By Drew Dietsch
| Published
One of the most unfairly overlooked sci-fi movies of the 70s is also the strangest and most unique must-sees of the era. It’s an ambitious directorial debut from a Hollywood legend that killed their career in the big chair. Put away your picnic baskets because it’s time to get antsy with the one-of-a-kind Phase IV.
The story of 1974’s Phase IV was loosely inspired by the H.G. Wells story “Empire of the Ants,” which got a mostly-in-name-only adaptation a few years later from giant monster aficionado Bert I. Gordon.
Phase IV is a very stripped-down narrative. Two scientists respond to strange, aggressive ant activity in the Arizona desert. The nearby town has been evacuated, except for one rural family. The scientists have a base of operations where they plan to run experiments to figure out the motivations of the ants, as the creatures’ intelligence seems to increase.
We’ve got a level-headed scientist played by Michael Murphy who is trying to decipher the communicative abilities and language of the ants, and we’ve got Nigel Davenport as the obsessive and antagonistic scientist who is both fascinated by the ants and enraged by them.
We’ll return to some story points in a bit, but before we get too deep into this ant farm, we have to talk about the director of Phase IV, Saul Bass.
Saul Bass is one of the most celebrated graphic designers in film history. His movie posters and title designs are the stuff of legend, especially his work with Alfred Hitchcock. Bass had a strong visual sense, and when given his first opportunity to direct with Phase IV, it’s clear that Bass had a stark and powerful visual sense that he wanted to bring to this potentially pulpy sci-fi tale.
And boy did he ever! So much so that a final climactic sequence showing a possible future was deemed too weird by the studio and cut from the final film.
That seems to be the case with Phase IV and its reception: the studio expected something more like a drive-in horror flick, and what they got is basically 2001: A Space Odyssey with teeny nibbling HAL 9000s.
I don’t make that comparison lightly. Phase IV is a psychedelic and contemplative sci-fi flick about an intelligence that begins to surpass our own human understanding. If you can’t vibe with that particular heady oddness, this flick will probably come across to you as “boring.”
Well, there is some actual boring in the movie as the ants are shown digging into the corpses of their victims with a horrific aftermath. All the ant stuff in Phase IV is impressively creepy. Wildlife photographer Ken Middleham was in charge of all the insect sequences, and there are a lot in the movie. It is truly awe-inspiring to watch an entire sequence in Phase IV with this incredible close-up photography of ants that also tells a story with no dialogue.
There are whole scenes in Phase IV that require you to empathize with silent ants and it works. A highlight sequence comes after the scientists have poisoned a bunch of ants with a yellow liquid, which also happens to kill off most of that rural family that was sticking around. We see an extended sequence of ants collecting chunks of the hardened poison and bringing it to their queen, who ingests it and starts producing ants that are now immune to the poison.
This is all done without dialogue. The technical prowess of the ant photography is commendable on its own, but actually being able to manipulate real ants into telling a specific story is nothing short of amazing.
The story escalates in engaging fashion. When the scientists first arrive in the desert, the ants have built eerie towers that seem to act as some kind of observational structures. After Nigel Davenport blows the towers up in an effort to stoke some response from the ants, the ants retaliate by building reflective structures around the laboratory that overheat the base’s environment and computers. It’s a wonderful bit of interspecies warfare that continues to reveal stranger motivations for the ants.
I don’t want to give away the entire movie, because I hope at least one person reading this checks out Phase IV, but suffice to say that the battle with the ants leads to a transcendently weird and unforgettable conclusion.
Sadly, the movie was a flop and Saul Bass never applied his incredible talents to feature film directing ever again. The movie was mostly forgotten or even treated as a joke over the years.
Thankfully, wiser heads prevailed, and Phase IV eventually started to gain a legitimate cult following. In 2024, the fine folks over at Vinegar Syndrome released a special edition 4K Blu-ray set that offers both the theatrical version and a newly restored cut that adds in deleted material including the full original ending which has to be seen to be believed.
There are plenty of reasons Phase IV deserves both a dedicated audience and a place in pop culture history. One of the most interesting facets of the movie happens early on as the scientists are surveying the land. They come across an enormous diamond symbol that the ants have created in a field. If you know anything about alien hoaxes, this sure looks like the movie was inspired by the infamous crop circle hoaxes of the ‘70s.
But Phase IV predates the first crop circle reports, so there is speculation that the original hoaxsters may have seen Phase IV and gotten the idea for their prank from this killer ant movie.
Though you’ve got to be braced for a truly weird and druggy experience, Phase IV rewards the sci-fi faithful with a smart and scary exploration into the idea of human intelligence becoming obsolete or needing to evolve into something we can’t quite fathom just yet. If you’re looking for a classic sci-fi movie that dares to be stranger and pushes the stylistic ambition of a B-horror movie into something greater, start communing with the ants of Phase IV.
