Saturday 4 April 2020

Phase IV

Cast: Nigel Davenport, Michael Murphy, and Lynne Frederick  

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.