This was not widely available, if at all, at the time this movie was made. (He is able to do this by plugging his phone into his computer and using his phone line and minutes to connect to the internet. When he wakes up he gets online again to see where Howdy is. Gage, horribly dejected, sleeps in his car outside of the raid locale. They use this as an opportunity for sting operation but, they bust in on the wrong house. Using that information, they pose as a teen, draw him out and he invites them to a party. That’s when they get the name CaptHowdy and the niece looks up his member profile. They contact the internet service provider and get account information for who his daughter was last chatting with in the chat room before she logged out. Coupling that with the kind of torture that Tiana was subjected to, they surmise that their suspect is into body art.įurthermore, Gage’s niece enlightens him on how the girls how been using chat rooms as of late to meet guys. The owner of this piercing can put a finger through the piercing hole for this spike, that’s how big it is. They also find a septum spike (nose piercing spike) that is absolutely huge. Tiana is inside, nude, her mouth sewn shut, tortured and dead. Classic Investigation 101, check the trunk. Through the investigation Gage is alerted to Tiana’s car being found in a lake. He begins to investigate the girls’ disappearance. Gen’s father, Mike Gage, is a local detective on the police department. The next day, they don’t come home and parents get worried. So, they get his address and go to the party. They look at his profile and see that he’s a teenager, like them, he goes to a different school and he’s telling them his parents are gone for the weekend. After a couple of messages are exchanged, he invites them to a party. Gen is chatting with a screenname CaptHowdy. Gen is online in a chat room, the hot thing to do to socialize while stuck in the house at the time. Two girls, Genevieve and Tiana, are hanging out one night at Tiana’s house. We were still getting used to the idea of everyone having cell phones and people were still using pagers in the late 90s.)īut, before I go any further, let me tell you the story. Most businesses didn’t even have websites yet. For instance, in 1998 when this movie came out, it was NOT standard procedural information to include an email address on personal information forms. Most adults in the 90s didn’t really understand the internet and the kids had no concept of predators in chat rooms. Keep in mind that this was all very brand new. The big craze at the beginning was chat rooms and the famous “You’ve got mail” message when you got an email. Back then we pretty much only had AOL and there wasn’t much in the way of “searching the web”. (Quick history lesson for those who have never lived without the internet: The internet wasn’t fully commercialized and made available to the public until 1995. This story takes place on the cusp of the birth of the internet. A story so real it could actually happen and being a true crime buff, I can assure you that there have been many similar cases throughout the country for decades.

What we have is Hollywood foreshadowing what would later become one of the easiest ways for predators to initiate contact with their victims. It delves deep into the depravity of a tormented human psyche and is truly one of the only movies that has ever REALLY creeped me out. Written by Dee Snider and directed by John Pieplow, this has been one of my favorite horror/thriller films for a long time.

Strangeland 1998 full movie