Cinema: Bat Bites

CHOSEN SURVIVORS

Directed by SUTTON ROLEY

Screenplay by H.B. CROSS and JOE REB MOFFLY

This is one of a currently fashionable Hollywood genre known as the disaster movie (TIME, June 10). No one, it seems, is left alive on earth — dat ole debble thermonuclear disaster (shades of On the Beach and The World, the Flesh and the Devil) has struck again. Deep in a cave, eleven computer-selected citizens, each with some tal ent useful to get the world spinning again, await word that the radiation level on the surface is survivable. Meantime, they share a coed dorm, done up by a grateful government in its most lavish 2001 style. A prerecorded television tape keeps urging them to start group therapy sessions, and considering the speed with which they start gnawing away at each other’s vitals, that is not a bad idea.

Unfortunately, another faction is trying to gnaw away impartially at all of them, without regard to race, creed, color or state of mental health. It is a herd of vampire bats, who are understandably annoyed at the way their neighborhood is being run down. They are rather more clever than you would give them credit for — short-circuiting the lights at will, squirming through air-conditioning ducts to bite the folks good night. After a while, indeed, one begins to suspect that they had a chaw or two on the wiring of the computer that picked this lot of survival candidates. There are more neurotics among them than a random sampling of subway riders would probably produce, and they are not very clever with their hands, either. In various skirmishes the percent age of bat casualties is far lower than that of the human.

The script has one major surprise in it, but that apparently exhausted the writers, leaving them no energy to work the characters up even to the customarily low average of cheapie sci-fi entertainments. Director Roley does not enhance audience involvement by shooting everything through a diffusion filter. Obviously derived from The Birds, Chosen Survivors is also strictly for them. Or maybe for the made-for-TV movie market, where most of the cast — Jackie Cooper, Alex Cord, Richard Jaeckel, Bradford Dillman, Diana Muldaur — customarily find work.