Director: Saul Bass
84 minutes (12) 1974
101 Films Black Label
Blu-ray region B
[Released 6th April]
Rating: 8/10
Review by Christopher Geary
In Frank Sinatra’s Oscar-winning song High Hopes, for comedy movie A Hole In The Head (1959), the lyrics slyly comment: “Everyone knows an ant can’t/ Move a rubber-tree plant”. It is quoted
here because the prodigious ability, and capacity for doing work, of a
hive-mind is relevant to this movie’s exploration of a confrontation between
the ants and humanity. Partly influenced by iconic genre movies, Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Phase IV is very different to most
other sci-fi monster movies. Unlike the atomic giants in Them! (1954), the creatures in this bleak little chiller are only normal-sized
insects. Unlike creepy Martians seen in The
War Of The Worlds (1953), the ‘invaders’ of mankind’s planet are already
here, but with a new social structure and prior ancestral claim to ruling the
Earth. Essentially, ants in Phase IV are sinister ‘aliens’ in comparison to and competition with 20th-century human culture.
After a mysterious cosmic event, Dr Ernest Hubbs (Nigel Davenport)
discovers a sudden behavioural change in the colonies of different ants, now co-operating
with each other against the natural order. Monolithic (by insect scales) towering
ant-hills, with angled peaks like tilted heads, are discovered in the Arizona
desert. There’s a crop circle around a square that’s marked by dead sheep. A local
farmer’s family are ordered to join a general evacuation, but their
grand-daughter Kendra (Lynne Frederick), survives when an accident kills the
old couple. Hubbs recruits another scientist, James Lesko (Michael
Murphy) and they investigate the weird activity of ants, from safety of their
labs, sealed in a metal-walled geodesic dome.
After decoding the intelligent ants’ language, sonic weaponry
is the human response to attacks but the men find their industrious enemy soon
deploys reflected sunlight for over-heating the base. Later the bugs dig out
hidden pits as man-traps. Hubbs proves to be obsessive, not simply a curious investigator studying an entomological puzzle and, after becoming infected, he
soon turns paranoid. However, his fears are quite well-founded, as the relentless
insects are quite unstoppable.
Despite a comparatively low budget, Phase IV eagerly adopts a technical virtuosity that is keenly reminiscent of
The Andromeda Strain (1971), where
decontamination processing keeps the building clean for its scientific
research. The strange insects are captured with macro-photography by Ken
Middleham, who also worked on Oscar-winning pseudocumentary feature, The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971), a cult
movie of apocalyptic vision that apparently inspired Saul Bass to make Phase IV. And it is a particularly fine
example of eco-horror in the subgenre tradition of nature’s revenge movies, but offers much more than its obvious surface themes.
There
are many great scenes of Quatermass styled thinking, and some clever sci-fi
creativity, especially notable in dialogues between Hubbs and Lesko. Phase IV is a hard-SF movie that’s driven
by a vaguely Lovecraftian tale of a unique kind of warfare, staged like some live-action
game of chess, but with uneven sides of a king, a queen, and only one knight,
against countless millions of tiny pawns on the Other side.
Disc extras:
- The original ending (17 minutes) includes a sequence of bizarre surrealism, about man’s transcendent evolution, artistically portraying the dawn of a new species. This has an optional commentary.
- An Ant’s Life (20 minutes) - a featurette of critical comments
A second disc collects short films by Saul Bass:
The Searching Eye
(1964) - 17 minutes
Why Man Creates (1968) - 24 minutes
Bass on Titles (1977) - 33 minutes
An interview with Saul Bass about his groundbreaking work
on graphic designs and / or animations for movie title-sequences.
Unfortunately, clips of titles here are not shown in their correct screen
ratios.
Notes On The Popular Arts (1978) - 20 minutes
The Solar Film (1980) - nine minutes
Quest (1984) - 29 minutes
Written by Ray Bradbury, this visually impressive dark
fantasy and sci-fi mystery is about a strange future world with a condensed-epic
story, where a human life-span is limited to eight days.
