Survival (1976) User Reviews

Possible Influence on Television's "Survivor"

[mditoro · 7/10 · 11 September 2006]

Millionaire Barry Sullivan invites the usual assortment of friends, relatives, and hangers-on to a dinner party where he proposes a cruel parlor game. Each guest must justify his existence to the others or be voted out of the room. Souls are bared, resentments are dredged up, and feelings are hurt until only two people are left.

The excellent cast does what it can, but the film is confined mostly to the dining room set and is all talk with no action. The bizarre final image may just be symbolic, or perhaps there was something supernatural in all this. Either way, I have not seen this movie on television in ages, and it doesn't appear to be available on VHS/DVD. I'm actually waiting for it to show up on a Mill Creek 50-Movie Pack.

First of three airings on Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater in 1979

[kevinolzak · 10 October 2020]

A true oddity that seems to have completely vanished without a trace, 1970's "Survival" was the brainchild of Michael Campus, in fact his first feature as director despite Oliver Reed's "Z.P.G. (Zero Population Growth) usually being cited as his debut. Best known for Blaxploitation classic "The Mack" starring Richard Pryor, and a gentler follow up "The Education of Sonny Carson," he started out doing documentaries across the globe before this opportunity at a work of fiction, shot in Sedona, AZ in Dec. 1969, going unreleased until 20th Century-Fox finally picked it up for a few playdates in 1976, very few TV screenings before its disappearance. STAR TREK's John D.F. Black fashioned the screenplay from Campus' story (he later scripted both "Shaft" and "Trouble Man," starting out with John Carradine's 1957 "The Unearthly"), using a dozen cast members also recruited from television for a game of death and the meaning of life. AllMovie's review gives the most detailed analysis: "the scene is a lavish dinner party, overseen by a Woollcott-like gameplayer. After dinner, the guests indulge in the usual Charades and Twenty Questions. Then the host proposes that each guest make a statement justifying his or her existence. The catch: all but two of the participants will be rendered nonexistent by the rest of the guests. The yakety "Survival" has an excellent cast (Barry Sullivan, Anne Francis, Chuck McCann, Sheree North, Otis Young), and you'll be able to guess which actors were hired by the day and which by the week as they begin to die off." Such an unloved orphan deserves to turn up someday for at least a little bit of attention, currently praying for its survival.