Chosen Survivors (Sutton Roley, 1974)

Helicopters arrive, laden with the chosen few plucked from their everyday lives and allowed entrance to a secret bunker set into a mountainside. They’ve been hand selected as American’s next best hope of civilization in the face of nuclear Armageddon. These ten civilians (along with a military escort) inhabit one of twelve similar installations around the country, pockets of civilization meant to retake the surface world once radiation has reached acceptable levels.

Thank goodness for the foresight of the U.S. government, they always think of everything! The bunker has private rooms, a five year supply of food, and an infestation of killer vampire bats. The underground lair was installed in a pre-existing New Mexican cave as a cost-saving measure, and the original inhabitants aren’t too pleased about sharing. The new residents are a varied lot of scientists, athletes, artists, and a lone businessman, proving that cockroaches and capitalists will survive the Apocalypse. As they watch the destruction of earth from satellites, it’s easy to believe that they’ve all been sequestered as part of an elaborate hoax.

“There’s a time to take it easy and there’s a time for action,” rants businessman Raymond Couzins (Jackie Cooper). He’s convinced that someone’s playing with them and he’s not too far from the truth.

At times Chosen Survivors comes dangerously close to being the “elevator episode” of a television show wherein diverse personalities overcome an adverse situation (like Vincenzo Natali’s Cube). That the cast is populated with familiar television faces (Alex Cord from “Airwolf,” Diana Muldaur from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” et cetera) doesn’t help dispel this impression. The resume of Sutton Roley indicates that the director was far more comfortable working in episodic television than features. Finally, the John Carpenteresque synthesizer score by Fred Karlin (Westworld) is decidedly low rent.

Instead of being a poignant post-apocalyptic character study, the movie quickly devolves into a “crazed creature” feature more akin to John Cardos’s Kingdom of the Spiders than Peter Watkins’s Fällan. Shot in Murk-O-Vision by Gabriel Torres, Chosen Survivors was unavailable legitimately until 2007, when it was released as a double feature DVD with Earth Dies Screaming. — Mike White

Tags: Chosen Survivors, Jackie Cooper, Earth Dies Screaming, Sutton Roley, Airwolf