Nikki Pellaggio (Jackie Neill) and her brothers Chick (Art Neill) and Paulie (Neil Cerbone) break into the home of Ellen Epstein and torment the woman. Revenge is the name of the game, Nikki having been wrongly incarcerated twelve years earlier after her drug addict husband Barry (Gary P. Cohen), who is now happily married to Ellen, caused the house fire that killed her infant son.
Gary P. Cohen followed his shot-on-video gore movies Video Violence 1 & 2 with Captives, AKA Mama's Home, a SOV home invasion film that tries hard to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Last House on the Left, Death Weekend and Fight For Your Life, but which stumbles at every turn thanks to lifeless direction, a weak script, lousy audio-visual quality, poor acting and a first hour in which very little of interest happens.
After lots of dialogue-heavy scenes of tedium, with just one murder (of Ellen's babysitter), the pace picks up for the final twenty or so minutes, when Ellen Epstein and her mother-in-law Estelle fight back against their abusers, but it's too little too late and not nearly brutal enough - I imagine most viewers would have dozed off or switched off by then, while those still persevering will have long lost any goodwill they might have initially had towards this low-budget home-made wannabe shocker.
The film's low point is the hippie home movie that Nikki forces Ellen and Estelle (and us) to watch - it looks awful, it's boring and it goes on for way too long - now that's what I call torture! Cohen understandably saves the best scenes for himself, the director having fun as coke-snorting, hooker-bashing low-life Barry, although Art Neill looks like he's enjoying playing incestuous creep Chick, who has a thing for sister Nikki (I'm just hoping that Art is Jackie Neill's husband in real-life, and not her brother!).
3.5/10, rounded up to 4 for IMDb.
