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(More customer reviews)Alberto De Martino's Anglo-Italian Holocaust 2000 aka Rain of Fire aka The Chosen is another post-Omen ripoff with an ageing Hollywood star jumping on the Satanic conspiracy bandwagon, in this case Kirk Douglas as a powerful industrialist whose plans to build a controversial nuclear power plant in the Holy Land might just trigger the End of Days. Naturally, he doesn't see it that way at first, but even before he dismisses one critic by urging him to "Stop talking like a ridiculous prophet of the Apocalypse! I'm not counting on God. I'm putting my faith in nuclear energy!", you can see where this is heading even if he can't. But a few deaths courtesy of the odd celebrity victim in the supporting cast like Anthony Quayle or Virginia McKenna, one ominous computer printout, a fertile fling with Agostina Belli's photographer and a chance meeting with Romolo Valli's priest later and he's having nightmarish visions of the Apocalypse and, this being the 70s when you had more chance of getting Sylvia Kristel to keep her clothes on in a film than Kirk, we're having nightmarish full-frontal visions of Douglas running naked through the desert as he gradually comes to believe that his proposed seven-towered nuclear plant might just be the seven-head Beast of the Book of Revelations and that his unborn child might just be AntiChrist (a common ailment with ageing movie stars in the 70s) while screaming "We're not seven-headed monsters bringing about the Apocalypse!" at his corporate minions. Luckily - or perhaps not - he's teamed up with the Vatican's only pro-abortion priest to kill the sprog, but things don't quite go to plan and thanks to his angelic son Simon Ward he finds himself in a rubber room in Adolfo Celi's steel and glass asylum: well, Kirk did always want to make One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest...
LionsGate's US DVD, released as Rain of Fire, is the European version with the original open ending: for the shorter US cut, a clumsy and rushed epilogue (not included on the DVD, though it can be found on YouTube) was added by editing shots of a board meeting, Douglas arriving at an airport, a body double sewing dynamite into his suit and a stock footage explosion together to laughable effect. Otherwise there are surprisingly few moments of unintentional comedy, though Douglas' reaction to the semi-decapitation of the Israeli Prime Minister by a helicopter and his gurning expression when passing out after being drugged are spit-your-coffee-across-the-room ones. You can see the twist coming a mile off, but while it offers no surprises and is about as frightening as processed cheese, it's easygoing schlock entertainment with some class and a decent budget, and it's probably a better Omen sequel than the actual sequels.
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