Forget THE OMEN, THE CHOSEN has his day of reckoning on Scream Factory's Blu-ray.

American hotshot turned British industrialist Robert Caine (Kirk Douglas, SPARTACUS) is about to realize his dream of building a massive nuclear power plant in the Holy Land, harnessing the heat of the sun (or the core of a hydrogen bomb) with laser technology. There are many who are opposed to the project, from Harbin (Spiros Focas, ROMANCING THE STONE), opposition candidate to the Israeli Prime Minister (Ivo Garrani, BLACK SUNDAY), to environmentalist protestors back in London who are stationed outside his estate during a party in which his own wife Eve (Virginia McKenna, BORN FREE), who has controlling interest in Caine Enterprises, reveals her intention to quash the project shortly before she is accidentally killed by an Arab (Massimo Foschi, JUNGLE HOLOCAUST) in an assassination attempt against Caine. In the aftermath of his wife's death, the project continues on with Caine's son Angel (Simon Ward, DOMINIQUE) proving his mettle both as a businessman and as a physicist coming up with methods to harness energy at exponentially greater temperatures than speculated. When Harbin wins the elections, he announces his intention to fight the project out of concern that a failure to contain the energy Caine intends to amass could set off a chain reaction of nuclear explosions in the surrounding area that could turn the Earth into a ball of fire. Caine's own resolve is shaken first by a romantic interest in Sara Golan (Agostina Belli, NIGHT OF THE DEVILS), a beautiful young Israeli press attaché, and meeting Monsignor Charrier (Romolo Valli, DEATH IN VENICE) who recognizes the bizarre number 2v231 repeatedly spit out by the plant's computer is the Latin spelling of Jesus spelled backwards which is a symbol of the Antichrist. As more people who oppose the project, including those who come to realize its danger like the project director (Anthony Quayle, THE EAGLE HAS LANDED) and Angel's professor (Alexander Knox, ACCIDENT) meet with increasingly bizarre freak accidents, Caine starts to suspect that the Arab assassin's charge of "From your seed comes evil!" means that he may be about to father the Antichrist in Sara's unborn child and that his nuclear plant is the figurative seven-headed "dragon" that the Antichrist will use to bring about the Apocalypse.

Although director Alberto De Martino had already helmed a film titled THE ANTICHRIST – released stateside as THE TEMPTER – that was actually a well-budgeted, respectably-cast cash-in on THE EXORCIST while THE CHOSEN, or HOLOCAUST 2000 as it is more widely known, is part of the shorter-lived spate of OMEN rip-offs. Like THE ANTICHRIST, THE CHOSEN boasts higher production values than much of Italian exploitation of the period with an impressive cast including Douglas giving all for his art running around nude in front of blue screen during a nightmare sequence, Ward doing a sinisterly ambiguous turn on his YOUNG WINSTON Churchill persona, and a supporting cast of Italians like Garrani and Visconti regular Valli who are more of a pleasant surprise than the British supporting performers in light of the slump in British filmmaking of the period: the Brits also include Geoffrey Keen (MOONRAKER) as an abortionist and a young Denis Lawson (NEW TRICKS) in a blink and you'll miss it turn as a journalist. Adolfo Celi (THUNDERBALL) also appears briefly as a psychiatrist. The script by De Martino, Sergio Donati (ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST), and British TV writer Michael Robson (THE THIRTY NINE STEPS remake) gets right the escalating series of little events and Biblical conspiracy theory gobbledygook that might have someone like Caine questioning his sanity but De Martino and company seem to have forgotten that the raison d'être of the OMEN film is a series of grisly and gory set-pieces which is where the film falls flat here apart from one jolting bit involving a helicopter blade a year before DAWN OF THE DEAD. The scope photography of Enrico Menczer (CAT O'NINE TAILS) is serviceable while the OMEN-lite choral bits of Ennio Morricone (THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE) are less stirring than the romantic theme he uses to underscore the scenes with Douglas and Belli.

Released theatrically by American International Pictures in a version that appended the original ambiguous ending as THE CHOSEN and subsequently reissued as LUCIFER'S CURSE, the film appeared on television and VHS from Vestron Video as HOLOCAUST 2000, and that title has stuck with the film, even when the film finally had its official American DVD release from LionsGate (through their Studio Canal deal) as RAIN OF FIRE in a cropped 1.78:1 widescreen version that featured the European ending and went back to 2.35:1 for the end credits. MGM reportedly struck a new master of the American version the film showed up in France and Germany from Studio Canal in a 2.35:1 widescreen transfer of the European version first. Through their new deal with Studio Canal, Scream Factory marks the film's Blu-ray debut with transfers of both versions of the film; both of which are acceptable but also imperfect in their own ways.