[troggi]

Originally Posted by Demdike

Phase IV (1974)

Wow, this film left me cold. I found it so boring. When it comes down to it its just stock footage from National Geographic of ants under the earth and two blokes in a lab playing with knobs and dials.

Look at the poster below.... cool isn't it? Well its nothing like the film.

I watched "Phase IV" at a small screen cinema when it first came out and again when it was broadcast on T.V. On neither occasion did it leave me "cold" except with the chilling thought that we may be underestimating the intelligence of "hive-minds"!

True, there is a lot of footage of ants, that's what the film was about, it would have been silly to show footage of dung beetles. The film is slow, quite clinical and, I feel, a tad scary. Not demon-possessed-maniacal-vampire-serpent-alien-monster-ghost scary but we-are-living-on-a-planet inhabited-by-other-intelligences-that-could-turn-on-us scary. More of an intellectual fear than a BOO! you've shit your pants fear!

The whole film is story driven and if you don't follow the story then the film will be boring because it will just be images of ants doing what ants do and two guys playing with their knobs! It's like reading a graphic novel if you don't read the story and dialogue all you have is sequential art.

I must admit that I haven't seen the film on dvd, or anywhere else for many years. Maybe the film has been re-cut and edited thereby losing some of the storytelling aspect of the original. Maybe it's just that today's audiences expect more out of a film than images of ants doing what ants do and two guys playing with their knobs! If I can remember a-rightly the image on the poster of ants crawling out of a hole in a hand is actually in the film also so there's no false advertising there. Maybe I'm just prematurely senile and I'm mis-rembering things but I quite liked it and will by the DVD if I see it around AND if I have mis-remembered stuff and I hate it I'll tell everybody here the address of the rest home I'm retiring to so that they can send their hate-mail and dead ants to me!