Phase IV
When
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scioscribe
informed me that Saul Bass, the noted movie credit sequence and poster designer who worked on everything from North by Northwest to Casino had also directed a horror movie about ants that was free on Amazon Prime and had an ending so bizarre that the studio cut it and it was only released a couple years ago, I promptly watched it over lunch and liveblogged over email.
Ants begin behaving strangely in the desert, building towers and cooperating to kill predators. Two scientists move into a geodesic dome to study this phenomena. This goes about as well as you'd expect.
Phase IV was released in 1974 and OH BOY can you tell. It's essentially a '50s monster movie filtered through an incredibly '70s sensibility, so it swerves between standard horror moments (dialogue like, "Oh my God, they're huge! ANTS!!!!!") and a dreamlike, allegorical trippiness.
There are moments that are genuinely haunting and beautiful, such as the towers built by the ants, a girl stumbling barefoot through the desert and singing hymns in a wobbly voice, and a lot of the ant photography.
The ants are real ants, and they're shot to highlight their strange beauty and to tell little stories about them that make sense within the plot but also function as self-contained stories. An ant relay in which they drag insecticide to their queen, one ant taking over for the next as they succumb to the poison, is halfway between Viking saga and the Chernobyl repairmen; a sequence involving a praying mantis is a perfect little masterpiece of misdirection, suspense, and a satisfying reveal. When the scientists try to kill the ants, we see it from the ants' perspective and it's shot like a classic war movie. All these sequences are like movies from an alternate world in which ants are the dominant species.
[Note: ants are most definitely harmed in the making of this movie.]
And then there's the human story. There's a scientist who wants to communicate with the ants, a scientist who wants to kill them, and a teenage girl who survives an ant attack. (Despite the massive 70s-ness of the film, there is no sex or romance THANK GOD.) I think it may have been an allegory of the war in Vietnam. It's definitely an allegory of war and how men who'd rather wage war than make peace ruin everything.
The movie as a whole was so 70s that I kept emailing
scioscribe
moments that I thought were peak 70s, only they kept getting topped.
"2 dudes and a girl naked in a decon shower wearing nothing but giant goggles while ants fall in slomo = quintessential 70s."
"On second thought, glowing pink crystal pyramids next to a geodesic dome is the most 70s thing ever."
And then I hit the ending. Both endings.
Cut for spoilers and ant-related body horror movie poster. ( Read more... )
Phase IV[image error]
comments
scioscribe
informed me that Saul Bass, the noted movie credit sequence and poster designer who worked on everything from North by Northwest to Casino had also directed a horror movie about ants that was free on Amazon Prime and had an ending so bizarre that the studio cut it and it was only released a couple years ago, I promptly watched it over lunch and liveblogged over email. Ants begin behaving strangely in the desert, building towers and cooperating to kill predators. Two scientists move into a geodesic dome to study this phenomena. This goes about as well as you'd expect.
Phase IV was released in 1974 and OH BOY can you tell. It's essentially a '50s monster movie filtered through an incredibly '70s sensibility, so it swerves between standard horror moments (dialogue like, "Oh my God, they're huge! ANTS!!!!!") and a dreamlike, allegorical trippiness.
There are moments that are genuinely haunting and beautiful, such as the towers built by the ants, a girl stumbling barefoot through the desert and singing hymns in a wobbly voice, and a lot of the ant photography.
The ants are real ants, and they're shot to highlight their strange beauty and to tell little stories about them that make sense within the plot but also function as self-contained stories. An ant relay in which they drag insecticide to their queen, one ant taking over for the next as they succumb to the poison, is halfway between Viking saga and the Chernobyl repairmen; a sequence involving a praying mantis is a perfect little masterpiece of misdirection, suspense, and a satisfying reveal. When the scientists try to kill the ants, we see it from the ants' perspective and it's shot like a classic war movie. All these sequences are like movies from an alternate world in which ants are the dominant species.
[Note: ants are most definitely harmed in the making of this movie.]
And then there's the human story. There's a scientist who wants to communicate with the ants, a scientist who wants to kill them, and a teenage girl who survives an ant attack. (Despite the massive 70s-ness of the film, there is no sex or romance THANK GOD.) I think it may have been an allegory of the war in Vietnam. It's definitely an allegory of war and how men who'd rather wage war than make peace ruin everything.
The movie as a whole was so 70s that I kept emailing
scioscribe
moments that I thought were peak 70s, only they kept getting topped. "2 dudes and a girl naked in a decon shower wearing nothing but giant goggles while ants fall in slomo = quintessential 70s."
"On second thought, glowing pink crystal pyramids next to a geodesic dome is the most 70s thing ever."
And then I hit the ending. Both endings.
Cut for spoilers and ant-related body horror movie poster. ( Read more... )
Phase IV[image error]
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