A computer selects eleven people at random. They are sedated, loaded onto helicopters, and deposited into a state-of-the-art nuclear bunker two miles beneath the desert. They are told the world above has ended. They are told they are humanity's last hope. They are not told about the bats.

CHOSEN SURVIVORS (1974) is a Mexican-American co-production directed by Sutton Roley, a veteran television director whose credits included Lost in Space and whose sensibility was perfectly suited to a film that is essentially a very expensive bottle episode about the collapse of social order and vampire bats.

It was shot at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City, distributed by Columbia Pictures, and takes its premise with complete seriousness, which is either its greatest strength or its central absurdity depending on your tolerance for that kind of thing.

The cast is a murderers' row of 1970s character actors - Jackie Cooper, Bradford Dillman, Richard Jaeckel, Diana Muldaur - all playing the kind of people a government computer might reasonably select to repopulate the earth, and all discovering in real time that the shelter has a bat problem.

Real bats were caught daily for production and used for a single day of filming. This detail has not improved the film's reputation among animal welfare advocates, but it does explain why the bat attacks have a certain unnerving authenticity.

The film also has a twist at the two-thirds mark that reframes everything preceding it - and which, in a more ambitious production, might have been devastating. Here it lands somewhere between clever and deeply strange, which is roughly where the whole film lives.