tortured, pierced and scarred - is discovered in the river, Gage realizes that time is running out for Genevieve. Taking sadistic delight in Gage's desperation, Captain Howdy sends the detective a series of taunting e-mails, challenging him to a deadly online game of cat and mouse, and drawing him into his ""modern primitive"" world - a strange land of fetish bars, S&M, body modification and Goth-rock.

Heavy metal superstar Dee Snider, Elizabeth Pena and Robert Englund star in this dark suspense-thriller, in the tradition of The Silence Of The Lambs and Kiss The Girls.

Summary from netflix.com

The only reason I watched this was to see Dee Snider. I like his music, he did a great job with the PMRC, he's fun to listen to on his radio show, and he's just an interesting guy. Because of that I watched his movie even though I don't like horror films. I must say it was better than I expected, but that's not saying much because I didn't expect anything good. The movie's plot more or less follows Twisted Sister's song "Horror-Teria (Captain Howdy/Street Justice)." Dee was certainly terrifying as Captain Howdy, but his character didn't have much humanity. Maybe that's the style of these movies, but it would have been better if he had been a tortured soul and we understood his motivations. To be fair, I don't think that's expected in this genre though. This was basically like a "Nightmare on Elm Street." In fact, Robert Englund had a fun role here. Other than Dee and Robert, I was surprised at how poor the acting was. I was surprised to see Elizabeth Peña in this, and further surprised that she wasn't very good. She wasn't given much to do, but she didn't seem much like a worried/distressed mother. The other actors were just horrible. The plot also had a lot of holes and the police were not presented accurately, but I think that's par for the course for a low-budget horror film. On the positive side, it looked great and had a killer (pun intended) soundtrack. It's not intended to be scary, but it will definitely make you squirm. -- Bill Alward May 27, 2001