Hey, you welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob Lamb. Hey, we have a really fun one for you here today. This is an episode that originally published in January of twenty twenty two, concerning the nineteen seventy four film Phase four. Yes, this is an ANT movie, but it also might be the trippiest mind blowing ant movie of all time. It's a lot of fun. Really enjoyed watching this one and then chatting with Joe about it. So let's jump right in.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.
This is Rob Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
And today we are discussing We're not only discussing an ant movie, which of course is a subset of killer bug movies in general. We are discussing what my be the ant movie, the most ambitious ANT movie in many ways, the most perplexing and thought provoking ANT movie. I'm super excited to talk about it. Actually just had as a pre recording snack a couple of ants on a log I got off the the celery and peanut butter and the raisins It just felt appropriate.
You know, I feel like that reflects our higher ant consciousness now, because the important thing to understand about ants is they don't even mind if you eat a few of them.
You know.
That's sort of like the it's like the skin cells that you would scrape off of somebody's hand while hugging them. You know, it just like doesn't bother the colony as a whole. And I would say that's actually reflective of the movie we're talking about today overall. The movie is the nineteen seventies sci fi ant flick Phase Four, which we alluded to possibly doing an episode in our Core
episode about ants building traps. We talked about some biology papers about ant behaviors, whether whether these structures ants build should be understood as traps or not. But this movie came up because we were talking about ant movies and I said, you know, there's this ant movie I've been looking at in the video store for years, just based on the DVD cover. It's called Phase four. The cover is like this kind of cool design, but it's got
ants crawling out of a hole in somebody's hand. Never seen it, and we went in just based on the DVD cover. I'd say this was a hit.
Yeah, yeah, after we had we had already decided this is the one. I actually received word from someone on the stuff to blow your mind. Discord email us if you want to invite to that who They were like, yeah, this is this one's good. You're going to want to cover this one for a weird house. I also have, of course, looked it up when we were talking about it. I looked it up in Michael Weldon's Psychotronic Encyclopedia film in which he called it quote a great science fiction
thriller starring countless real ants. Yeah, so that was a solid endorsement, but it still was able to prepare me for all that was to come.
Well, So, when I look at the other side of the critical response to this movie, I think some people have been kind of critical of it lacking in human depth. And I'll say, okay, I'm with them there. I mean that this is not really a humans movie, and the human characters there are few of them, and the ones that are there, we don't learn much about them, and
they're not super dimensional. But I think that's okay because this is a movie that encourages you to also see humans as sort of just sells on the whole body of the human species.
Yeah, yeah, and in very delightful ways. It is. It is a movie almost by ants for ants. It is a movie that is one fresh on ant rotten tomatoes. It is. It is such an interesting film in so many ways, like it's going to be fun to discuss everything. I'm almost not sure where to art here.
You know, the funny thing about ant Rotten Tomatoes is there are no in between scores. It's either one hundred percent or zero percent every.
Time they're unified.
Well, maybe we should talk about ant movies more generally,
because this is, of course not the only one. In fact, I had a very powerful, vivid memory that came rushing back to me just the other day when when I started trying to recall if I'd seen other ant movies before, and it was a memory of being about twelve years old and watching this terrible made for TV killer ant movie that I think was on the Fox network or one of those you know, it was one of those made for TV movies that they used to advertise in the weeks leading up to it, so they'd have a
commercial with you know, Don la Fontaine or somebody on there saying this Sunday at eight nine Central, you will learn the true meaning of terror ants and you'd get a music sting and man that I don't know if they focus group tested that or whatever, but that worked on my twelve year old brain. That was like, I had to make an appointment to watch a movie that I went back and looked up and I found out it is called Marra Bunta Colon Legion of Fire, and
I rewatched the trailer and ooh, this looks stinky. It looks like it is no good. It has some absolutely atrocious CGI ants, stripping a moose clean down to the bone like piranhas on Land. It does have Mitch Poleggi from the X Files and Shocker, and it also has something that's common to some of these ant movies where there are scenes of columns of army ants that are treated like rivers of molten lava and a volcano movie.
So you get, I don't know, a kid stranded up on top of a crate and then on all sides of them, the ants are just flowing and they've got to jump over them to get to safety or something.
What is it with Shocker connections? We're gonna have another one of those coming out, that's right. So I guess when I think of ANT movies that I saw as a kid, I my mind probably goes to nineteen fifty four as them because this one was in I think it was in pretty tight rotation on like the turner stations back in the day, like there was a pretty good chance you're going to catch part of them, you know, especially on like a Sunday afternoon. But other notable ANT
movies include nineteen seventy seven's Empire of the Ants. There's also nineteen seventy seven's TV movie Ants with an exclamation Point, starring everyone's favorite work bist Robert Foxworth of what was it?
Can't you remember the name of that movie?
Death Moon or deth Moon Death Moon Fame, But that one also starred Suzanne Summers, Brian Denahey, Anita Gillette. This is the actor who played Liz Lemon's mom on thirty Rock, and also Bernie Casey.
So does Foxworth play another work beast in this movie?
I don't know.
I'm guessing, like, yeah, maybe a laid back work beast that has to go up against in this case. Ants. I haven't seen it, but oh, okay, it sounds good.
A question about them though. Them is a movie not with regular ants, but with big ants, right, It's like an atomic age mutation movie.
Correct. Correct? And I think that leads into our next major distinction to make here. When we're talking about ant movies, you're gonna either deal with giant ant movies or you're gonna deal with normal sized ants. So it's either going to be a giant bug feature or it's going to be a swarm feature. And what's interesting about that is when you have the giant ant, it's going to be more about individual ants. That's the spectacle of it, right.
This generally you're doing a lot to get one giant ant on the screen, But when you're dealing with the swarm, of course, you have this more accurate reflection of what ants are. They are not the individual, they are the group.
Yeah, I think that's right, and I would say broadly, I think i'd break ant movies into three category. So you've got your giant ant movies, in which case the ant is not really important. It's not important that it's an ant. It's just a giant bug, and it could be any bug, could be a giant praying mannis giant
spider is just a giant bug that attacks. So I think that's probably going to be my least favorite kind overall, because that you lose the essential antiness, you know, the form the formic aromas of the premise is just like any giant bug will do, because they're just big and they'll tear you apart.
Yeah, might as well go with a more interesting solitary bug, you know, insect or rachnet, like a scorpion for example.
Sure, giant scorpion, that'd be great.
Giant spider obviously, okay, but then.
When you break it down, you keep the ants small. I think they're basically two ways you can go. One is the just ants as ants, like, you know, they're kind of an environmental threat almost. This comes back to the like they're like rivers of molten lava in a volcano movie. You know, they're just like as the floor is lava, except instead of lava, it's ants. But then the other way to go is to think about ants as a sort of organization principle and have the horror
lie there. And that's actually where Phase four goes, which I think is interesting to think about ants not just as something that turns the floor into lava, but something that has has organized behaviors that can surprise you and make you afraid.
Yeah. Yeah, and that's definitely the realm that we're going to be venturing into with phase four here.
I guess the real distinction there is that, like, does the danger of the ants lie in their in their numbers alone or in their use sociality? And Phase four it's in their use sociality.
Yeah, And this is we have to drive home. This is definitely one of the more, if not the most ambitious ant movies and intelligent ant movies, Like they really went for it with this particular film, trying to use ants to their full potential cinematically. So it's a rare beast.
I think it's a work beast in many ways, because I would say this is also a highly technical film. As we've already said, it may be lacking in some human depth, but as a sort of visual art project, I'd say this movie is a home run. I mean it is a beautiful, weird celebration of geometry of like colors and lines and angles and close up photography of ants, and I would say very good special effects. There were
parts where the ant puppetry is so good. I sometimes couldn't tell if I was looking at you know, microphotography of real ants or if it was one of the puppets.
Yeah. Yeah, it was very difficult to tell. And I should also throw in that not only are the visuals great, but the sound design and music is also really noteworthy, and we'll touch on that as we go.
Yeah.
Now, Phase four was was something of a flop at the time, apparently maybe it was ahead of its time, but over the years it's been particularly influential on various visionary filmmakers. Apparently, I know it's Michael Weldon liked it. I've read that Panos Cosmntos was a fan of it.
Yeah, apparently inspired Beyond the Black Rainbow, Yeah.
Yeah, which is a film I have a lot of admiration for, and certainly having seen Phase four now I can I can definitely see where those inspiration points are. Apparently apparently as well, this was also a film that was riffed in the KTMA, like basically proto season of Mystery Science Theater three thousand and that's an episode you can actually find places, you know, uploaded on video servers and all. I've never watched it because the KTMA episodes are.
You know, it's a different beast it was the first season. It's not quite like watching a full blown MST three K episode.
Yeah, I would say in general, they're not as engaging, not as good. And the weird thing about it is, I recall some of the movies, so this is like when they were a public access show in Minnesota or wherever it was before they got syndicated became a national show. But the weird thing about that early season is I haven't seen a lot of them, but I know they do some movies that are kind of seems like higher
budget maybe better movies than they do in the later seasons. Actually, like I think they end up doing The Green Slime, which is a movie we may come back to on Weird House Cinema someday, especially because it's got its own really groovy rock theme song.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't think they'd quite calibrated what was an MST three K film at that point. So at any rate, if our discussion here perks your interest and you're not quite ready to watch it without some sort of riffing structure in place, then I guess you could check out that Katma episode. But for the most part.
I think this is a film that stands on its own and is richly enjoyable on its own, and more to the point, in high visual quality that you're not going to get with the rip of an old public access television broadcast.
Now, while we're talking talking about looking up this movie, I got to say, also is a bizarre coincidence. As weird of a name as Phase four with the Roman numeral for ivy is for a movie, there is actually a totally unrelated other movie called Phase four that came out in the early two thousands. It looks like some kind of Dean Caane conspiracy action thriller.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So word of warning, don't get into much for a hurry when you're saying this, when you don't want to wind up with the Brian Bosworth film. If you watch a Brian Bosworth film, you want to watch Stone Cold from nineteen ninety one.
So I've never seen that one, But while we were chatting about this, you got me to look up stills from it and Brian Bosworth and Stone Cold is fresh. I mean, like, God, look at his hair at the sunglasses.
Yeah, it's ridiculous. That was and I remember it being a fun action B movie because you have Lance Hendrickson's in it. William Forsyth is in it, so it's yeah, yeah, it's ridiculous.
It's like a biker fighting movie or something. Okay, Okay, give me the elevator pitch on phase four before we hit the trailer audio.
Okay, So what if there was some sort of a solar conjunction and it caused all ants to suddenly declare a peace treaty and turn their attention on other species on the rest of the world. So basically a nature strikes back, but this time it strikes smart and with you social precision.
Great premise. Let's hear some audio.
In the next few moments. We will try to give you an impression of a new kind of film experience. If your curiosity is aroused, you are ready for phase four. How do you fight a force that knows what your next move will be before you think of it?
All right, that's a solid trailer right there.
I agree. And now one of the things we've already talked about is that, you know, I've had my theory that really the star of this movie if it is not ants, you could say it's ants, But if it's not ants, it's still not humans. It is visual geometry. It's colors and lines and shapes and design. And I think that totally makes sense once you realize who the director of this film was, because I think the director, Saul Bass, this was his only movie. Am I right about that?
This was his only feature length film. Yeah, he did some other short films and experimental films and some you know, sort of documentary style shorts, but this is the only full length film he did.
And it seems to me very much a graphic designers or art director's kind of films. It's not really an actor's film. It's not really very script driven. It's a movie about showing you pictures. And the style of those pictures reads very much to me is that mid century modern design style, the kind of thing that you see a lot on mad Men or whatever. And I think that makes sense because I've read that mad Men was in many ways trying to copy the style of the director of this film, Saul Bass.
Yeah. Casaal Bass is something of a legend, certainly in the graphic design field here. He lived nineteen twenty through nineteen ninety six, and he was for Starters. The title sequence, title design guy of the day. He crafted title sequences for major films from the mid nineteen fifties all the way through the mid nineties. We're talking about the likes of The Seven Year Itch, Vertico, Psycho, Spartacus, West Side, Story, Seconds,
Broadcast News, Big Good Fellas, Kate, Fear, and Case. I should also note that, in addition to directing Phase four, he of course did the title design. You're not gonna You're not. If you're Saubash, You're not gonna trust that to anybody else. This is your baby.
You're doing the titles, and the title design is great.
It is like you said. The Mad Men is often credited as kind of an homage to his work and some of the visual elements there. He did logos as well for a number of big name companies throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and I was reading something too about the longevity of his designs on that front. He also did some pretty famous movie posters, including the aforementioned films, but also Stanley Kubrick's The Shining Oh.
That's interesting. Did Saul Bass do the credit sequence for Doctor No, the first James Bond movie?
That's I think he had some connection with the Bond film. I didn't put it in my notes, but that sounds right, if not Doctor No. One of the Bond films he has connections to.
It seems to kind of fit into his design and Clay.
I was looking at some of the rejected poster designs that he did for the Shining stuff, Like he had one that heavily featured the Hedge Labyrinth the Hedge Maze, and Kubrick had rejected that one because he didn't want
too much focus to be put on that. But I was reading a post about this at Farout Magazine dot co dot uk and it had images from the original correspondence between Bass and Kubrick, and you can see that Saul Bass has has signed like the cover letter here, and he includes this wonderful It's either an illustration or a stamp of himself as a fish. So it's like his sort of mild mannered, mustached, bespeckled face here on a fish's body. It's pretty amusing.
Is that a joke on him being a Bass?
I guess so. Yeah.
His Shining poster is worth looking up because I love the design. It's like it's just three sort of silhouettes heading into the opening of a maze, and part of me wonders if did Kubrick reject this just because he was in a bad mood and he was being difficult.
Or yeah, maybe so because it's a great poster, like we said. Phase four was Bess's only full length film, though he made six other short films, including Why Man Creates from nineteen sixty eight, which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. His other films include the nineteen eighty Robert Redford produced the Solar film promoting solar energy over fossil fuels. He also made a very interesting looking nineteen eighty four short titled Quest, based on the
Ray Bradbury story Frost and Fire. I look this one up. I found like a rip of it on one of the video streaming sites, but I didn't watch it because part in part it looks too interesting. I feel like I need to see this in a like a higher visual format or something.
I wonder iful that a disc out there that collects his smaller works or something.
I would hope, say how or perhaps there's one of the blu rays that we allude to later on. For this film has some extras like that. But it looks very cool and definitely has that the sort of the sci fi visual sensibilities that we'll discuss in relation to this film. I also want to point out that he often worked with his wife and creative partner, Elaine Bass on these projects.
Right, So if you've heard us talk in the past about rub the Fur movies, I would say this is a really excellent example of one of those. This is a design first movie, and the pleasure of it is almost all about texture. It is a celebration of surfaces.
Now, it did have a writer, Mayo Simon born nineteen twenty eight. This is the screenwriter who wrote the West World sequel Future World in seventy six. This had Peter Fonda and Yu'll Brenner in it. Also the nineteen sixty nine film Marooned starring Gregory Peck and Gene Hackman. That
one won an Academy Award for Visual Effects. But Simon went on to create the NBC TV show Man from Atlantis, which I'd never heard of before, starring Patrick Duffy of Dallas Fame and Belinda Montgomery, who some of you might remember as being Doogie Howser's mom.
I do not remember.
It looks very fun in a mid like mid seventies TV sci fi sort of way.
Now we've already said that this is not really an actor's film. In fact, it's not even really a very human film. But I guess we should mention some of the cast members.
Right first and foremost, we have Nigel Davenport playing doctor Ernest D. Hubbs now Davenport lived nineteen twenty eight through twenty thirteen, English actor known for nineteen sixty six is a Man for All Seasons, in which he played the Duke of Norfolk, and nineteen eighty one's Chariots of Fire, in which he played Lord Birkenhead. That one had. I've only seen parts of Chariots of Fire and it was
many years ago. It's got a pretty extensive cast, so I don't specifically remember where he fit into that, but of course it's it's a famous movie and has a tremendous score by evangelists.
Nigel Davenport seems like an actor you call in for gravitos.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He has a great presence and a great presence in this where he plays the determined and at times reckless at times later on the film he basically becomes kind of an ant focused captain a hab in any ways.
So he has just a terrible case of mad scientist disease.
Yes, so he's perfect casting for this. I can't imagine anyone else here. He was also in the nineteen seventy seven adaptation of H. G. Wells The Island of Doctor Moreau. This is one I fondly remember from catching on TBS or TNT back in the day. This one started Burt
Lancaster and Michael Yorke. He apparently plays Scrooge's dad in the nineteen eighty four George C. Scott adaptation of a Christmas Carol, and he's also in nineteen eighty four's Gray Stoke, The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, starring Christopher Lambert.
Oh wow, Well who is he? And Greystoke? Is he? Is he? Is he Tarzan's dad or something?
You know?
Gray Stoke is another one that I've only seen parts of on TV when I was much younger. I've not I don't think i've watched it in full. I'm I believe he plays one of the grumpy British guys like generally.
That's Oh, I think there are a few of Thosese.
Yeah, yeah, that's generally you're casting for Davenport.
Well, all right, So basically, the two main characters of this movie are the two scientists who go in to investigate the ant phenomenon, and so Davenport plays one of them, he plays Hubs, and then the other scientist is one named LESCo, who is played by the actor Michael Murphy.
That's right. A born nineteen thirty eight American actor, best known for his work with Robert Altman. He did seven pictures for Altman. They include the likes of Countdown, The Cold Day in the Park, mash The Original film, Brewster, McLeod McCabe, and Missus Miller Nashville Kansas City. He also appeared in Woody Allen's Manhattan, Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously, and Oliver Stone Salvador. He also worked with
John Sayalis Silver City. He was in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, and of course he was in He was in Tim Burton's Batman Returns. He also mayor. Oh yeah, yeah, he's the mayor of Gotham City. There. I guess he was only one term, because I don't think he pops up to another Batman film. But he was also in a movie called count yorga vampire. And this is our other Shocker connection because he was in Wes Craven Shocker.
He plays Peter Berg's dad in Shocker. He's like a detect who's on the case trying to chase down Mitch Pelegi.
Yeah, so Murphy, Murphy's fine in this. You know, he's a you know, far younger than many of these other film appearances that we noted, but yeah, he's he's he's a numbers guy. He plays what he's a game theorist and mathematician. Mathematician, Yeah, doesn't really know or care anything about ants, but it is ultimately like the younger, more compassionate of the duo here, right.
I think they do a kind of strange thing where they have two scientists. One is a like entomologist who cares deeply about ants, and the other is a mathematician who doesn't care about ants. And so you would think that the one who goes ahab and just wants to destroy all of ants would be the mathematician, but no, they switch them. It's kind of counterintuitive.
Yeah, but if if the other guy, if Davenport's hubs is Captain a hab Then Murphy's less go is.
Yeah, he's kind of along for the ride. Yeah he decided well. In fact, he even says he was like, I just wanted to get away for a few weeks. That's why I took this job. So it's like he wanted to go see the watery part of.
The world, all right. We ultimately have a very small human cast in This is one thing I noticed before we even watched the film, and has like five or six people are credited, and the two we covered have most of the screen time, but there is another there's a third human character that plays a I don't want to I guess a crucial role. It's not a great part because he's kind of a damsel in distress for a lot of it. But we have the actor Lynn
Frederick playing Kindra Eldridge. Now. Frederick lived nineteen fifty four through nineteen ninety four, British actor of the seventies who had a really promising career going died too young. Known for roles in The Amazing Mister Blunden, Nicholas and Alexandria, and The Prisoner of Zenda. She was also in the nineteen seventy two horror film Vampire Circus.
I didn't realize she was in Nicholas and Alexandra. I got to look that up. I see she was in. That's a movie where I also very much appreciate the textures. There's some really good sets and locations in it.
Yeah, I've heard you talk about that one before. Basically, she is what we'll discuss like. She's an innocent human who gets swept into this ant takeover drama. She has a couple of grandparents that are are doomed, and we'll discuss their doom in a bit. But the actor who plays Grandma Grandma Eldridge in this is the actor Helen Horton, who lived nineteen twenty three through two thousand and seven. She pops up in Superman three, did a lot of
TV work. But she's also the voice of Mother from nineteen seventy nine's Alien.
Now, this is funny because I didn't remember Mother in Alien. This is the name of the computer. Is the computer that controls everything. I only remember Dallas communicating with Mother through like a command line on a computer screen, though maybe Mother has a voice. When there's like a self destruct countdown on the ship or something.
I think that is it. Yeah, okay, where Mother's given the countdown and Ripley is trying to get out of there with.
A cat, right right, But I don't know. Maybe next time I watch Alien, I'll got to keep I'll keep an ear out for Helen Horton, who in this movie just plays like suspicious Grandma. It's Mildred is just not very happy about the government telling them that they need to flee the ant menace.
All right, let's talk a little bit about the music on this one. Normally we highlight a single individual that's involved, but this time, like three different individuals at least are worth noting here. So, first of all, Brian Gascoigne is credited with the music. Born nineteen forty three, British composer and musician who also scored the Emerald Forrest in nineteen eighty five and worked in the music department on such films as Godsford Park. He did piano on that, Harry
Potter and The Goblet of Fire. He did keyboards and synthesizer on that. He did synthesizers on Cherry two thousand and most exciting of all, at least to me, he was also in the music department on Jim Henson's nineteen eighty two masterpiece The Dark Crystal. I'm a huge fan of that film, and I think the music for that movie is tremendous. The score was composed by Trevor Jones, but Gascoyinn provided quote synthesized electronic sounds. So I'm guessing
it was like, Okay, the crystal's doing something. We need to get gas coin in here to start tickling the synth.
What is the sound of draining essence?
Now we also have Desmond brisco on this who lived nineteen twenty five through two thousand and six. He's credited as Composer Additional Electronic Music, a British composer and sound engineer, co founder of the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Now this is the group that included pioneering electronic artist Delia Derbyshire, who lived nineteen thirty seven through two thousand and one.
Oh yeah, yeah, She's the one who provided the electronic arrangement of the original Doctor Who theme and ultimately influenced many future big names and electronic music.
So I've said on the show before that I am not a hoovey and I don't really know much Doctor Who, but when I did very first try to watch a few episodes, the main thing that actually hooked me about it more than the show itself was the theme song.
I got briefly obsessed with the theme music and with the different versions of it from over the years, and ended up going on the steep dive about Delia Derbyshire and like how she created it with I guess it was analog tape effects at the time, right, Yeah, yeah, I mean this, yeah, digital manipulation, and yeah, what a great piece of classic electronic and tape effects music.
And then on one more individual I want to mention in reference to Phase four, and that is Stomu Yamashta, who is credited with composer Montage Music. Born nineteen forty seven Japanese percussionist, keyboardist and composer known for helping to fuse traditional Japanese percuss of music with Western prog rock.
In the sixties and seventies. He was a member of the supergroup Go alongside such names as Steve Winwood, best known for the track Higher Love, but also German electronic music pioneer Klaus Schultz, of whom I'm a big fan.
Oh I don't know if I know him.
Oh, you would dig out. I'll have to send you some stuff after we record, because Claus Schultz put out some wonderful material. Now, Yamashta, on his own scored the nineteen seventy six David Bowie sci fi film The Man Who Fell to Earth, as well as nineteen eighty two's Tempest, starring John Cassavetti's Susan Sarandon, Molly Ringwald, and Roald Julia.
Now this is a movie where I don't think there was ever like a melody from the score that stuck with me. But in general I loved the sound design and the ambient electronic music.
Yeah, this is a film that's very concerned with computers and computer technology and all that computer technology is also scene is and very much plot wise as a way of translating the way of the ant in a way that ants and humans might communicate. So it uses electronic music well in providing a sense of the cosmic and other worldly and even like the sense of the cosmic and other worldly to be found in the mind of
the ants. There are a few places where it gets a little melodic and traditional, almost as if somebody like the producers were like, hey, what are you doing here? Saw this is a human movie for humans, and this scene has humans doing human stuff. Let's get some human music in here. But otherwise, yeah, it's pretty great. Lots
of electronic touches. There are stretches without music, but those tend to revolve around one of two soundscapes I found, either windswept desert or the insides of their spaceship like research station that also has a supercomputer. There, so lots of computer noises.
Oh, in fair warning, I wouldn't normally mention this, but there was one part of like, if you're listening with like loud headphones or something, there is one segment of this movie where for like several minutes they start making this excruciating high pitch noise. Yeah, I imagine. Do you know the part I'm talking about?
Rob Yes, yeah, absolutely, Because I was watching it with the sound up, part of it with the sound up while my wife was trying to work like the next dream, and I was a little I was like, oh, this is getting a bit much. I have to plug in the headphones for this.
Yeah. So if you go watch it yourself, just be wary, keep your finger on the volume button.
All right, let's get into the plot of this baby. We have to mention this is a movie that is not afraid to narrate.
No, no, Yeah, there is plenty of voiceover narrate near In fact, I wonder if there is just if you go by word count, I wonder if there's more voiceover narration than there is dialogue.
Probably, So you know, I have to be one. Anytime I think about narration and film, I always go back to like various threads I would read and arguments about really Scott's Blade Runner, where people are like, get that narration out of here, narration in a film by god, And I was always like, I kind of like the narration. What's wrong with the narration? Give me that?
Yeah. I don't have strong general feelings about it one way or another. You know, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not.
Yeah, it can be good, it can be bad. It can also help along a movie that maybe you know, it just needs a little narration help and letting you know what's supposed to be going on.
Well. Yeah, And also in this movie, without the narration, you would either need to make it way more dialogue heavy and add totally different types of characters and stuff, or you just got to have the narration in there, because they begin by explaining the whole situation. The opening narration includes shots of space where you're seeing these planets and stars, apparently a line that they're very vague about what's going on, but in a way that I found
pleasing rather than frustrating. I think some people might be more frustrated, but they don't say exactly what's going on. But there's so some kind of weird astronomical event, and this astronomical event gets scientists and mystics alike very excited, but nobody knows what it means except you are told that there's a researcher named Ernest Hubbs who documents that right after this astronomical event, ants around the world start
doing things that ants don't do. It says that they're meeting, communicating, making decisions, again being very vague about what that means, but I guess we'll find out more as the movie goes on. And while the narration explains the situation, we get to watch this beautiful ballet of ants running around in tunnels, fighting, reproducing, doing all kinds of things. And I want to say, also that the effects and photography
in this opening ant ballet are just wonderful. There were plenty of parts where I couldn't tell if I was looking at real ants or at special effects. Even some of the close ups that were obviously puppets look very good. Of the textured surfaces, the exoskeleton, the eye, the sand grains, the antennae. At this point I immediately felt like we were in very good hands as far as the look and design of the movie was going. Absolutely but then
we get tons more voice over narration. I started transcribing it, but I think later on I realized, like, I don't need to read all of this verbatim, but essentially there is a different voice coming in that we will later find out as doctor Hubbs, and he's dictating some kind of government memorandum. He's issuing a MIMO to like the biocontrol division of some kind of agency, and he is explaining alarming reports of something going on in the American Southwest.
He says that the traditional antagonisms between different ant species have come to a dramatic halt, and he says, at the same time, there has been an apparent disappearance of those insects which prey on ants, specifically mantises, beetles, millipedes, and spiders. And he says that if this goes on, we're going to see some real booms in ant populations. And then meanwhile, we see beautiful time lapse footage of ants swarming over and devouring a big tarantula, and he
ends up offering in this MIMO a proposal. He's like, look, what we've got to do is a full scale attack on the ants, otherwise they're going to represent a threat to all other life forms in the area. So we need to build an experiment station out near ant ground zero. And he says he needs more personnel and needs another
researcher to join him. So the leader here is going to be this ant researcher Hubs, but he also requests somebody named j. R. LESCo, who is a senior scientist who is a qualified information specialist with cryptological background.
Yeah, and so we're already getting the idea that there's going to be some sort of communication aspect to this study, this project, which again seems to be a out understanding and combating ants who have declared like an ant wide peace treaty and are turning their attention to other things in a way that makes us feel threatened. And it seems like Hubbs has just been granted an enormous budget for this project, but also, as we'll find out, a very limited window in which to operate.
Yeah, it's funny. So they build him a geodesic dome out in the desert that's full of the world's most sophisticated technology, and it's got supercomputers and stuff in in nineteen seventy four. But he's also constantly getting calls on the radio that are like, they're like, can you hurry this up? You know, we don't have enough budget to fund you for two more days.
Yeah, well maybe, I mean, maybe it's on hubs, Like, maybe you should have scaled down on the facilities here. Maybe you didn't need this what seems like a spaceship, you know, it feels like it should be on the surface of Mars, not in the wedd of the Arizona desert.
We've only got these super computers rented through Friday. After that there are late fees. Well anyway, so that's the setup, and then we get to the actual narrative part of the film. So we see a car blasting through the desert, kicking up clouds of dust from the road, and it goes past signs for a golf course and a country club, and then a sign that says welcome to Paradise City.
But it's one of those comedic, ironic reveals because when you peel back from all those signs, it's just a cursed land of emptiness and dust.
Yeah. I think they refer to it as another desert development that didn't develop.
Right. It's some half built houses and a grid of dirt roads. But when they go down to the end of the longest of the dirt roads, we see something very strange. And in the middle of the nothingness there is this grove of seven pillars, just pillars reaching straight up out of the ground like Greek columns. And so they drive up and park the car and out hop a couple of guys. These would be our protagonist again. This is Nigel Davenport is doctor Hubbs and Michael Murphy
is doctor LESCo. And I immediately noticed some very interesting color coating. This was another thing that tipped me off early how sort of visual and design oriented this movie would be. Because Rob, I don't know if you noticed the same thing, but The color coating of the wardrobes of the two actors is so starkly different. LESCo is just blue, blue blue. He's blue jeans, blue shirt, blue jacket, and blue hat, whereas Hubbs is all these earth tones
and earth energy. So he's wearing khaki pants, a brown jacket, he's got long hair and a dark beard, and he's carrying a staff or stick of some kind. Yeah, so I was immediately wondering what's going on with this? It again seems like a graphic designer's touch. But is LESCo supposed to be the sky while Hubbs is the earth? Or is it a blue wizard in ratagas the brown thing.
I really noticed this as much when I was watching it, but I guess I was focusing more on the environment they're in, which is pretty brilliant, because this is the place where where human organization and human development has the wave has crashed and fallen back. It is where human development has failed, but it is where this new sign of ant civilization has sprung forth right.
And so they walk around in these half built or abandoned houses, and LESCo asks if there are any dead bodies out here, and Nigel Davenport says, no, the population moved itself out days ago. And then they start talking about their background, and we learned that LESCo has achieved scientific fame by applying game theory to the language of killer whales, and Hubs is very intrigued by this. He wants to know, did you ever actually make contact with
a whale? And LESCo says, only with the emotionally disturbed ones. And Hub is like, well, how did you determine that? And LESCo says, well, we talked. I think he's supposed to be kidding, but they never clarify this.
Yeah, I think it's math nerdery. And also, this is the point in the movie where if you don't know anything about it, you can easily imagine we're going in the direction of like a computer literally translates what ants are saying in some sort of a computer voice, in the same way that you have films where this is happening with dolphins and other creatures. But and this is a film that is about communication or attempts at communication
between two drastically different intelligent species. But it does so in very clever ways that I think really like takes the question seriously and takes the you know, the gulf between different you know, possibly evolved intelligences, the gulf between them, and how difficult it would be like for one side to even realize the other side is intelligent.
Yeah, that's something I really liked about this movie is that it it takes the confusing nature of cross species communication seriously. Like there's a great scene I want to talk about later that involves communication between humans and ants and how it's hard to understand what it means. But anyway, here at the beginning, it's clear that LESCo does not see himself as a biologist or a zoologist or somebody who cares about or understands animals. He says, I'm strictly
a pencil and paper guy. The two scientists approach the Seven Pillars and Rob, how would you describe these pillars? I love this feature of the movie. And they won't be the last pillars we see.
Yeah, they're pretty great because they're monolithic, but they don't you know, they're not as perfect as say the monolith from two thousand and one A Space Odyssey, though you can't help but imagine some of that DNA is present there. I mean, certainly the this is a film that exists, you know, in the ultimately in the very long shadow of two thousand and one, a space Odyssey. But these feel they feel very organic. They're reminiscent of termite mound
cooling towers. They have these little crevices towards the top that feel like they're intended to do something with the air. It's the kind of thing that you'd think an ant researcher would be very interested in, but they ultimately don't seem to investigate that much. But yeah, they feel like they are at this place where where organic animal construction and human construction meets and the distinction becomes blurred, right.
I mean it's the angles I think that make them unusual. I mean, if they were just sort of rounded pillars, you might think, well, those are very tall and strange, but they're more like termite mounds. It's the fact that they have like a diamond shape with sharp angles that makes it look like, oh, this shouldn't be something ants are doing.
Yeah, it looks very alien and cool.
Oh and of course we see in close ups that ants are looking looking out the scientists through crevices in the pillars. So anyway, after this, they go to a farm where they find some dead sheep, and there are shots of them walking through the tall grass that's rippling in the wind. It's very elegant. But they eventually come across a crop circle with geometric designs inside it.
There's like a.
Diamond in the middle and then a ring around the outside, and Hubs is talking about how there are some ant species that will attack anything that threatens their food supply, and so what do these patterns in the field represent. Well, it's not clear yet, and in fact, I don't know if it ever becomes clear. It's just like the ants make this pattern in the field for some reason, and.
I don't even think our characters perhaps realize that pattern is there. This is like the privileged information that is for the viewer. Yeah, there's no indication that they notice that they are standing in the midst of this strange crop circle. Right.
And I will say, by the way, I don't know if this is true, but I just read briefly on the internet some people alleging that this film may have inspired some of the people who made crop circles, and then said that they were made by aliens because apparently this pre date some of the big crop circle craze.
Huh, I didn't realize that. I did read somewhere that this is arguably the first appearance of a crop circle in a film, But that would be interesting, and certainly it would match up with what we know about about crop circles in there. They're very human origin.
Yeah, apparently there are a few reports of things sort of like crop circles that date to before the seventies, but I think the real crop circle craze started sometime in the mid to late seventies. That's when it really took off. Well anyway. So they're going around this farm that still does have a few people in it, and
we meet a farmer named mister Eldridge. I don't think we ever learned his first name, and he's explaining a fuel ditch trap for ants, Like they dig a big moat around the farmhouse and fill it with gasoline or something.
Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of a crazy sounding planned. They're like, yeah, if they aunt get across the water, we'll just light this troth of a fuel on fire and then that'll do him, and then we'll just keep this troth of fire going for the rest of our lives.
Yeah. So the family is mister Eldridge, and then his wife Mildred Eldridge, who is skeptical of these scientists who have arrived to tell them they're in danger. And their granddaughter Kendra Eldridge, who she kind of rides horses and waves. And then there's another guy named Cleat, who I guess is their aunt burning guy. It's like, oh, you got an aunt burning guy. Yeah, his name's Cleat. Yeah, I'll put you in touch.
Yeah. But Kindra is the main character again, this is the character played by Lynn Frederick spoiler. She's the only one that is going to survive for any length of time here.
Right, But anyway, Hubbs tells them they're going to have to evacuate in a few days for their own protection. Mildred is not happy about that, but strangely, mister Eldridge is like, hey, listen to them, it's for our own protection.
Yeah.
So that was Phase one, and then we get a transition where we see phase two. It's not clear what has changed, but that's what we get.
Yeah, And that's the interesting thing about this film, Like the title phase four is not referring to most of the film, Like Phase four is the place we are going to arrive at at the end of the film.
Right, So the next thing we do is we go to the two scientists in their self contained research facility, which is a geodesic dome with an antenna tower next to it and then a bunch of little nodes coming off of it, like these pipes leading out to these little spheres planted out in the perimeter around the geodesic dome, which we later learned are for spraying beautiful poison.
Yes, of which they have. Do they have just two colors or are there three colors?
There are only two we learn about that there may be others.
There's yellow and there's blood.
So the scientists are inside doing experiments. There are lots of machines that make beeping and worrying noises, sometimes a big air pressure hiss as well. And this might sound kind of hard to believe, but I believe. I think there are several just extremely pleasurable shots of Michael Murphy just flipping lots of switches.
Yeah, yeah, we're not exactly sure what he's doing here necessarily, but you have that nice computer electronic ambiance going on in the background, and he's very chill about this. Yeah, it's a nice vibe. Now, I love, love, love this research facility they have here. In general, I love it when researchers and or adventurers in a film are just drastically technologically over prepared for a mission, overfunded as well,
perhaps here. I love it when it's as simple as an antarctic research facility or an underwater station that just happens to have a flamethrower on hand. I also love it when it's an eight mission into the jungle and you bring along tripod, gun drones and your own talking techno ape.
It's congo.
You have congo, And I guess that's the thing too. It's like, you know, it's very criteny, and this film does feel very Crichtony in many respects. Well, yeah, I.
Don't want to say it's ripping it off, but I say I think there are some very clear parallels between this movie and the Andrama to Strain, Michael Crichton's first big novel, which is also about a group of scientists that go into a self contained facility in the American Southwest in order to fight some kind of novel biological menace that has been caused by an astronomical event. So I wouldn't be surprised if there's a little bit of inspiration.
Going on there that would make sense. Yeah, but again, what we have here is a weird station that seems like it's built for the surface of Mars, full of supercomputers, NASA style living conditions, you know, like this wonderful scene where they're picking out what kind of food they're going to eat, or they're getting some coffee or something, and
it's like a spaceship, but not only a spaceship. A spaceship that has been engineered to stand is like the last redoubt against the ant onslaught, and yet it is not one hundred percent ant proof, though there seem to be measures taken to try and make it so. Like there's essentially like a decontamination airlock that you have to get nude for. They're the poison sprayers with two different flavors that we mentioned.
It's great, and there's some drama inside about cost overruns that we alluded to earlier, Like there's a guy on the radio who's calling hubs and being like, hey, you got to speed up your research. We're running out of money here.
And I guess this is important too, to not like one of the things that they keep driving home. I think with the human interaction is that ants have it all together. Not only previously they did, you know, species to species, or a colony to colony in some cases, and super colonies. But now all ant kind is one is on the same page. They are working in unison. Meanwhile, none of our humans can get along completely. They all have different ideas and different views. You know, our two
researchers are arguing with each other. They're having conflicts ultimately with the other human character and with these people on the phone, right.
But the way they come up with to speed up the research, by the way, is hilarious because what it means is, Okay, we got to get the ants to do something. So Hubbs is like, well, I guess I'll go blow up these towers in the desert with a handheld grenade launcher.
Yes, and yeah, we have to stress that we're talking again, like a handheld grenade launcher like the one Arnold has in Terminator too. He just casually uses it to blow up all the ant monoliths that are there, which which which is interesting too because later on, like the voice on the phone is like, you should try destroying one of the monoliths to see if you can provoke a reaction. He didn't. He didn't mess around. He just blows them all up. Yeah.
Well, I think he's already done it. When they suggest that, he's like, oh, I'll think about it, okay.
Uh yeah, And I just again it comes back to the fact that this grenade launcher I'm I'm assuming or hoping it is Slash, was illegal to actually own one of these that fires actual grenades and not flares. So I guess it is part of the specialized kit that he requested and was approved for use in this research experiment. So that means it has its like its own shelf in the in the research station, or maybe it's in as it's mounted behind glass with a sign that reads
break if studied. Dandelion is rapidly approaching.
Yeah, but we just see him out there in the middle of the road. He's standing there like like Mill Gibson and the Road Warrior poster with the thing. He's just shooting these ant colonies.
Yeah, he's got a whole ammunition box of grenades and he's just letting it, letting the monolithts happen.
But anyway, so from this they do learn some things because LESCo figures out that the ants are communicating by sound that he's like, they're talking to each other, and he starts recording the sounds they're making and trying to decode it and understand their language in anyway, so we knew this was coming. Later that night, the ants apparently attack the Eldridge farm. They're the only other humans left around,
and the ants set upon them. So they start attacking the horse out in the field, and then the fire trap is triggered, and then the ants swarm the house and then the humans have to flee in a truck, and Mildred is all like they warned us, and then I think ants attack the truck and attack inside the truck.
Yeah, yeah, they're they're They're suddenly inside they're crawling in Grandpa's hair. There's the results in a wreck, and so they're fleeing on foot at this point towards the research facility and towards the buildings, you know, the remains of this housing development.
They're still there, right, So they basically get to the research facility, but they're attacked by ants when they get out of the truck, and at the same time LESCo is showing off his work to Hubs on decoding the ant language. And while he's doing that, ants cut the power to the facility. They cut the power, man, how can they cut the power? They're animals, but they do, and the so Hubs responds by spraying the ants outside with this gorgeous yellow poison that it's like coming out
of these spheres. It's weird to say it's beautiful, but it is beautiful. And they call the poison yellow. It's just called the yellow. Yes, And I think again, it makes a lot of sense for this movie to call its poison, to not have a chemical name, to not let it have a brand name. It's just the yellow, and that indicates like that color and lines reign supreme in the world A phase four.
Yeah, absolutely, But the poison defense here it seems to work. In fact, it works a little too well.
Right, So it kills most of the ants, though some ants get away, and then meanwhile they come out the next morning, and so the two scientists are in these environment suits they look like they're like, you know, like eva suits in space, and they go out to see that they're spraying of the poison has killed the people who came from the farm. It killed Mildred and mister Eldridge and Cleat.
Yeah, it killed grandma and grandpa. But as it turns out, as we find out in a bit, Kindre is fine. She was actually in the basement of one of those houses.
Right, she hid in the cellar.
Oh.
But also there you start getting some hints that things are going in a weird direction because Hubbs is trying to figure out what the ants did to sabotage their generator in the truck, and meanwhile less Goo's like, there are dead people, and then Hubbs is like, oh, yes, a tragedy. But he so you're starting to get the sense that maybe he's a little disconnected from the value of human life. But anyway, he says, okay, so I think the yellow should hold its potency for three or
four days, which was a great phrase. I thought, Oh, but then there's something very rare. So when they find Cleat, remember the ant burning guy. So they find Cleat and his hand is tightly closed and they pry it open with a metal rod, and it has three symmetrical holes in the palm of the hand like dots, and then we see ants crawling out of the holes.
Yeah, this is This really gave me the willies watching this. This is how you know. The makeup effects that they did on this are are really convincing. They really feel like they are holes in a hand, and we get close ups and usually like an extreme close up on an effect like this will reveal the flaws and the design, but this one just makes me feel more and more like I'm looking at three holes in a human hand
with an ant crawling out of it. So yeah, if you have the if you have the fear of holes, I would maybe make sure you're ready to fast forward through this scene. There's also an earlier scene where they're looking at a hole in like the neck of a sheep. She that also gave me the willies.
Agreed, and again the effects look great. Oh but also, like we said, they discovered that Kindra survived with the storm, so she takes refuge with the scientists inside the geodesic dome and we get a scene where Hubbs is explaining the beauty of ants. He's like, so defenseless in the individual,
so powerful in the mass. But here we start getting some real conflict between LESCo and Hubbs, because LESCo quite sensibly wants to call a helicopter to evacuate Kindre to safety while they keep fighting the ant menace, and Hubbs is against it. He's like, I think the bureaucrats would be rather unhappy to learn of our casualties.
Yeah, because I mean to to Lesco's point, two people have died. Three people have died. Two of them were killed seemingly by the experiment itself. Now they have this poor woman who needs to be taken to safety. Yeah, but Hubbs is like, I don't know if we want to really mess up the experiment for this.
We don't want to ask you exactly. Yeah. So Hubbs is he's trending into mad scientist mode, and it helps that while saying all this stuff, he's in the middle of staging an experiment where he puts ants in a maze with a bunch of praying mantises, and eventually he's LESCo gets him to promise that he will call the helicopter to come collect Kindra, but he's obviously lying.
Yeah there is. There are no helicopters in this movie, never show uh.
But then at some point Kendrick gets mad while staring at an ant. She's like, ants killed my horse, and she smashes a bunch of the glass lab equipment, which sends ants everywhere inside the lab. Hubbs gets bitten by one of them before he can seal the room and gass it to kill all the ants.
Yeah, this is another one of those scenes. It really feels like it was. It was written and filmed by ants like playing you know, okay, loose understanding of how humans work in accurate.
Yes, the human motivations are Yeah. The ants are doing most of the acting here, yes.
But from there we move on to some ant business. It's back to like basically, you know, this is a game. It is one side moves in the on the other side moves, and now it is the ant's turn.
Right, So what the ants do? I'm not sure I understood this scene right. Maybe you can correct me if you've got a different impression. What it looks like is happening is that there's this sequence of ants repeatedly trying to move a wod of some yellow white material through the tunnels. And I think the wad is supposed to be the poison, the yellow.
Yeah, yeah, and like one will die or become exhausted, probably die, pass it on to another ant, and that ant will keep journeying with the poison.
Right, so we see this handoff. It's a relay of the poison kills one ant, the next ant takes it along on the journey, eventually bringing it, I think, to the queen, and then the queen like sniffs the poison and breathes heavily while examining it, and then starts to give birth to a yellow green object like strudes. It seems to be an egg that has been infused with the spirit of the yellow.
Yeah, and this is one of those scenes where, Yeah, if you're going to come in and you're going to be very critical about everything, you're going to say, is this something ants can do? Is what's going on here? And I think, you know, this is a movie that is largely takes the viewpoint of like, Look, if I explained it to you, I'd probably get it really wrong
and it would feel kind of dumb. But if you're just viewing it, if you just kind of like breathe it in, take in the colors, then everything's going to be fine.
Right, So from here the arms race continues. The ants after this build a series of geometric pillars right outside the geodesic dome. And the scientists are like, what are they doing? What is this? And we discovered that they have built solar reflectors to direct beams of sunlight at the dome and this immediately starts bringing up the temperature in the lab above the level where the computers can tolerate it.
Yeah, I love it. They ants did it all in one night, reflective monoliths to fry the humans and perhaps more importantly, to overheat their their delicate thinking machine. It's the sort of heat based warfare that is actually used specifically, to my knowledge, by bees. Now, bees do not construct monoliths to fry supercomputers, but they will swarm around an invader and overheat it with their own their own body heat.
So it's that alone makes this feel like a I mean a speculative leap, certainly, but kind of a believable tactic that you might conceivably have some sort of advanced ants us right.
Right, So that's their new offense, but also the ants of a new defense, because the researchers see that, like, the ants have started a new generation of workers that are yellow like the poison and hubs says, we challenge them with yellow chemistry, they respond with yellow creatures. So it seems, you know, the ants are adapting to the poisons they're using, and Hub says, we can try the blue, of course, but they'd only adapt again. Yeah yeah, so
of course mad scientists progression. Hubs starts talking monologuing about how he believes the ants or a new type of intelligence, one that can be harnessed and educated by humans. Oh yeah, and he's like, oh, yeah, I didn't call the helicopter, so LESCo tries to call, but when he goes to flip the switch on the radio, it shorts out, and you know, sparks go all over the place, and we find that the circuit board OHO is covered in ants that have sacrificed their bodies to short out the electronics.
Yeah, and they managed to get in here.
Yeah, they've penetrated the perimeter. They're sabotaging equipment, and then there's this ensuing battle. They're fighting a war over like the air conditioning. The ants are trying to burn out the lab computers and the humans are trying to keep
the environment cool. And so there's this cool great stuff, like shots of an ant crawling all the way down a spiraling copper coil inside the air conditioning units and LESCo, on the other hand, tries to create a sonic weapon to broadcast at the ants, accepted as excruciating to humans and cracks all the glass and the sonic weapon works.
It does shatter and crumble the pillars. But then we also get ants attacking, continuing to attack the electric wires inside the facility, and there's a great scene of ant revenge. I mean, this movie really does kind of have ant characters, Like you can see them fighting their side of the battle too, because like some of the mantises from the experiments have gotten loose and they're trying to prey on
ants as they're doing their business. But there's some ant revenge when an ant grabs a praying mantis's leg and pulls it into a circuit board and it is fried.
Yeah. I mean, how often do you see a bug movie with two bugs battling it out like actual bugs in miniature in this artificial set like this must have been quite a challenge to put together.
Now, Hubbs is not doing well because of the venomous ant bite on his hand, and we get some narration where he says, I'm taking one of my less painful moments to record these notes. Our equipment only functions for a few hours at LESCo believes we're being allowed this time for some purpose, a hypothesis I do not share. If this were so, it would raise questions I had not considered. And here's a really cool part where LESCo
tries sending a message to the ants. It's an audio message, but he uses it to encode because he figures out that the ants have a code that they communicate in about directions, and so he can send them images. And so he sends them an image of a square, reasoning I didn't fully make the connection here, but I think it's something about geometry. He says, like, mathematics is the universal language among intelligent creatures. If there's intelligence there, I
want it to know there's intelligence here. So he sends it a square.
Yeah. I love this because you know it's getting to the I buy into this idea in mathematics is going to be the universal language that on some level the ants understand it, we understand it. And I really love this idea that like, the ants might not realize that we are intelligent two, you know, they could just be blind to this fact. And how do we possibly communicate with ants and let them know this, but things.
Get progressively worse inside the dome. There's a creepy scene where Kendra is menaced by ants while she's sleeping. She sees an ant on her pillow and says, go away, please go away, and then hubbs, possibly because of his venomous ant bite, or possibly from the interaction of that bite with his pre existing mad scientist disease. He starts going nuts and smashing things, trying to kill ants he sees or believes he sees. He gets a really bad case of I attached a picture for you to look
at here, Rob kind of mad scientist eyes like. He looks like he's about to start talking about how he should have won a Nobel prize but the narrow minded academics stole it from him. And he thinks he kills an ant, but I can't tell if he actually did. He just sort of pulls back a bloody hand. I'm not sure he had.
Here's some shattered glass on the floor and he manages his hand up. We don't see an end. Hey, then his Phase three buddy, Yeah, yep, We're getting down to the final of the This is the pinultimate phase. Yeah. Phase four is going to really blow you away. And this is this is where we're getting there.
So we see LESCo and Hubbs in their bunks, and Lesco's wondering, why don't they kill us? You know, they roast us in here all day and then they dare us to come out at night. Why why do they Why do they play these games? Why don't they just kill us? Now? What do they want? And Hubbs talks about ant specialization. He says, you know, ants are organized into roles by the queen in order to keep her alive.
He says, she's at the center. It is she who speaks if she were to die, and then they hash out their different views about what should be done next, how to proceed. Hubbs thinks, let's locate the queen and killer. That's our only way, and LESCo says, ants have all the cards. The only way to survive is to convince them that we're worth keeping alive.
M It is interesting here where you know Hubbs and focusing more and more on the queen, and so he ends up focusing more and more on the individual as opposed to the group, whereas I think LESCo still seems to be more of the mindset it's like a it's the mass we need to communicate with. So I feel like the focus on the individual is perhaps just more a part of Hubbs's madness.
Right, and oh and here's a scene I did love. So the ants want to communicate that LESCo transmitted the square to them earlier. They transmit back. They make vocalizations that the computer can interpret and it prints what they say. And what they say is in response to the square. They say, a circle with a dot in it. What does that mean?
Yeah, they start to saying, well, maybe that's here. It's a map. They want something in here. We should look around and see if we find it. And that's pretty great because Kindra is suddenly like, oh, they must mean me, because I smashed an ant in the research room earlier. I will go out into the wild without my shoes on, rightady, to sacrifice herself for these scientists.
Yes, She's like, the ants want me, and if I go, I commit aunt suicide. Then the scientists will get away, all right, rub there's a picture I included here, not because anything interesting is going on. It's just Hubbs sitting at a desk. But I included it because I don't know what these boxes are, but it looks like he has several sticks of butter sitting on the console in front of him.
It does look like it. There's also a scene where he because basically he's convinced, I got to go out and kill the queen. They I what they where? They think the mound is where the queen can be found. And he goes to get the grenade launcher out again, but there are no grenades left because he used all of them to blow up the monoliths earlier.
Why why, buddy.
So he's gonna have to do it the old fashioned way. He's gonna have to take a canister of the blue out there and poison his way across there the ant dominated waste plant and make his way to the queen and try and poison her there. That seems to be the plan.
But Hubbs goes out to attack the queen, and so Kindra has already gone out to sacrifice herself to the ants, and we see her just sort of disappear. Hubbs goes out and falls into a pit trap. The ants construct a pit trap. This is amazing connection to the core episode we did.
Yeah, yeah, we were talking about pit traps and why we don't like studies about why we don't see more pit traps in nature. You know, how about how ultimately a pit trap is is easy to build, it doesn't require that much energy. And we talk about ants potentially building traps as well. And so because of all that, and then having sort of developed a vague interest in this film based on our previous episode about ants potentially building traps, to suddenly be hit with this scene, I
think I exclaimed aloud. It was just it's such a shock. It's a great sequence.
Yeah, it is. And of course he's immediately swarmed by ants. He gets landed puranaed by the ant, and so now it's just down to LESCo Is Michael Murphy. He's like, I gotta do it. So he delivers this model that's full of regret. He says, like, I would still like to believe that if we'd had more time, we could have come to an understanding, some rational accommodation of interest, some agreement. But that's not the way it's going to be. So he suits up, just starts spraying the blue everywhere,
and finally he's come around to Hub's position. He's like, we only have one chance. We got to assassinate the queen. So he goes up to the mound where the queen is supposed to be. But then I guess there's sort of another pit trap because he's as he's trying to go in, he ends up sliding and he falls in.
Oh but then we should mention on the way to the mound, like he's having all sorts of mishaps. He starts out in his full protective suit, but oh right, he like falls and breaks the glass. Ants get into the mask and are biting his face, and so by the time he gets here he has no protective gear on it all, he has no shoes on it. All right, it's and we have the narration of, you know, of just how worn out and on the end of things he is.
But then here we get to the ending, and the ending is so weird, and I love this, and there are a couple of things I think we can say
about what the ending could have been also. But in the end he goes down in to find the queen, and instead of finding the queen, he finds a room with a with a like a rectangular doorway as if it was built for humans inside the ant mound, and inside this room Buried underneath the sand is Kendra, who appears to be maybe still alive or in some suspended animation state, and Michael Murphy sort of surrenders to the ants and he knows that the ants have won and
they're going to keep winning, and essentially that the ants are going to be the new rulers of the Earth, but they're not going to be killed. The ants have some kind of plans for them, and he's just ready to obey.
Yeah, it is a it's a great like suddenly just very trippy and psychedelic sequence, you know, with images of a setting a rising sun. I guess ultimately it's supposed to be rising the I feel like they might have filmed a setting sun and then reversed it or something. But very very orange, very very warming, beautiful sequence that again just really kicks the film into high gear, like suddenly we're in pure visionary filmmaking mode and we're gazing
into the future. These two have been chosen by the ants. They don't know what their purpose is going to be or what this new world is going to consist of, but there I guess they're going to be the profits of the New Age or the spokespeople of the ants or anabassadors.
They're like the Yeah, I was thinking, are they going to be used as the ambassadors to the rest of humanity to like explain to them that the ants are in charge? Now, that's sort of the idea I got. They're the I for one, welcome our new aunt overlords.
Yeah, exactly. It's also hinted like maybe they're gonna it's gonna be the beginning of a new species. They're like that, the Adam and Eve of the New Ant World.
But so the version of the movie I saw had shorter ending, but there actually is an alternate ending.
Yes, now this one. According to Michael Weldon, this one was cut at the request of the studio because the lost ending the original ending is even more nut so psychedelic. It reminds me a lot of how Disney's The Black Hole from nineteen seventy nine also originally had a far trippier, weirder like quasi religious ending with our characters emerging in the afterlife and humans and robots merging together, and then like the studio apparently it's like that is too weird.
This is a mainstream motion picture. But yeah, similar thing going here because the Lost ending, like the actual ending that we get in the theatrical cut of the film, is very satisfying, very trippy, very visual. But the Lost ending is just an absolute heroic dose of cinematic surrealism.
Uh huh.
So this ending is even longer. I think it's like seven or eight minutes total, and it gives us this sort of muadib fever dream vision of a future world in which ant civilization dominates humans. And all of this is presented very you know, surreally and abstractly, with visual flashes and confuse occasionally, like confusing number tags. We see flashes of ant mega projects and human scampering across them
like ants. We see visions of human beings I guess in servitude to ants, strangers with magnifying loops on their heads, you know, magnification devices over their eyes, so I guess they can see their masters better. There's a faceless human that pops up, perhaps the result of some sort of ant derived human, you know, he's like a drone or something. We see James and Kindred's faces becoming one. There's you know,
some sort of erotic flashes of human bodies. There's oh, and there's just so much going on that Like it's it's like a crazy music video with all sorts of strange surreal sek. There's a bald guy buried in the sand with a hole in his head and ants come crawling out the hole.
It's just eleven thirty eight.
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, it's like it just goes into like just extreme visual mode. And and I think it works into a large extent because it is it is the ant future loosely translated into some sort of visual form that the humans can understand.
I would say actually that I think with the long ending, the whole point of like that the abstract imagery and stuff is is to say that we can't understand it.
Yeah, yeah, when we can, we can we can sort of glimpse it. Yeah, we can't fully understand like why the ants have done this, that and the other. Like what the full vision is here?
Yeah, that the future of humans under an earth controlled by ants is going to be so bewildering and incomprehensible to us. It would be like, you know, like what we do with an experiment like ants trying to understand why they're in a maze in a laboratory. It just doesn't make any sense to them.
Yeah, and in this extended you know, ultimately rejected ending, I think it also it it's beautiful but also horrifying at times, like the dude with no face. There's another guy with like some sort of weird implants in his head, Like you get the sense that, yeah, an ant dominated world in which humans still have a role, it's going to be very different. It's not going to be altogether pleasant. It's it's yeah, this is a strange ending. It is
a strange message to potentially hit the viewer with. And I have to say I understand. I understand why the studio probably came in and they're like, Saul, Saul, what are you doing? What are you doing with this? You know, we can't do this ending? You know.
I like it. I like the long, weird ending. I like the part where the at least humans are up on like a zigarot. That's interesting.
No, I love everything about the extended ending. And I think if you go out and watch this film, you need to make sure you get to see the extended ending as well, and you can choose which one you prefer. But I totally get why the studio was like, you can't do this, No, No, you've got to scale back on this. This is too weird.
Well, I guess that's it. Phase four an ode to our future use social overlords. That's A. That's a. That's a pretty great ant movie.
This is the best ant movie I've ever seen. This may be the best. I don't know if it's the best animal tack movies I've seen. It's certainly an animal tack movie where the animals have the best strategy. They're not just swarming us, they're out thinking us. So, hey, you want to watch phase four as well? You want to reach phase four? Well, you can watch this film
pretty much wherever you rent or purchase digital movies. All of Films put out of what seems like a nice blu ray of it in the US not too long ago. One oh one Films put out a really nice blue ray in the UK, and I believe they also put one out in the US as well. I highly recommend you find a version that includes the original ending as an extra. Sometimes you might be able to find that extra, you know, floating around online, but that's not really and ultimately,
you want high quality for this. So I know the one oh one Films Blue has the extended ending as an extra, and if you purchase the movie but not rent it on Apple TV, then you get access to this extra, but you do have to purchase it through there. Otherwise you just rent it and you get the theatrical ending. Oh and as for the soundtrack, Waxwork Records put out a really beautiful yellow vinyl of this with stunning jacket design, full of production art by Saul bass, stills from that
lost ending, and expansive liner note. So this is really cool work looking. If you're a if you collect vinyl and this kind of soundtrack is your thing, you should check this out. I think they might have put out a CD release as well, but I couldn't find a good place to just stream the soundtrack, you know, Like, I don't think it's up on any of the streaming
sites at least as of this recording. All right, well, we're going to go ahead and close it out then, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there thoughts on phase four having seen it recently, having seen it back in the day, did you see it? Were you one of the few people that apparently saw it in theaters back in the nineteen seventies, whatever your answer is, we'd love to hear from you. As always, Weird House Cinema publishes every Friday. You can find it in the
Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. We're primarily a science podcast, but you know, we like to set most serious matters aside on Fridays and just discuss a strange film and in this case, you know, sometimes it's a film that ties in with recent serious episodes we've recorded. If you want to follow Weird House Cinema on Instagram, I created an Instagram for it. It's Weird House Cinema. That's the name of the show. That's the name of the Instagram account. And then also I put up blog
posts about these episodes at Simmuta music dot com. That's a linked on the Instagram if you want to get there. But whenever we refer to other pieces of media that are related to it, other trailers, other bits of music. That's often where I will stash that for your easy case assumption.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
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