Graphic designer Saul Bass directed exactly one feature film in his lifetime, the sci-fi horror flick Phase IV. The movie was a flop, so he didn’t get the opportunity to make any more of them. Was it just that the public was not interested in a movie about hyper-intelligent ants waging war on a scientific outpost in the middle of the Arizona desert?
Keep in mind these are regular-sized ants, so maybe that was the problem. However, I did have some free time, so here we are.
The movie opens with a voiceover explaining how a rare cosmic allignment somehow made the world’s ants hyperintelligent. These opening minutes, with actor Nigel Davenort doing voiceover work as Dr. Ernest Hubbs to explain what happened, really works well. There’s a lot of footage of actual ants doing ant things, but done in a way that makes them look like they’re organizing for some nefarious purpose. I actually thought, between the ant footage and the voiceover, that this first section was done very well and made for a promising start.
And then we cut to the Arizona desert (actually Kenya) as Hubbs and his associate James Lesko (Michael Murphy) show up to investigate some weird ant behavior. The ants have been building some very large structures and there’s clearly more to come.
Naturally, Hobbs decides to blow the structures up with a series of grenades. That…does not sit well with the ants. Hobbs, Lesko, and a teenage girl named Kendra (Lynne Frederick) are trapped in the top-of-the-line desert lab (top-of-the-line for 1974 at least) with the ants making escape difficult. Hobbs and Lesko try various ways to either get out or take down the ants, but the ants seem to be ahead of them at every step.
There’s some ambition behind the movie, that much is certain. Hobbs is portrayed as someone who thinks the ants can be beaten or as fascinating subjects to run experiments on, and he won’t leave until he finishes what he started, even as venom from an ant bite starts to affect his health and sanity. Lesko is more cautious, thinking that leaving before things get too bad would be a smart thing to do, but Hobbs seems to outrank him. Kendra is mostly traumatized as she is the lone survivor of an attack the ants led on her grandparents’ farm, particularly the loss of her horse. Can the three of them get out of the lab alive, or even come close to defeating the ants when the ants are seen adapting to insecticide or even taking down the occasional praying mantis to achieve their own goals? Lesko, who sees a possibility of communicating with the ants, may have a way to get something done with the ants. But then again, much of this may depend on what the ants even want…
I found the wildlife photography of the ants was rather impressive. And the ways the ants were, shall we say, more than holding their own were a bit clever. That said, the ant footage and the human footage rarely connected. Some scenes show ants. Some show humans. There may be cutting back and forth, but it doesn’t seem to show much interaction between the two species. The ant footage is really great stuff, but the humans were, well, less interesting. And no matter how smart the ants were made out to be, they somehow still didn’t seem to be that much of a threat, and if your horror movie bad guy can’t seem threatening, is it really horror?
Grade: C+
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