EVEN DeepER Blurting!: Chosen Too Many -spoiler-

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Chosen Too Many -spoiler-

Posted by DexterBG on 3/24/2008, 2:59 am, in reply to "DBNS: Bat-ter Up!"

Oh man! Do I remember this one. I was stationed at a tumbleweed bound Air Base. And it played at the one and only base theater, one weekend (actually about two years late). At the time I didn't think it was so bad. But the desert isolation can warp your taste and judgement. And it was at least a year before "Star Wars" would raise the bar, considerably. After that, almost every scifi movie that I'd seen before, had become garbage.

To hear that "Chosen Survivor" has finally come out on DVD, both surprises and angers me. I mean, we've been waiting for MST3k:TM's return to DVD. AND THIS TURKEY HAD TO COME OUT FIRST?! Not to mention so many other lost classics that still haven't been released. Where's the logic, where's the justice. If I see the DVD of this, I hope it's in the bargin section where it belongs.

I'm about to give something about the movie away. So you've been warned if you read farther, and wish to be surprised. But I can't imagine why anyone would, by this thing.

The basic plot is more the tired old "Ten Little Indians" or "And Then There Were None" formula. With isolated characters getting eliminated, one by one by some mysterious killer. Which we eventually learn was always these damn bats. Everyone's clueless about what's happening to them all. Except the military man (Jaeckel) seems to know more than he's admitting to. In the final act, it's revealed that it's all be a trial run for WW3. But the bats weren't supposed to be part of it, and unless the survivors of the chosen survivors can escape, the bats will finish them.

So the film then turns into a knock off of The Poseidon Adventure. As then try and climb their way back up the elevator shaft that lead them there. But guess where the bats were comming from. A big hole in the shaft! How did the project engineers miss that?!! Hope their next job wasn't the Yucca Mountian nuclear waste storage project.

I forget, but either the bats had knocked out the elevator. Or the military, in it's infinite wisdom, had deactivated it until the test had run its course. Not allowing for medical emergencies.

This movie followed on the heels of "The Andromeda Strain". Which was a much better movie about a select group of americans, who are carted off in the night to an underground secret lab, to find a way to neutralize a deadly alien germ. The idea of stashing a sampling of humans away for WW3, sounds more like someone took that Dr. Strangelove's suggestion seriously. But why weren't there more women than men? And far more prettier ones, at that?

I agree with Kenneth. They didn't need the bats. A soviet agent, among the chosen, could have served as the antagonist of the piece. Picking the others off, so that Russia would have more post-nuclear survivors than the US. But I'm quessing that the military rode shotgun on the script (as always). And didn't want it suggested that such agents could penetrate even the tightest of security screenings. But as we've learned from recent history, they always have.

Also, they had to cover for the fact that a real bomb shelter already existed, under a four star hotel called The Greenbrier, in Virginia. And it was reserved for the US Congress members. Not some computer chosen cream of the crop americans. So the impression the movie gives is that they still haven't figured out if survival was even feasible yet. While a rather large shelter already existed,
feasible or not.

This is one of those movies that gets stuck in your memory. And you wish you could either forget it entirely. Or see it again, just to put to rest how stupid an idea it was test people down inside a real bomb shelter. When a fake, above ground, one would have worked too. Mission Impossible (Tv) pulled off a fake WW3, with a shelter only a few meters below ground. And the show "Big Brother" demonstrates that people don't have to be shoved down a hole to observe deviant behavor. Just shut them up inside a big house with no outside windows or Tv or telephones, and watch what happens. When you think about it, we've been seeing a "Chosen Survivors" knockoff on Tv for several seasons now.

As for Connections. I don't know about MST3000. But the two female actors had both appeared on Star Trek TOS as guest stars (unless I'm wrong).
-Dex-