By Richard Winters
My Rating: 0 out of 10
4-Word Review: Pretty teens held captive.
Frank and John (Gary Kent, John Parker) are two mentally-challenged brothers who’ve spent years being dominated by their aging mother (Great Gaylord) who will not let them date other women, or in any way play out their sexual feelings. If they do bring home a girlfriend their mother scares them away, so instead they kidnap women that they spot at random and then bring them home to their basement where they are forced to partake in all sorts of perverted ‘games’.
This is one of those movies where you know from the very first frame that it’s going to be bad and then it just proceeds to get even worse as it goes along. The production values are abhorrent and the music score is especially annoying. Instead of playing something that sounds creepy or heightens the tension they play and sing melodies from children’s songs like ‘Three Blind Mice’.
The acting is pathetic especially from the women who show no fight or struggle and simply lie there like dead fish and allow their male captors to do what they want with them, which creates no tension. The men aren’t frightening at all and the John character runs around while waving his arms in the air making both him and the movie look quite campy and silly.
If you’re hoping for something seedy or tawdry you can forget it. The provocative title and film poster may give you that impression, but what you receive instead would barely get an R-rating today. There’s very little nudity or gore and the action, which isn’t much, is poorly staged. The story does have a lurid quality, but it’s nothing that you haven’t seen before and overall quite tame and predictable by today’s standards.
There are similarities to this film and Charles Kaufman’s cult classic Mother’s Day, which came out 7 years later and was much better. Psycho is what this movie most resembles and there is even a scene where one of the victims bursts into the mother’s room only to find her to be a rotting skeleton, but it amazed me to think that the filmmakers behind this waste of time believed this would top that classic. Why simply rehash what has already been done before and better? Why not take things in a more unpredictable area? Maybe the writer, director and producer weren’t creative enough to think up anything else, so this tired, formulaic thing is all that they could offer, but it’s an embarrassment to all involved and should be avoided.
My Rating: 0 out of 10
Alternate Titles: Girls in Chains, Abducted
Released: February 7, 1973
Runtime: 1Hour 25Minutes
Rated R
Director: Don Jones
Studio: Mirror Releasing
Available: DVD
Scopophilia 
You know this movie is going to be great when there’s an obvious misspelling on the poster. The plot point about the emasculating mother who turns her deranged sons into rapist/murderers is very original too, it’s not like this Freud lite approach been featured in almost every slasher/exploitation movie ever made. When in doubt, blame the mama, the Ed Gein equivalent of the refrigerator mother. It’s a shame they couldn’t at least do something different or interesting with this concept, but what do you expect from a film called “Schoolgirls in Chains?” Also, how did this mom end up having two retarded sons? Once seems unfortunate, twice seems like pure carelessness. Great review, this seems like something that might be worth renting just to hate-watch, preferably with a couple of your most sarcastic friends and a bottle of liquor.