[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August, 1978]
There’s a sharply defined moment at which The Chosen goes bad: just past the halfway point of the film, when the mad logic that has been carefully built up through imagery and coincidence convinces us that one of the film’s characters really is the Antichrist; and then, suddenly, a belated red herring is introduced, and we are asked to spend the next two reels identifying with the impossibly misplaced judgment of our hero who, having as much information as we do, has no excuse for being wrong. You see this kind of thing a lot in giallo and Italian horror. It’s a critical error, and because of it, The Chosen ends up a disappointment. Yet there’s a lot of promise in the film, particularly its first half; and it is superior in almost every way to the film of which, at first glance, it appears to be merely a cheap imitation: The Omen.