TaryBiggBall
It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.
filippaberry84
I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.
Melanie Bouvet
The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.
Patience Watson
One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.
poe-48833
One can't help but wonder what kind of screening process was used by The Powers That Be when they selected the "survivors" for this experiment. It's interesting to note that the Free Poor are not included in the "drawing straws" experiment. Still, CHOSEN SURVIVORS is an entertaining tale of Terror and very probably the best vampire bat movie ever. (Sure, the vampire bats in this movie are decidedly HOSTILE- but who wouldn't be if someone came along and invaded your territory?) Slow motion lends a dream-like quality to the opening sequences and the mostly practical effects are guaranteed to make your skin crawl (it isn't until late in the going that the use of opticals becomes blatantly obvious; beanbag bats would've been better). The music is, at times, a little reminiscent of the score for John Carpenter's classic, THE THING. BATS, by the way, are the one solution to the current Zika virus outbreak that no one's even considered (as far as I know).
kelela1953-7
My husband found Chosen Survivors on DVD on eBay. It is on a disk with another movie I never heard of, but it is finally available to all those people who have spent the last twenty five years looking for it. I don't know if there are any more copies out there, but if you start there, you might have some luck. I saw this once when it was first out - at a drive in, no less - and have wanted to see it again ever since. As I recall, the twists and turns are not the ones you would expect when you first watch it, but they are interesting. It will be interesting to see if it scares me as much watching it now as it did the first time, now that I know how it turns out. You can email me if you want and I will let you know where in ebay my husband found it.
JoeKarlosi
This is a movie I've wanted to see for over 30 years now; I first read about it in horror magazines when it first came out, but it soon turned into a lost film that went completely out of circulation. It has now been made available by Fox as part of their Midnite Movies Collection, and I'm a little disappointed to say I wasn't missing all that much. It's not a "bad" genre film and it's got a good premise, but it's still rather ordinary in the way it's executed. A group of people are selected by computer, sedated, and then sent down 1,758 feet into an underground bomb shelter to see if they might sustain life in the event of a nuclear war. It was another of those perfect experiments hatched by the government, except they overlooked the fact that this project was built down within caves, so now swarms of hungry vampire bats manage to find their way into the bunker and chomp on these frantic chosen survivors. There's more talk going on than anything else, but when the bat attacks do occur, they're pretty satisfying, even if sometimes the special optical effects amount to little more than a flurry of dark splotches.I got a kick out of seeing former Our Gang child actor Jackie Cooper as the main loudmouth of the bunch who at one point goes on a bender and becomes your basic arrogant pain in the ass character. Other '70s regulars among this cast are Richard Jaeckel (GRIZZLY) Bradford Dillman (BUG), and Lincoln Kilpatrick (THE OMEGA MAN). I thought I recognized director Sutton Roley's name from somewhere, and later I found out that's because he directed some LOST IN SPACE episodes and was primarily a TV show director. I'm not sorry I saw this, but it sure was some tepid tea. ** out of ****
p-purcell
A group of people are selected to take part in an experiment to see how mankind would fare after a nuclear holocaust and are placed without there consent in a bunker thousands of feet below ground. They disturb a group of bats living in the cave systems around them and they begin to attack the trapped humans. This is a great premise for this film but i found it so slow moving with far to many talking scenes. In the whole first hour only two people die of the bat attack and only one of them do we see die on screen. The remaining film concerns one of the group trying to climb to safety who falls to his death and releases the bats to attack one final time killing all but 5 of the group in one big attack scene. All in all a good premise for a film but not as good as it could have been.