Captive (1980)

Emenegger and Sandler were documentary filmmakers and UFO buffs who received funds from Georgia-based Gold Key Entertainment (no relation to the comic book publisher called Gold Key) to produce, write, and/or direct ten (!) films that were released in 1980 and 1981. Two were documentaries, but most were low-budget science fiction movies with recognizable actors, such as Adam West, Fred Willard, Peter Mark Richman, Kristine DeBell, and Martin Kove. They’re talky, dull, and visually static, but there’s something intriguing about them that I can’t articulate, and they’re no worse than Don Dohler’s films.

CAPTIVE is one of the duo’s better features, though the impenetrable technobabble that passes for dialogue and the tissue-paper sets prevent me from calling it “good.” Mitchell (CAROUSEL) and former child star Ladd (THE PROUD REBEL), whose wife Cheryl was making a zillion dollars on CHARLIE’S ANGELS at the time, play aliens from the planet Styrolia, which is locked in an intergalactic war with future Earth. Much of the first act is these guys sitting in a very small spaceship cockpit set saying things that make no sense, except for Mitchell’s demented ramblings about the joy of killing Earthmen. They’re also wearing striped shirts modeled after the Sandmen in LOGAN’S RUN.

At least the homemade special effects are decently done on this budget level with Emenegger and Sandler filling the screen with space battles, animated laser blasts, and state-of-the-art (for the era) computer displays. The effects have a certain charm. If only it were enough to distract from Seth Marshall III’s dialogue, which is ridden with cliches and portentous science chatter.

After expending its effects budget in Act I, CAPTIVE settles into a cost-efficient riff on DESPERATE HOURS, as Ladd and Mitchell crash near an Earth farm and take its inhabitants — PETTICOAT JUNCTION hottie Saunders, younger siblings Ashley Emenegger and Dan Sandler (horrible actors, but related to the directors), and modern-world-hating gramps Sturkie (THEY CALL ME TRINITY) — hostage.

Although the story is satisfactorily wrapped at the end of Act II, the directors pad the film for a two-hour TV timeslot with an expanded coda that at least takes the movie outside for fresh air after over an hour on three basic sets. Editor Ken Lavet and associate producer Anne Spielberg, Steven’s sister who earned an Oscar nomination for co-writing BIG, are credited with directing the control room sequences set on Earth.