It is now the 1990s. Snider clearly still desires to cause parental outrage, but all his crossdressing theatrics are passé and here he now models himself as a Marilyn Manson copycat. As such the film co-opts the imagery of 1990s body piercing, tattooing and body art counterculture – there’s even a speech about the right gauges of metal to pierce with. And Snider cuts a freakish figure with tattooed body, red mohawk and with piercings all over his cheeks, nose and brow, even his eyelids. There are some fairly wild images of whippings, seeing Snider strung up and being hung by his nipples and victims with their lips sewn shut, their bodies pierced, impaled through spikes and hung on chains (even if only in the end all the body-piercing, BDSM imagery has been borrowed for old hat shock imagery).

Its moderately charged wildness aside, Strangeland is rather confused. One senses there is something oddly autobiographical to it all upon Dee Snider’s part. There’s the shock rock role he obviously relishes, and one that he was charged with by parental groups of the 1980s – of the demoniac figure corrupting and torturing children. [The character Captain Howdy is even named after Linda Blair’s invisible playmate in The Exorcist (1973)]. Snider happily plays into it all. But then oddly about halfway through in an abrupt and not at all convincing change of pace, Hendricks is turned into a pathetic figure of sympathy – going from a roaring sadistic tormentor to a painfully shy social reject (with Dee Snider looking for all the world like the man out of Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting) being persecuted by parental lynch mobs. Here the film changes its sympathies from seeing Hendricks as an insane, sadistic monster to being on his side, where we see that it is the conservative parental groups that drive him over the edge, before in the final act he returns back to being a sadistic psycho again. The final act of the film has the diligent detective pursuing and eliminating Hendricks, seeing him as entirely evil, something that the film has no doubts is a good thing. It is this central confusion of sympathies, with the film wanting to portray Hendricks/Howdy as someone irredeemably evil yet also sympathetically persecuted, that gives Strangeland such an odd mixed message. Certainly Dee Snider is not enough of an actor, not much of one at all really, to be able to make the complexities of the part convincing.

Dee Snider has announced a Strangeland 2: Discple, which is supposed to be filming for a 2010 release.