![]() If that premise seems simple, that’s because it very much is. After Howdy kidnaps his daughter (a young Linda Cardelini), the stakes become much more personal. The film follows detective Mike Gage (named for his actor, Kevin Gage) as he hunts down Captain Howdy (Snider), a serial killer who tracks young women down through online chat rooms. Seemingly inadvertently, Snider proves that some things never change. In the same vein, concerned parents began to worry about the impact of the internet on their kids a decade later. Films like BLACK ROSES or HARDROCK NIGHTMARE depict these bands as Satanic fronts created to lure in and corrupt the youth. The 1980s saw an infestation of horror flicks detailing the perceived evils of metal music. There is some sort of ironic statement to be made about a heavy metal star’s attentive involvement in this subject matter. Serving as a bizarre ego project after his group disbanded a decade earlier, Snider lays his heart bare on a blood-soaked silver screen. He is also the screenwriter for STRANGELAND, as well as its villain. If the name Dee Snider sounds familiar, he’s the musician best known as TWISTED SISTER’s frontman. Every frame of John Pipelow’s film conjures a grimy time capsule of a bygone era. It plays during violent nightclub raves, or alongside delightfully dated user interfaces adorning clunky white desktops. The soundtrack, featuring MEGADETH, SYSTEM OF A DOWN, ANTHRAX, MARILYN MANSON, and other heavy hitters, is absolutely relentless. If there’s a film that exemplifies late-90s internet and alternative culture, this is it. A mostly forgotten 1998 cyber-slasher, this picture details the exploits of “Captain Howdy,” a sadist obsessed with body modification and inflicting pain on others. The genre always reflects the cultural fears of the moment, and the internet was an intimidating beast.Įnter Dee Snider’s STRANGELAND. Monster movies of the 1950s wrestled with the potential fallout of nuclear war, while the hardened sentiments of cynicism surrounding the conflict in Vietnam bled into every fiber of 70s filmmaking. More realistically, HORRORVISION and PULSE explored how virtual worlds allow us to disconnect from reality. THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR and THE NET showed naive audiences what could happen if they used the internet without being aware of the risks. Several films in this time period attempted to show the dangerous side of what was then a new and exciting invention. These activities could form exciting relationships, or have deadly consequences. In the early days of the internet, users would log onto web pages about topics they were interested in, and peruse chat rooms to meet new friends. Connectivity is easier than ever, yet it’s important to stay diligent when it’s just as easy to find kindhearted people as it is to encounter the worst of the worst. Even considering all of this, it’s still one of our greatest assets. An endless stream of widely accessible information has mutated, in some corners, into a hive of bigotry home to everyone everywhere. Studies on how the internet affects our brains will be conducted until our dying days. The online world has taken much from the living.
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