Seldom seen review PHASE IV

ALWAYS been very curious about this film (love Saul Bass) and yes...it's a real shame it isn't available on DVD yet...(well, there are a lot of titles that are still absent, "white dog" and "four flies on grey velvet" are the first that spring to my mind)

PS saying is known for Hitchcock is selling the man VERY short....

he did artwork & logos for "west side story", "the man with the golden arm", a lot of famous record sleeves & a lot of well-known logos for global companies: AT&T, Minolta, United Airlines, Quaker Oats, etc

This movie ROCKS!

thoughtful and intelligent, the kind of Sci-Fi not seen since Silent Running and the glory days of the pre-Star Wars 1970s.

Phase IV is screaming for a deluxe DVD on Synapse or Criterion or some label.

For movie fans most people know Bass only through his titles and his movie posters. As a designer myself I know that the man was a legend in his field. I believe Anatomy of murder was his first movie poster.

P.S. Earlier today I got recogniced by the Art director club in Iceland for my movie posters.

I love this movie. It's absolutely brilliant.

Indeed it's a must see! Saw this one when I was 16, now i'm 31 and still love this film.
I found a bootleg version on dvd from a VHS master, was so glad to see it back.
I want to see a criterion version from this film with tons of bonuses!!

Caught this late night on BBC2 about 10,15 years ago... quite creepy.

I believ it was the subject of an episode of MST3000? And was eventually voted the least worst of all the films they commented upon?

Nice job reviewing this one. A DVD is definitely in need. I saw PHASE IV for the first time in the last couple of years. It is, as mentioned in a post above, intelligent sci-fi. I also love how the the use of "PHASE I...PHASE II...PHASE III..." leads to the end credits. Fantastic!

Also, Richard Stanley wrote a sequel to HARDWARE that paid homage to the "ants destroying technology" element of PHASE IV. The script can be found on his fansite "Between Death and the Devil."

Is this that film that ended with the girl outside singing to herself while bugs came at her, while another girl watched from inside some bunker?

I've been looking for this film forever, i think. it was very strange and creepy, even for the 70s.

No this is not that film. This film had two men and one girl in the cast.

I'd love to see Criterion make the ultimate Saul Bass 3-Disc Collection. I actually mailed Criterion the request a while back. It would include the widescreen cut of Phase IV with speical features on the first disc. The second two discs would be a collection of all of his intro and outro titles scenes from his film oeuvre (hopefully the Vertigo animation sequence). By God it would be an amzing set. The insert would contain a fun biography with snippets of his graphic designs work and quotes from the directors he's worked with (Scorsese, Hitchcock and Preminger). Man I wish ...

Evil:cat - That was where I saw this film as well. It was on Channel 4 rather than BBC2 though. I recorded it the last time it was shown in the middle of 1993 (the video is one of my treasured possessions!)

swarez - you are right - the cast had two men and a girl, but sonaboy is also correct. The film has the two scientists (one older, one younger) saving the girl from her farm which they had sprayed with a chemical to kill the ants (which works, but also killed her family! Whoops!)

The girl is then brought into the scientists lab, where both the guys fall for her. When his advances are rejected, and when the ants are showing intelligence by by building structures that reflect the suns rays and overheat the lab equipment, the older man starts blaming her for what the ants are doing and she takes it to heart.

sonaboy correctly remembers the sequence where the girl decides to walk outside while the younger man (rather than woman) can only watch. It is quite a heartbreaking moment as she sings under her breath to herself as we see shots of her bare feet walking along the path. She gasps as an ant runs over her exposed foot, and then we cut back to a long shot as she is stumbling through the desert seemingly in pain. This motivates the final act.

"They wanted....us"

I'm a huge fan of this movie, about 7 years ago i found that cinefex had run a large article written by the man who did all the insect photography for the film. At that point you could order black and white photocopies of old cineflex articles for something like 5 bucks.
It's a great article. 1 man spent an entire year shooting all the Ant shots.
Here is a link to that article, or where you can order it.
http://www.cinefex.com/index/03-03.html

amazing stuff.

Thanks for the link to the article jt! That really was the most impressive part of the whole film, showing the ants interacting. The most heartbreaking moment of the film is where each ant is rolling a piece of the poison the scientists have pumped out to kill them back to the nest so the queen can assimilate it and put out resistant strains of ants. Each ant pushing it a bit further before dying and the next one taking over.

In a strange way it feels like a premonition of the situation that would occur at Chernobyl in the 80s, where each man who went in to put out the fire was signing his own death warrant.