The original trailers aren’t always any better
Fight Club, for instance, was marketed as a boxing movie
and then there was I Am Legend, where the whole theatrical release was edited to miss its own point
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Exactly.
No. But I will watch it when I get a minute.
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I have to thank the Mrs tonight.
Why had I not heard of this William Castle gem. A fun fantasy comedy with Tom Poston. Not amazing but competent, entertaining and a great comic supporting cast.
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Flashback in El Camino where Bryan Cranston is telling Aaron Paul what he should study in college
Aaron Paul is forty years old
It’s reminding me of this Obama campaign ad
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throwback #1: Andy Griffith
throwback#2: Happy Days
throwback#3: Us 3 “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” background music
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Introduction
I just saw an influential movie from the 1970s. It’s about an often-overlooked predatory animal which has suddenly become a threat to humanity. People need to evacuate. Not everybody does. It’s up to a college boy and a crazily-obsessed older guy with a British accent to find a solution. In the end they are isolated with no hope of escape, while this deadly force of nature has them under siege.
Of course I’m writing about “Phase IV,” which is the only film directed by graphic designer Sol Bass. It’s an ants-on-a-rampage movie, but with a little something extra. It’s not quite the movie I was expecting it to be.
The Plot
The movie opens with an eclipse-like alignment of celestial bodies. This celestial event is left ambiguous. Whatever it was, however, causes a change in a population of ants living in a desert region probably outside of Los Angeles. Suddenly different types of ants who would normally be enemies are cooperating under the guidance of one queen. They appear to have developed a more robust form of communication and strategic goals.
These organized ants have driven away or killed the local populations of animals and people. They have begun demolishing homes and are building mysterious geometric towers out of dirt. The towers almost look like a group of people standing, looking at the sky with their mouths open.
Two scientists have come to the desert to study these ants: The older, slightly-obsessed British entomologist named Hubbs is played by Nigel Davenport. He might know more about the situation than he is letting on. The actor and his beard give the role a great deal of gravitas. Hubbs is assisted by a college-boy named Lesko, played by Michael Murphy. He uses computers and mathematics to try to find a way of communicating with the ants. Unlike most of his roles, here Michael Murphy plays a decent, down-to-earth person.
They have a custom laboratory built on-site — a metal geodesic dome filled with lab equipment, racks and racks of minicomputers, a teletype terminal and a plotter. Due to the marauding ants and a defensive use of heavy insecticides, they cannot leave the lab without wearing protective suits. They might as well be on another planet.
The third member of the primary cast is Lynne Frederick, who is probably best remembered for being Peter Sellars’ final wife. She is slightly in a daze, due to an ant attack on her family. Her role is basically to break-up the monotony of watch two men sweating under a metal geodesic dome.
The entomologist eventually concludes that the ants are too dangerous to study and need to be destroyed. He goes off for a confrontation with the queen. The college-boy however wants to continue communicating.
In the end… well, you knew the ants were going to win, didn’t you? But the way in which they win is what’s important, and that’s left largely to your own imagination and interpretation.
Production
This movie was made in the early 70s, at a time when biologists, with the aid of LSD or similar hallucinogens, were trying to communicate with dolphins and other higher forms of life.
From its celestial opening to its ambiguous ending where the last surviving character heads off for an encounter with the unknown, this movie feels strongly inspired by “2001: A Space Odyssey.” I think that Bass wanted his movie to be a similarly meaningful science fiction film, but terrestrially-based.
The isolated scientists’ in their geodesic dome trying to understand the ants makes me feel that this movie might have been additionally inspired by “Solaris.”
Conclusion
Phase IV is like the Velvet Underground — not popular but very influential. It’s funny to think that with “2001: A Space Oddessey” and “Solaris” as its inspiration, Phase IV ended up being responsible for the nature-on-a-rampage movies that were so popular in the 70s.
Movies such as:
*The Swarm
*Kingdom of the Spiders
*Piranha
*Jaws
*Empire of the Ants
But it doesn’t atop there. When we finally meet the queen ant, she is glossy black and breaths with exaggerated respiration — possibly like Darth Vader? And then there is the queen’s mound that has a large opening in the top that looks like the Sarlac’s pit.
Do I recommend this movie? Yes.
The first time I saw this movie a few weeks ago I was disappointed with it. I had assumed that since Sol Bass was such a visual thinker, the movie would have been more Kubrick-esque. That it would build itself up slowly, through carefully executed visuals. In fact Bass has a surprisingly heavy-handed directorial style. There’s nothing very subtle about the movie at all.
The second time I watched it, however, I knew what to expect and I ended up liking it a lot more.
So, in short, if you liked “Kingdom of the Spiders” but wished that it didn’t star William Shatner playing a character named “Rack,” this is the movie for you.
A little about the ant photography. The insect scenes are so well planned out and edited that it really looks like the ants know what they are doing. The insect wranglers did a great job. I generally don’t enjoy looking at up-close photographs of insects, but this movie’s insect photography is quite surprisingly beautiful. There is, in particular, a scene where a team of ants are attempting to sabotage the lab’s air conditioning system while there is a mantis stalking them. It is amazing.
The trainer for this movie is terrible, so instead here is the original ending that was found recently. I’m not sure if it is supposed to mean something specific, or if it is simply mean to provoke thought, like “Un Chien Andalou.” You decide:
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Cool film, haven’t seen it in ages. Two bits of persnicketiness, though. This was Saul Bass’ only feature film, he directed quite a few shorts. Here’s an old favorite, Why Man Creates:
Also, I don’t think Phase IV helped kick off the whole revenge of nature trend. The spiritual father of all these films would be Hitchcock’s The Birds, although admittedly it didn’t inspire any terribly successful successors right away. As far as I recall, it was 1971’s Willard that started the ball rolling. Now, of course, the rats in Willard kill because they’re Willard’s little buddies, not out of some sort of animal solidarity, but that movie’s box-office success led to all the later revenge of nature films of the ‘70s, such as AIP’s Frogs, which predates Phase IV by a couple years.
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“Frogs.” I haven’t seen that. I will have to look into it.
“The Birds” is something different. “Phase IV” has that distinct 70s animal attack vibe to it. And of course there is “Them!” which is different too. It started the 50s mutant animal attack movies.
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Kneel before Zod
Highly recommended, although admittedly not for the average cinema-goer.
ETA: I’ll break down and give a brief plot summary. Terence Stamp plays a handsome mysterious visitor who briefly lives with a bourgeois Milanese family. While there he becomes intimate with all family members, mother, father, son, daughter plus the maid. (Most reviewers say he seduces them all, but to me it seems that it is the others who are irresistibly drawn to him, without any effort at seduction on his part.) His influence/presence radically changes all of their outlooks on life, but then halfway through the film he announces that he has to leave, and everyone’s lives go in startling new directions as they try to cope with his absence.
Given an award by the International Catholic Film Office, then later condemned by the Pope, and then unsuccessfully charged with obscenity by the Italian police, probably Pasolini’s most controversial film after the de Sade derived Salo, although I suppose I should warn potential viewers that it’s not nearly as salacious as the above plot description may imply. (Pasolini got rather more raunchy in his “Trilogy of Life,” Canterbury Tales, Decameron and Arabian Nights.)
It also oddly reminds me of a film by Lucio Fulci.
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Yay! Now I don’t need to see any of the one’s I didn’t see…well, I might want to see a sparkly Jeff Goldblum…ooops, hope I’m not spoiling anything for anyone!
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Somehow, John Candy’s character became POTUS, though…
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Candy was playing an American, though. It’s confusing because he’s trying to be incognito for parts of the trailer, which is why he’s wearing that maple leaf scarf.
The real joke is some of the scenes are based on things actual American Senators did in the 1920s, which is the last publicly known time the US considered invading Canada.
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Yeah, so Boomer (LOLOLOLOL) could’ve been elected POTUS!
Of course, we weren’t taught about how the US threatened to invade Canada. Seriosuly, I had no clue! Probably because it would be realllllly bad PR, especially in a border town. And white people invading a country run by…other white people? Heaven forfend, fetch my smelling salts!
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Meh. Maybe I’m just in the wrong mood, but after having re-seen Penelope Spheeris’ iconic (and great) Decline of Western Civilization just last week, this fiction follow-up struck me as too cartoonish and misguided. Perhaps we can blame the two women forcibly stripped, one improbably accidentally, on executive producer Roger Corman, whose purported feminism never interfered with exploitable elements, but I’ll bet attempting to make that stripper a symbol of the “Citizens against Crime”’s hypocrisy was Spheeris’ idea, and that rubbed me the wrong way too. Points granted for making the L.A. punk scene’s racism and homophobia* a bit more explicit than the documentary and for showing that quite a few of these punks are, while still kids, far from decent people, but taken right back for making the most clearly decent person in the whole film a cop. What is this, a Dead End Kids film?
*Yes, I know, I did just recently post Fear in another thread.
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In my ever late to the game of Marvel Movies…
Endgame was actually good fun and a nice finish to the overall story arc.
I am looking forward to phase two.
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That and far from home finish phase 3. Phase 4 is up next.
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Well the next chapter of big story then.
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“This movie is like Red Dawn, if they were invaded by television propaganda.”
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I rewatched “Funeral in Berlin,” and I have to say that all my criticisms of the movie that I made earlier evaporated. I liked it before, but I really liked it this time.
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I just saw “the Gunfighter.” It’s the kind of western Sophocles would have written.
The movie was made in 1950. It comes from a brief period from the late 40s to the early 50s when Hollywood was making taught, efficient westerns filmed perfectly in black and white. Other notable films of his type include “My Darling Clementine,” “Winchester '73,” “Rawhide,” and “High Noon.” Guns indicate a personal weakness. Death has weight.
The movie’s about a notorious gunfighter, played by Gregory Peck, who visits a small town in the desert Southwest. He’s there to have a talk with his wife who has made new life for herself under an assumed name. He only has a couple of hours, and most of the movie’s action takes place in a saloon where his past is laid-out before him. In the end he has to leave, but his fate is waiting for him. The story resumes its familiar pattern, but now someone else has to live it.
The cast is excellent. Even the child actor is not totally annoying, and that’s amazing. The only weak member of the cast is Helen Westcott, who is just a bit too bland. This is possibly Millard Mitchell’s best movie. He’s a supporting charter, but exudes so much power he almost steals the movie.
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