TV Reviews : ‘Captive’ Delivers Jolt of True-Life Terror

A couple of psychopaths kidnap and terrorize a husband and wife in the compelling true-life horror story “Captive,” an ABC movie airing Sunday at 9 p.m. (on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).

Two things make this suspense thriller disturbingly seductive: the twisted, off-kilter portrait of the young killers and the kidnaped wife’s subtle lapse into the so-called Patty Hearst syndrome, i.e. getting too close to your abductor.

The production, based on court records and personal interviews with the real-life husband and wife, Paul and Kathy Plunk, recounts the events that nightmarishly unfolded on the Oregon seashore three years ago when a family’s idyllic life was shattered by a couple of deranged youths on the lam from a halfway house.

The terror reaches its ultimate violation when the wife (Joanna Kerns), who has been playing too many mental games with her abductors, is raped in the presence of her bound-up husband (Barry Bostwick). Accompanying this trauma is the anxiety over the couple’s infant daughter, who is kidnaped along with them.

While the focus is on the victims and their subsequent battle with guilt and shame that nearly wrecks their marriage, it’s the razor-sharp casting and probing characterization of the psychopaths (John Stamos and Chad Lowe) that give this double-edged drama its jolt.

The Bostwick-Kerns recovery scenes, coping with the deepest violations to body and spirit, tend to be repetitive and weepy instead of wrenching. It’s the only miscue in the otherwise taut direction of Michael Tuchner from a well-crafted script by first-time writer Leonie Sandercock, who met the story’s central figures two years ago, enlisted their cooperation and subsequently developed the script with producers Geoffrey Cowan and Julian Fowles.