It wasn’t until 1994 – by which point Twisted Sister and Widowmaker had imploded, and Dee was looking down the barrel of bankruptcy – that Horror-Teria got revisited and reworked yet again. It took bites off of every other slasher movie.” “It was a real derivative slasher film it was really bad,” Dee said of Helltown in a 1998 IndieWire interview. The singer returned to the idea in 1985, turning it into a slasher script called Helltown. Presumably, that’s because Twisted Sister were preoccupied with becoming one of the biggest heavy metal bands on the eastern seaboard. The plan was for its concept to be the heart of a rock opera, but he never found the time to finish it. He dodges prison time on a technicality, then gets revenge-killed by townsfolk Freddy Krueger-style.ĭee originally wrote Horror-Teria in 1983. The track’s about a serial killer also called Captain Howdy (named after the nickname that the main character of The Exorcist gives to her demon possessor), who lures “lovely little boys and girls” into his house and murders them. The movie’s a feature-length take on the Twisted Sister song Horror-Teria: the two-part centrepiece of the band’s biggest album, 1984’s Stay Hungry. After all, this was a personal passion project that went back fifteen years. So many of Strangeland’s issues boil down to the fact that Dee demanded a starring role and complete creative power, and would only let someone happy to give him those things sit in the director’s chair. Factor in a no-name director and the lack of any then-mainstream movie star and what’s left is an outing that couldn’t even recoup half of its shoestring $1.8 million budget. Then there are such subtler details as the score and cinematography, all of which are forgettable at best. Plus, although Strangeland’s infatuation with the modern primitive – a subculture that believes in personal evolution through body modification – could be fascinating, all it does is make its villain a diet Pinhead that tortures with tattoos and needles. The most memorable performance comes from Robert Englund, but even then it’s due to the hilarity of the scene where he hornily dances on the back of his sofa. Dee didn’t write himself decent dialogue and instead spews pseudo-philosophical rants, which, when combined with everybody else’s lack of personality, amounts to a cat-and-mouse narrative no one cares about. Howdy’s redemption and relapse could drive a TV series, yet get maybe fifteen minutes of screentime, sandwiched between first and third acts laden with serial killer cliches. However, the film handles these questions with the deft of a baby juggling chainsaws. Should prison seek to change people or punish them? Who gets to decide if and when justice has been served? And how far can a person go before they’re beyond forgiveness? Imprisoning and rehabilitating the killer only for an unforgiving society to make him relapse into insanity evokes still-conscientious questions. It also has some interesting ideas on how to subvert the slasher genre. To Strangeland’s credit, the soundtrack fucking slays.
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