Captives

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.

Not much is known about Majestic Home Video, except that they released a few titles which are extremely tough to find, including this one, thus, no ratings or comments. After 5 years, I finally came across this VHS under the title of "Mama's Home." According to Gary Cohen, who also directed SOV classics Video Violence 1 and 2, Majestic Home Video cut off the intro, threw some music on top of most of the dialogue and manipulated other aspect of the film. This resulted in a travesty that would become one of the most sought after horror VHS's. Good luck finding it.

Majestic Home Video must have operated out of someone's garage or basement because the equipment they used to create the new "Mama's Home" title and credits is completely amateur and shows mistakes that could've been corrected if they had actually cared about what they were doing. A woman is released from prison after being accused of letting her child die in a fire. Once released, her and her two brothers seek revenge. They intend to torment her ex-husband's family and force them to watch home videos that are supposed to prove that it was his fault the child died in the fire. They stay at the house tormenting the family until her ex-husband comes home. This synopsis is pretty much what is explained on the back of the VHS case, so watching the movie is really just a matter of putting the pieces together since its hard to figure out what's going on since you can't really hear any of the dialogue because of the booming music put over it.

I give the movie 5 stars only because I have not seen the actual "Captives" version of the movie. The only thing Majestic did right was have some awesome sleazy artwork and title, despite Cohen's dislike of them which I can understand. Captives was intended to be a serious comment on violence yet it was marketed as a slasher on the front cover, despite the back of the box reading, "Not A SLASHER FILM..." The movie seems to have been shot okay, despite the usual continuity and logic errors which are common with inexperienced SOV filmmakers. But for what I can tell, the movie could have had a lot of potential if Majestic had not butchered it.

UPDATE:

Camp Motion Pictures DVD has released Captives in its original form as part of an 80's SOV box set