"More blood, more bats."

Categorically, CHOSEN SURVIVORS (1974) is a disaster film on par with the big ticket likes of EARTHQUAKE (1974) and THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974) but on the more intimate/less expensive scale of the made-for-television FER-DE-LANCE (1974). The US-Mexico coproduction shot at Mexico City's Churubusco Studios bears less of a resemblance to the Irwin Allen paradigm than to European fare of the same vintage. I'm thinking specifically of José Ullóa's post-nuke chamber piece REFUGE OF FEAR (1974... god, what a year!), which sunk two suburban couples and a horny teenager in a deluxe bomb shelter after the Big One, where they get on one another's nerves and approximate the end of the world via alcohol and drug abuse, sexual acting out and eventually murder. As obscure as that rare Spanish science fiction film may be, it was at least widely available on video tape during the 80s, which is more than can be said for CHOSEN SURVIVORS. Until the recent Sony/MGM "Midnite Movies" pairing of this with THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING (1965), CHOSEN SURVIVORS was effectively a lost film.

Helmed by episodic television director Sutton Roley (who could count the superbly creepy telefilms SWEET, SWEET RACHEL and SATAN'S TRIANGLE to his credit), CHOSEN SURVIVORS is the tale of a handful of hand-picked science and artistic types who are thrown down the rabbit hole after the start of thermonuclear war (why does "thermo" make "nuclear war" sound so much worse?). Drugged upon their arrival, these chosen survivors stumble about their spartan underground furnishings, where they are brought up to speed by prerecorded big screen "thoughts of the day" courtesy of corporate positive thinker Kelly Lange (briefly Mrs. William Friedkin) and satellite footage of the world going pear-shaped (courtesy of stock footage of lava fields and some very dodgy decoupage). But before anybody can say "could things seriously be any fucking worse?" these think tankers find their new digs infested with bloodthirsty bats who have wiggled their way in from the surrounding caverns.

All the shouting notwithstanding, there's something soporific about CHOSEN SURVIVORS. None of the characters feels fully alive, particularly novelist Alex Cord and icy bedmate Diana Muldaur, who are the closet we get to a hero and heroine. Yet even this dreamlike quality is an asset to me. The combined effect of the production design (heavy on chrome and glass), synth score (courtesy of Fred WESTWORLD Karlin), gauzy cinematography (by Sam Peckinpah associate Gabriel Torres) and the lassitude of the beautiful people players evokes Italian giallo psychothrillers like Dario Argento's THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1970) and Mario Bava's FIVE DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON (1970). I even have to wonder if the gialli in some small way might have inspired the vogue for disaster pics, which most often had a similar belle monde setting and were, for all their titanic blandishments, essentially body count films.

As much as I enjoy CHOSEN SURVIVORS, it's hard on minorities, killing off all of its dark-skinned characters (Pedro Armendariz, Jr. lives about as long here as he did in EARTHQUAKE) while sparing most of its whitey whites. The women's roles are badly drawn: blonde nutritionist Cristina Moreno becomes an hysteric after about twenty minutes down under, Diana Muldaur does absolutely nothing that I can remember (SHAFT's Gwen Mitchell is similarly wasted) and physician Barbara Babcock not only has to submit to rape by drunken industrialist Jackie Cooper ("Go ahead! Go ahead!") but then faints at the sight of blood. Nice. On the plus side, Bradford Dillman (as the heavily perspiring Macomber) and Lincoln Kilpatrick (as a former Olympian) are always worth watching and Cooper's irritating blowhard is the most challenging character, spewing invective and common sense in equal proportions. There's also a good dummy death near the end and I like the bats.

Despite these reservations, I still like CHOSEN SURVIVORS. Given how much time the characters spend in their pajamas and bathrobes, there's even something Christmassy about the proceedings. Watching the movie again recently I played a little game in my mind, trying to imagine an all black cast: Calvin Lockhart in the Alex Cord role, Moses Gunn as the industrialist, the underused Robert Hooks as Macomber, maybe Diahanne Carroll (or somebody similarly classy, like Claudia McNeil or Barbara McNair) in the Diana Muldaur role, Rosalind Cash as the doctor and Bernie Casey or Roger E. Mosley as the technician played here by Richard Jaeckel. Well, a guy can dream.

Final thought: one of the scenarists of CHOSEN SURVIVORS is "H. B. Cross," who has little else in the way of credits. I'm wondering if H. B. Cross might be "Henry Cross," alias Harry Spalding. A film buyer promoted to the position of screenwriter, Spalding wrote THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING and two dozen Lippert cheapies before taking nearly a decade off from 1965 to 1973, returning to the game with Disney's ONE LITTLE INDIAN that year. H. B. Cross did write a song for the youth musical THE TEENAGE MILLIONAIRE (1961), scripted by... Harry Spalding. Certainly, CHOSEN SURVIVORS shares with THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING certain similarities, namely a clutch of survivors bickering in the aftermath of global annihilation, one character nobody likes or trusts, and an overall listlessness born of jobbing writers with more ambition than imagination. I'm not calling this hypothesis a genre discovery in-the-making, just interesting... if you're interested in things like this.