Phase IV (1974) feels like a perfect movie to discover randomly on a grainy public access TV channel. “Hmm, looks like an ordinary movie,” you might think. “Oh, it’s sci-fi. And ants? Ants are the threat? Okay.” And then you walk away and think, “What the hell did I just watch?” This is the only feature film directed by graphic designer Saul Bass, the man behind iconic film title sequences like North By Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, and eye-catching posters for The Man With The Golden Arm, Anatomy Of A Murder, and The Shining. Phase IV’s eventual fate as a movie covered by Mystery Science Theatre 3000 indicates the wackiness of its straight-faced premise: two scientists (Nigel Davenport and Michael Murphy) are assigned to study ants who are behaving abnormally. Their white domed lab out in the desert becomes the site of an interspecies war with a stray young woman (Lynne Frederick) caught in the cross-fire. Formally Phase IV seems like a nature documentary interspersed with the set-up of a sci-fi horror radio play. But as photographed by Saul Bass and his collaborators, it also becomes a trippy experience. Insect close-ups that resemble stop-motion animation. Ominous desert sculptures and shining rays of the sunlight. Brightly coloured chemical spray that looks like paint. A chess game that becomes increasingly bizarre, an incoming apocalypse based on microscopic details that eventually resolves into strange cosmic visuals. Neither a commercial or critical success upon release, Phase IV exists somewhere between the ridiculous and the transcendental, particularly if you find the original extended ending on YouTube, which plays like 2001 crossed with prog-rock concept album covers and a score (by Brian Gascoigne, Stomu Yamashta, David Vorhaus and Desmond Briscoe) that feels a King Crimson psych-jam. Available to rent on iTunes (don’t forget to seek out the original ending). Recommended.
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