Dee Snider’s Strangeland (1998)
The big surprise: Dee Snider actually has an idea
Going into Strangeland, I expected something roughly on the level of Brainscan: a goofy, dated, technology-based ’90s horror movie that might be entertaining primarily because of how badly it had aged.
And Strangeland is absolutely goofy. It is absolutely dated. It is frequently very, very dumb.
But it’s also much more thoughtful than I expected it to be.
Dee Snider clearly saw The Silence of the Lambs. He also clearly had a genuine interest in body modification, underground culture and the darker corners of the still-new Internet. But underneath all of that, he actually seems interested in something more complicated: Can someone who has done genuinely monstrous things be mentally ill, receive treatment, become stable and actually be rehabilitated? And what happens when everyone around him refuses to accept that rehabilitation?
That’s a much more interesting question than I expected Dee Snider’s Strangeland to ask.
And, amazingly, for a stretch in the middle of the movie, it almost works.
Captain Howdy
Snider plays Carlton Hendricks, whose online persona is “Captain Howdy,” because apparently Dee Snider watched The Exorcist at some point and thought, “That’s a cool fucking name.”
There doesn’t seem to be any other reason for it.
Early in the movie, Captain Howdy is appropriately repulsive. He’s trolling Internet chat rooms, finding teenagers, luring them to his house and subjecting them to torture and extreme body modification.
And Snider obviously has a genuine fascination with this stuff.
The clubs, the piercing, the tattoos, the body-modification culture — that material doesn’t feel like somebody who Googled “weird shit teenagers do” and wrote a horror movie about it. There’s a certain sincerity to it. Snider seems genuinely interested in these people and this subculture.
Which helps because he doesn’t ultimately want Captain Howdy to remain a simple monster.
After Hendricks is captured and institutionalized, he’s medicated. He’s treated. And eventually he’s released back into society.
And that’s where the movie becomes unexpectedly interesting.
Because Hendricks isn’t immediately Captain Howdy again.
He’s this fragile, heavily medicated, socially destroyed man trying to exist after doing horrific things. And against every expectation I had going into this movie, I actually started to feel sorry for him.
That is a pretty remarkable trick for the movie to pull off considering what we’ve watched him do.
The movie’s best idea
Then Robert Englund shows up and essentially plays Cousin Eddie.
I don’t know what the fuck Englund was doing here.
He’s the leader of this angry group of townspeople who decide the justice system has failed them by allowing Hendricks back into society, so they take matters into their own hands.
And the performance is AWFUL.
Not fun-awful. Not Freddy-Krueger-chewing-scenery awful. He’s basically Cousin Eddie from Christmas Vacation, except Cousin Eddie has organized a lynch mob.
But dramatically, what happens to Hendricks is actually the movie’s best idea.
The system has done everything it’s theoretically supposed to do. Hendricks was caught. He was institutionalized. He was treated. He’s medicated. Doctors have determined that he can function in society.
But society doesn’t give a shit.
People want revenge.
And their revenge against him ultimately becomes the catalyst that helps recreate the monster they’re afraid of.
That’s interesting!
There’s a version of Strangeland that really digs into that contradiction: What does rehabilitation mean if society refuses to permit someone to be rehabilitated?
And even more provocatively: If you brutalize someone because you’re convinced he’s still a monster, and that brutality helps turn him back into a monster, what responsibility do you have for what happens next?
That is WAY more interesting than I expected this movie to be.
Unfortunately: the movie is also really stupid
The problem is that Strangeland doesn’t trust that idea enough.
Eventually it needs Captain Howdy back.
So psychosis essentially becomes an on/off switch.
Medication = Carlton Hendricks.
No medication = CAPTAIN HOWDY.
At one point his medication literally gets run over by a car.
His pill bottle is crushed beneath a tire.
It’s symbolism so mighty you half expect Dee Snider to jump into frame and yell, “DO YOU GET IT?!”
And that’s where the movie loses a lot of the complexity it had accidentally — or maybe intentionally — built.
Because mental illness doesn’t work like a light switch. You don’t crush somebody’s Prozac under a Buick and suddenly unleash Buffalo Bill.
Kevin Gage and the world’s most technologically defeated police officer
The other enormous problem is our hero, Detective Mike Gage.
This guy is supposed to be the stoic, emotionally impenetrable cop at the center of the story.
Unfortunately, he’s boring as shit.
The movie gives him almost nothing resembling a personality except for one truly bizarre recurring character trait:
He is perpetually baffled by computers.
For roughly the first thirty minutes, every time this man approaches a computer, he looks at a mouse, or a cable, or a monitor like someone has handed a caveman the controls to the space shuttle.
Then he sighs.
That’s the character development.
Fortunately his niece is played by a very young Amy Smart, and she understands THE INTERNET, so she can explain cyberspace to the ancient police detective.
His partner isn’t much better. He’s essentially Gage’s id: where Gage is supposedly stoic, the partner is constantly angry, impulsive and yelling.
Neither character is particularly interesting, and neither performance does much to elevate the material.
That’s one of the biggest reasons the movie never becomes what it almost could have been.
The women get almost nothing
Elizabeth Peña plays Gage’s wife, Toni, and she’s perfectly good because Elizabeth Peña was generally perfectly good.
But there’s almost nothing there for her to play.
She’s The Wife.
That’s basically the character.
Late in the movie, she suddenly seems furious with her husband for not somehow preventing the townspeople from attacking Hendricks, which is especially strange because earlier she’s understandably expressing her own desire for revenge against the man who abducted and tortured their daughter.
Maybe I missed a connective scene somewhere, but it felt less like character development and more like the screenplay suddenly needed her to occupy a different emotional position.
Linda Cardellini, though, is good.
She’s extremely young here, playing Gage’s teenage daughter Genevieve, and she’s probably the most natural performer in the movie.
It’s also bizarre seeing Linda Cardellini and Amy Smart pop up in this thing just before both of them became much more recognizable.
The Internet time capsule
One thing I genuinely love about Strangeland is that it captures an incredibly specific moment in Internet history.
This isn’t the modern Internet.
It’s not even really the AOL Internet that Hollywood usually remembers.
It’s that weird mid-to-late-’90s period of chat rooms, handles, private conversations and the novelty — and danger — of suddenly being able to talk anonymously with complete strangers.
The movie creates its own fake services instead of leaning heavily on AOL branding, and I actually like that.
There’s early streaming video. There are chat rooms. There are private messages — IMs, I think we called them, because “DM” hadn’t really become the terminology yet.
And the technology is ridiculous in places, but there’s also something fascinating about seeing filmmakers trying to understand this new thing essentially as it was happening.
Movies didn’t have very long to capture this particular version of the Internet.
Strangeland did.
So even where it’s silly, it’s become this weird little cultural artifact.
Is this a Dee Snider vanity project?
Yes.
Absolutely.
Come on.
Dee Snider wrote the movie, stars in the movie, created this elaborately pierced, tattooed, physically imposing horror character and spends a significant amount of time displaying the fact that middle-aged Dee Snider was still in extremely good shape.
This is a vanity project.
But I don’t think that’s inherently a criticism.
Because Snider is actually pretty good.
He’s certainly not the worst actor in Strangeland. Not even close.
And more importantly, he clearly CARES about this movie.
He has ideas.
He wants to say something about body modification, mental illness, rehabilitation, revenge, Internet culture and the way society defines monsters.
That’s ambitious as hell for what could very easily have just been “Dee Snider plays a scary pierced serial killer.”
And I have to give him credit for that.
ADDITIONAL NOTES
Bile — authenticity followed by bullshit
One reason the club material feels considerably more authentic than the movie’s depiction of cops investigating the Internet is that Bile is actually performing in the film.
They’re not actors pretending to be an industrial band. That’s Bile performing “In League,” and their presence gives those scenes an authenticity that a lot of late-’90s movies trying to portray underground goth/industrial culture absolutely did not have.
But apparently their experience with the movie wasn’t entirely happy.
Despite appearing onscreen and contributing “In League” to the soundtrack, Bile went uncredited in the finished film, something the band publicly complained about afterward. That deserves mentioning because Strangeland was clearly benefiting from the credibility of an actual band from that scene while simultaneously failing to properly acknowledge them.
It’s particularly ironic in a movie where Dee Snider’s obvious familiarity with alternative culture is one of its strongest qualities.
The fire stunt is fucking GREAT
For all my complaints about the filmmaking, I have to give Strangeland enormous credit for the fire stunt near the end.
That shit is spectacular.
Captain Howdy is set on fire and goes crashing around the room — including into/against the walls — and this isn’t some little controlled “actor’s sleeve is burning” stunt.
The guy is ON FUCKING FIRE.
It’s one of those old-school practical stunts where my reaction stopped being about the movie and became:
“Jesus Christ, that is an actual human being doing that.”
And especially considering this is a roughly million-dollar independent horror movie, it’s impressive as hell.
There are places where Strangeland looks and feels cheap. That stunt does not.
If anything, it’s another example of this weird problem the movie has: every once in a while something happens that’s so much better than the material surrounding it that I start imagining the substantially better Strangeland that almost existed.
The astonishingly rapid re-Captain-Howdyification of Carlton Hendricks
There is, however, one logistical question that I cannot get past.
After the Cousin Eddie Memorial Lynching Society nearly hangs Hendricks, the movie needs Captain Howdy back for the third act.
Fine.
Except Hendricks doesn’t merely become psychotic again.
HE BECOMES CAPTAIN HOWDY AGAIN.
Like… physically.
Twenty minutes ago this motherfucker looked like an Amish midwife.
Now suddenly he’s got the red mohawk, the piercings, the whole fucking Captain Howdy presentation again.
WHEN DID HE DO THIS?
Where did he get all the jewelry?
Did he stop at Piercing Pagoda?
How long does it take to put all of those piercings back in?
Were the holes still open after his institutionalization?
Where did he get the hair dye?
Did he already own clippers?
We’re watching what should be a psychologically significant transformation — Hendricks abandoning his rehabilitated identity and deliberately reconstructing Captain Howdy — and the movie skips the entire thing.
And that’s a shame because THAT’S A SCENE!
Imagine Hendricks standing in front of a mirror, slowly putting those piercings back in.
Dyeing the hair.
Reconstructing the person he supposedly no longer is.
Watching Carlton disappear and Captain Howdy return.
That could have been disturbing as hell.
Instead the movie basically goes:
MEDICATION CRUSHED.
PSYCHOSIS: ON.
CAPTAIN HOWDY SKIN: EQUIPPED.
And we’re off to the climax.
It reinforces my biggest problem with the second half of the movie. The middle briefly treats Hendricks’ mental illness and rehabilitation with surprising complexity.
Then the screenplay needs its horror villain back and suddenly everything becomes mechanical.
The tragedy isn’t merely that Hendricks relapses. The potentially fascinating idea is that the mob brutalizes this fragile, medicated man so badly that he consciously chooses to become the monster they already believe he is.
That’s the movie.
And Strangeland almost fucking realizes it.
The frustrating thing about Strangeland
This is one of those movies where I always say, “The script needed another couple of drafts.”
Except here I really mean it.
Because there’s a genuinely good movie lurking somewhere inside Strangeland.
That’s what makes it frustrating.
This isn’t a fundamentally stupid movie that couldn’t possibly have worked. It’s a movie with a surprisingly good central idea surrounded by bad characters, weak performances, clumsy psychology and scenes that desperately needed another pass.
Give the script a couple more drafts.
Give the detective an actual personality.
Make the wife’s emotional progression make sense.
Let Robert Englund play something resembling a human being.
Treat Hendricks’ relapse with the same complexity you gave his rehabilitation.
And suddenly you’ve got something.
Instead, Strangeland is this bizarre near miss.
It’s dumb.
Sometimes REALLY dumb.
But it’s also considerably more thoughtful, sincere and interesting than I ever expected Dee Snider’s Internet serial-killer vanity project to be.
And weirdly?
I kind of respect the hell out of him for trying.
STRANGELAND — PRODUCTION / RESEARCH NOTES
BUDGET AND BOX OFFICE
So, Strangeland was not an expensive movie.
The generally reported budget is about $1.1 million, which honestly makes some of what they managed to get onscreen considerably more impressive — particularly the practical effects and that absolutely bonkers fire stunt near the end.
The movie opened theatrically on October 2, 1998, through Artisan, in only about 315 theaters.
It made $373,288 its opening weekend.
After that, the numbers fall off pretty dramatically. Depending on which box-office database you use, its final domestic gross was somewhere between about $631,000 and $713,000.
So even using the more generous number, it didn’t earn back its reported production budget theatrically — never mind prints, advertising and distribution.
This was a theatrical flop.
But it also wasn’t some $30-million studio disaster. It was a weird, approximately million-dollar independent horror movie that got a limited national theatrical release, disappeared pretty quickly and then gradually developed the kind of cult audience you’d expect a Dee Snider serial-killer movie to develop.
JOHN PIEPLOW — DIRECTOR
The director is John Pieplow, and his résumé is kind of fascinating because there really isn’t much of one in feature films.
Before Strangeland, his other notable feature directing credit was a 1996 movie called Jurassic Women.
And that’s basically it.
So despite John Pieplow being the credited director, this really does feel like Dee Snider’s movie.
Snider wrote it.
Snider produced it.
Snider stars in it.
His music is all over it.
His interests — body modification, heavy metal, outsider culture, pain as ritual, Internet culture — are all over it.
It’s even called Dee Snider’s Strangeland.
So this is an interesting kind of vanity project where the auteur is not technically the director.
Pieplow did apparently have a background shooting commercials, and that’s actually part of how they ended up filming in Colorado.
Producer David Bushell later talked about scouting Colorado with Snider and Pieplow. Pieplow had previously shot commercials there, and they specifically liked Colorado because they thought it had a different look from the usual indie-film locations.
So Denver and Colorado Springs weren’t simply chosen because they were cheap.
They apparently wanted this movie to look geographically different.
CINEMATOGRAPHER GORAN PAVICEVIC
The cinematographer is Goran Pavicevic, and his background is considerably more serious than I expected from this movie.
Pavicevic studied filmmaking at the University of Arts in Belgrade, where he eventually taught filmmaking himself.
Then he came to the United States and studied cinematography at the American Film Institute, earning an MFA and receiving the Joseph and Olga Auerbach Scholarship for cinematography.
So this isn’t somebody Dee Snider found outside a Denver metal club and handed a Panavision camera.
This guy was formally trained.
After Strangeland, he shot All Over the Guy and A Trip to Karabakh and won cinematography awards for later work. But here’s the fun part: he eventually became an additional/second-unit cinematographer or camera operator on movies including:
The Pursuit of Happyness, America’s Sweethearts, This Is 40, Rock of Ages, Beautiful Boy and Fast & Furious 6.
That’s a legitimate career.
And knowing that actually makes sense to me, because for as amateurish as Strangeland sometimes feels dramatically, there are individual shots and sequences where the movie looks considerably more competent than the material around them.
I think Pavicevic deserves some of the credit for that.
And again: $1.1 million.
There are definitely moments where this looks like a cheap movie.
But there are also moments where it looks better than a million-dollar Dee Snider horror movie has any business looking.
KEVIN GAGE — WAIT… THAT’S WAINGRO?!
Here’s the casting revelation that blew my mind:
Detective Mike Gage is played by Kevin Gage.
Kevin Gage is WAINGRO FROM HEAT.
That’s the fucking guy.
He’s the psychopath who screws up the armored-car robbery at the beginning of Heat, kills the guard and becomes the loose end that De Niro spends the rest of the movie wanting to eliminate.
And getting that role was apparently a huge deal for Gage.
According to Gage’s own biography, he’d been trying to establish himself as an actor for about thirteen years when he auditioned for Michael Mann.
He went through roughly three months and eleven readings before Mann finally cast him as Waingro.
So here’s what makes Strangeland even funnier to me:
You have an actor who proved that he can project this incredible amount of menace and unpredictability in one of the great crime movies of the 1990s…
…and Strangeland casts him as the world’s most emotionally constipated police detective, whose primary character trait for the first half-hour is apparently:
“Computers make me tired.”
He sits down at a computer.
He looks confused.
He sighs.
Someone explains the Internet to him.
This happens over and over again.
So I actually want to cut Kevin Gage a little more slack than I initially did.
Because I’ve seen Heat.
The man can act.
I think Detective Gage is simply a badly written, badly directed character.
THE SOUNDTRACK IS A WEIRDLY IMPORTANT 1998 TIME CAPSULE
The soundtrack may actually be one of the coolest things associated with this movie.
It came out in September 1998, just before the movie, and it’s this enormous 18-track slab of late-’90s heavy music.
And what’s fascinating about it now is where it lands historically.
You’ve got the established metal generation:
Megadeth.
Pantera.
Anthrax.
Twisted Sister.
You’ve got the industrial and alternative-metal world:
Marilyn Manson.
Bile.
The Clay People.
You’ve got the emerging nu-metal generation:
Sevendust.
Coal Chamber.
Snot.
Hed PE.
You’ve got Soulfly, whose first album had only come out in April of 1998 after Max Cavalera left Sepultura.
And then you’ve got artists who are standing right on the edge of becoming MASSIVE.
System of a Down is on here with “Marmalade.”
Their debut album had only been released on June 30, 1998.
This soundtrack arrives a couple of months later.
Then you’ve got Kid Rock featuring Eminem doing “Fuck Off.”
Kid Rock’s Devil Without a Cause had only been released on August 18, 1998 — basically a month before this soundtrack.
And Eminem?
His major-label breakthrough, The Slim Shady LP, wouldn’t come out until February 23, 1999.
So Strangeland has Eminem on its soundtrack five months before most of America knew who Eminem was.
That’s fucking wild.
And suddenly this isn’t just a collection of mediocre late-’90s metal.
It’s almost an archaeological sample of exactly where heavy music was in 1998.
The old guard is still standing.
Industrial metal is huge.
Nu metal is exploding.
Rap and metal are colliding.
System of a Down is just arriving.
Kid Rock is about to explode.
Eminem hasn’t exploded yet.
And Dee Snider somehow gets all of that onto the soundtrack of his million-dollar body-piercing serial-killer movie.
That’s genuinely impressive.
AND DEE SNIDER BUILDS HIS OWN LITTLE MUSICAL UNIVERSE
There’s also a lot of Dee Snider DNA threaded through the album.
The soundtrack opens with Snider himself doing “Inconclusion.”
Dayinthelife performs “Street Justice,” which Snider wrote.
Crisis performs “Captain Howdy,” another Snider composition.
And then Twisted Sister reunites to contribute “Heroes Are Hard to Find.”
Contemporary reporting actually noted that Twisted Sister was reuniting specifically to record material connected with Strangeland.
So this wasn’t simply:
“Let’s license some metal songs so the movie seems cool.”
Snider was clearly treating the soundtrack as part of the entire project.
And contemporary reviews of the soundtrack were actually substantially kinder than reviews of the movie.
AllMusic later called it one of the better heavy-metal soundtracks, specifically praising the combination of established bands, emerging acts, unreleased songs and rarities.
Which is basically where I landed watching the movie:
This soundtrack is much less shitty than I expected it to be.
RECEPTION
The movie itself was… not similarly embraced.
The contemporary reviews were brutal.
The Los Angeles Times basically described it as an accumulation of disturbing imagery that eventually becomes numbing rather than frightening.
The Boston Phoenix tore apart the dialogue, direction and storytelling and called the Robert Englund appearance wasted.
Other reviews similarly complained that Snider had potentially interesting ideas about body modification, rehabilitation and Internet culture but buried them under lousy dialogue and inept filmmaking.
And that’s interesting because it’s almost exactly how I feel about the movie.
Today, Rotten Tomatoes has it at only about 7 percent from critics.
But the audience score is dramatically higher — around 63 percent.
And THAT makes perfect sense.
Because this is exactly the kind of movie critics were going to annihilate in 1998…
…and exactly the kind of movie that would accumulate people twenty years later saying:
“No, no, no — hear me out. Strangeland is kind of awesome.”
I don’t think it’s awesome.
But I understand those people.
Because there’s something here.
THE THING I KEEP COMING BACK TO
The more I learn about the production, the more I think the frustrating thing about Strangeland is that Dee Snider wasn’t just fucking around.
This wasn’t:
“Hey, I’m Dee Snider. Give me a million dollars so I can play a cool serial killer.”
Well…
It was definitely some of that.
But he was also legitimately interested in Internet culture before Hollywood really understood it.
He was interested in body modification and the people involved in it.
He was interested in mental illness.
He was interested in rehabilitation.
He was interested in whether society actually believes that someone can be rehabilitated.
And musically, he had a surprisingly good sense of what was happening at that exact moment in heavy music.
He just wasn’t a sufficiently experienced screenwriter to pull all of those ideas together.
And John Pieplow wasn’t a sufficiently strong director to rescue them.
Which is why I keep landing in the same place:
There’s a legitimately good movie trapped inside Strangeland.
And that almost makes it more frustrating than if the whole thing were simply garbage.
Bottom Five Body Modifications
Had to be careful here because we already did Bottom Five Transformations
#5 — Erik, Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
I’m starting with Erik from Final Destination: Bloodlines, because if there has ever been a movie character who should have stayed as far away from an MRI machine as humanly possible, it’s the heavily tattooed professional piercer who has apparently decided that every available portion of his anatomy requires metal ornamentation.
And yes, that includes a Prince Albert.
Erik winds up trapped in an MRI room where Death begins using all that metal against him. His piercings start getting violently ripped out, including the genital one, before the magnetic field grabs a wheelchair and turns the whole sequence into one of those wonderfully elaborate Final Destination deaths where you spend several minutes thinking, “Surely THIS is going to kill him,” only for the movie to find something worse.
The best production detail is that the Prince Albert was actually Richard Harmon’s idea. Harmon thought that if Erik really was a tattoo artist and professional piercer who had modified practically everything else, then of course this lunatic would have one of those too. The filmmakers agreed and incorporated it into the death.
And Bloodlines was a massive comeback for the series. Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein directed it, Christian Sebaldt shot it, and the movie made about $318 million worldwide against a reported $50 million budget, easily becoming the biggest Final Destination movie financially.
So my lesson here is simple: if your body contains enough metal that entering an MRI requires a full inventory, maybe you’ve modified enough.
#4 — Frank, Hellraiser (1987)
For number four, I’m going with Frank in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, because this gets closer to something that actually comes up in Strangeland: the idea that pain itself can become pleasure—or that mutilating and transforming the body can somehow unlock another level of experience.
Frank isn’t satisfied with ordinary sensation anymore. He solves the Lament Configuration looking for something beyond conventional pleasure and instead gets the Cenobites, who famously no longer recognize much distinction between pleasure and pain.
And ultimately Frank gets exactly what he went looking for: hooks buried into his flesh from every direction, pulling him apart piece by piece.
What makes this especially appropriate is that Barker has explicitly talked about wanting Hellraiser to explore the pleasure-pain threshold even further than the finished film ultimately could. He was contractually required to deliver an R-rated movie and said some of the more extreme sadomasochistic material had to be curtailed. Even Frank’s final destruction originally ran considerably longer, with Barker saying the face and body tearing were originally much more explicit before censorship cuts.
And visually, Barker wasn’t simply trying to make Frank disgusting. He based the skinless Frank imagery partly on the anatomical illustrations of Andreas Vesalius—flayed human figures Barker found simultaneously beautiful and horrifying. He specifically wanted Frank’s exposed body to have a kind of “perverse beauty.”
This was also Barker’s feature directing debut, adapted from his own The Hellbound Heart. Robin Vidgeon shot it, Christopher Young supplied that enormous gothic score and the thing cost only around $1 million but ultimately became a major commercial success and launched the entire franchise.
So Frank makes the list because Captain Howdy and the Cenobites could probably have a disturbingly productive conversation about the relationship between pain, pleasure and the limits of the human body.
#3 — The Surgical Failures, Escape from L.A. (1996)
Number three is not one person. It is an entire community of plastic-surgery nightmares living beneath Beverly Hills in John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A.
Snake gets captured by what the movie calls “surgical failures”—people who have had so many facelifts and implants that, according to the film, their muscles have basically turned to Jell-O. Now they survive by kidnapping healthy people and harvesting fresh body parts under the direction of the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills, played under mountains of makeup by the great Bruce Campbell.
This is the body-modification nightmare taken to its logical Carpenter extreme: everybody wanted to look younger, prettier and more perfect until they collectively turned themselves into a colony of grotesques who now require spare human components just to remain functional.
And Bruce Campbell is virtually unrecognizable. The sequence uses heavy practical prosthetic work associated with legendary makeup artist Rick Baker, which helps explain why these people look so wonderfully disgusting rather than merely digitally distorted.
The movie itself was Carpenter’s long-awaited sequel to Escape from New York, again starring Kurt Russell, with Carpenter, Russell and Debra Hill writing the screenplay. Gary B. Kibbe handled the cinematography and Carpenter co-scored it with Shirley Walker. It was considerably more expensive than the original—roughly $50 million—and was a commercial disappointment, making only about $25.5 million domestically.
But this particular scene has aged beautifully because the joke is incredibly simple:
Even after Los Angeles falls into a dystopian hellscape, Beverly Hills still finds a way to fuck itself up with cosmetic surgery.
#2 — Evan’s Nipple Ring, Final Destination 2 (2003)
Yes, Final Destination makes the list twice.
And this one isn’t even technically responsible for anyone’s death. It’s here because twenty-plus years after seeing it, I could still remember the visceral sensation of watching Tony Todd take a pair of pliers to a dead man’s nipple ring.
After Evan Lewis dies, Kimberly and Clear visit mortician William Bludworth, and while Bludworth gives them one of his wonderfully cryptic explanations about Death’s design, he’s preparing Evan’s body for cremation. He removes a gold tooth—and then takes hold of Evan’s nipple ring with pliers and rips the fucking thing out.
That’s it.
That’s enough.
I don’t need an MRI machine. I don’t need hooks from Hell. I don’t need a whole underground Beverly Hills organ farm. Tony Todd plus pliers plus nipple ring gets this onto the list entirely through sympathetic physical discomfort.
And I like pairing it with Bloodlines because apparently Final Destination has been conducting a two-decade campaign against body jewelry.
Final Destination 2 was directed by former stuntman and second-unit specialist David R. Ellis, which makes sense when you consider that extraordinary opening freeway pileup. Gary Capo was the cinematographer, Shirley Walker returned to score it and the movie made roughly $90 million worldwide on a $26 million budget.
The freeway sequence became one of the franchise’s defining pieces of filmmaking—and, somewhat hilariously, the filmmakers discovered during testing that real logs didn’t bounce dramatically enough, so the tumbling logs we all remain terrified of driving behind were created digitally.
But for me, none of that matters.
It’s the nipple ring.
No.
#1 — Demi Moore, Striptease (1996)
And number one is Demi Moore in Striptease.
This one is different from everything else on the list, because I’m not really putting Demi Moore’s breast augmentation here because I think breast augmentation itself is inherently bad—or even simply because I personally preferred how Demi Moore looked earlier in her career.
Although, for the record, as someone who had a VHS recording of About Last Night in the house as a young man, I had already conducted what I would describe as extensive research into whether Demi Moore required physical improvement.
My conclusion was no.
The reason this is number one is what Demi Moore represents: the completely insane standard Hollywood has historically placed on actresses, where an extraordinarily beautiful woman can still be made to feel that maintaining marquee status requires becoming somehow even more perfect.
And the story becomes considerably more interesting when you look at what Moore has subsequently said about that era.
Moore has acknowledged that she was repeatedly told to lose weight and that she responded by placing an enormous amount of her self-worth into controlling her body. She’s described periods of eating disorder and extreme exercise. While making Indecent Proposal, she has said she was nursing an infant while getting up before dawn and biking roughly 30 miles each way to Paramount, then working a full shooting day. Looking back, she’s described the pressure and humiliation of being told her body needed changing and, even more importantly, how brutally she internalized it.
And that makes what happened almost thirty years later with The Substance remarkable.
Here is Demi Moore—after spending part of the 1990s as one of the most photographed, scrutinized and commercially valuable female bodies in the world—playing a woman who is told she has aged out of desirability and becomes so desperate to manufacture a “better” version of herself that she literally destroys herself.
Moore has said that her own experiences with body image were part of why she understood The Substance so deeply, describing the film almost as a completion of the process she’d begun by confronting those experiences in her memoir.
There’s another irony here: Striptease made Moore the highest-paid actress in Hollywood at the time, with a $12.5 million salary, and instead of that being universally celebrated as an actress achieving pay parity at the top of the business, the press turned the salary and her body into part of the spectacle. She was even derisively nicknamed “Gimme Moore.” Moore was still talking about that backlash in 2026, saying essentially: I earned it—why shouldn’t I have been paid what I was worth?
The film itself was written and directed by Andrew Bergman—the guy who co-wrote Blazing Saddles, wrote The In-Laws and Fletch, and directed The Freshman and Honeymoon in Vegas. And the cinematography is by Stephen Goldblatt, who shot Lethal Weapon and had just received an Oscar nomination for Batman Forever; he also had an earlier Oscar nomination for The Prince of Tides.
Striptease cost somewhere around $40–50 million, bombed domestically with only about $33 million, but international business ultimately dragged it to roughly $113 million worldwide. Contemporary reporting still treated it as a major American box-office failure.
So Demi Moore is number one because hers is the only body modification on this list where there isn’t a Cenobite, a mad surgeon, Death itself or Tony Todd holding a pair of pliers.
There’s just an industry and a culture looking at one of the most beautiful women on Earth and somehow convincing her:
Not good enough yet.