Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Jerrie It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Raul Faust Considering that horror movies coming out this year are ALL involving exorcism and possession stuff-- which are extremely saturated--, I thought that watching a nineties horror would be a nice idea. In fact, it would, if it wasn't around 11 p.m. in my serene neighborhood. "Strangeland" is in fact a very STRANGE movie, which can be noticed, from the get go, with the weird directing that sometimes focuses on the characters' feet. Also, I had no idea that in the nineties people had personal computers that supported instantaneous video and audio; I mean, in Brazil that was an utopia back then. The film as a whole is very dark, with scenes of mutilation, torture and every freak stuff that you can imagine. Many of those aspects look a lot like Jigsaw's plans-- even if "Saw" came out years later. The bad thing in this plot is the over-the-top character of Smallwood; if he was depressed and pessimist as he said he was, why didn't he ever commit suicide? Besides, how did Mike find the horror house, given that the only noticeable thing in the audio was a dog's barking? How on earth was he standing right in front of the house? And also, HOW ON EARTH a cop can get beaten up by a crazy guy who's been confined in a mental institution for about 4 years? It feels VERY hard to believe. The ending also is a relative let down, but I can't deny that "Strangeland" is an entertaining film for those who like the genre, like me.

qormi Pure trash...the acting was unbelievably bad. The actors who played the parents of a missing teenage girl are so inept, they can't even register the glimmer of an emotion that would indicate anxiety or concern. The man who played the villain was about as scary as Kevin Nieland doing the news on Saturday Night Live. How such an amateurish film was ever sold is beyond me. Then, there are the victims whose mouths are laced shut. Hello- --they're not shoes....Lacing one's mouth shut would entail a fair amount of bleeding and swelling....and once the victim was rescued and unlaced, she had no scars....One huge plot hole....the detective magically located the killer'd house...twice...without any explanation of how he found it...This movie was a complete bore.

jimevarts This sounded like it was going to be like Silence of the Lambs or Zodiac or something, but it wasn't. It really was more like one of the Halloween movies without all the jump scenes. It was a little like Plan 9 From Outer Space in the sense that the main bad guy kept making inane speeches that made me want to go get a snack without pushing pause. The idea of a person who is so crazy that he would abduct people and torture them as a form of spiritual enlightenment is actually an interesting idea, but the execution was too made-for-TV feeling. I have to say it was better than I expected for a movie written and starring Dee Snider. A good first effort. Maybe he'll learn some lessons and his next effort will be less clumsy.

AntoineMDevine First, the acting is horrible. I get the archetype of the disaffected detective, but disaffected does not mean disconnected. Gage is an iceberg except when he finds his daughter, than he becomes an emotional wreck before allowing himself to get beat up by a skinny kid. How did he make detective without learning self-defense? When he found the house, why didn't he call for backup? Next, the chat scene is completely unbelievable. There's no way you set up a new chat account and go right after the subject, and get an invitation for a face to face in 15 minutes. It's takes the FBI weeks, sometimes months, to get a suspect to trust them enough to meet. They were made as soon as they changed the profile, which was also bogus. The whole idea of a chat-room is anonymity. You can't get exact names and addresses. If you could, there would be no point to having a screen name. Also, ISPs did not store IM chats then. Only recently has the technology been developed to store them with a third party service. The technology didn't exist in 1998. At best, they might be able to trace the screen name back to a credit card.The tracing scene was also a joke. The guy's father was a marine. He had to learn something about tactics, like, I don't know, using an untraceable peer-to-peer network for his computer.As someone commented earlier, the 2nd half of the movie is pointless. If you are a seasoned detective, and you get a call from the guy who kidnapped your daughter, don't you grab her up right away? He seemed surprised that she was taken again after the nut-case sees him let the lynch mob take him. His powers of deduction are nonexistent.When this movie was released, it was scarier. This time, I spent more time laughing at all the mistakes and bad acting. This is now a 5***** rotten tomato.