The insect-terror movie has a long and rich history in the science fiction/horror genres, reaching back as far as "Them!" and stretching forward pretty much to the present day -- the aliens in "Starship Troopers" certainly qualify in appearance if nothing else. But it's rarely been done so effectively and fascinatingly as in this 1974 effort directed by famed production/title sequence designer Saul Bass in which the insect threat isn't predicated on ridiculous atomic-irradiated mutated giants, but on a strange rapidly developing intelligence in the hive-mind of an ant population in the American desert southwest.
The film begins with narration by British scientist Hubbs (Nigel Davenport) sent to an area that has experienced odd troubles with ant colonies; he is accompanied by American statistical theoretician Lesko (the seriously under-appreciated Michael Murphy) and the two start their studies of the odd insect populations inside a self-contained geodesic dome. It's clear the ants in the area have mutated, developed some kind of superanimal intelligence and the two ill-matched (of course) scientists spend most of the film studying and trying to communicate with, or defeat the potential threat of the insects. Their work is disrupted by the appearance of a young woman, played by the stunningly gorgeous (also of course) Lynne Frederick who doesn't really get what they're doing and whose early crazy fit results in Hubbs getting bitten by an ant and various odd things starting to occur.
From this point (a little before halfway through) it's a race against time as the scientists struggle to figure out what the ants are doing, how they communicate, and how to defeat them. Much of the middle part of the film is quite exciting, and most of this is provided by the exquisite insect photography (cinematography is by Dick Bush, don't know who else to credit for special close-up microscopic photography) and the eerie music (Brian Gascoigne) which goes from typical 70s electronic stuff to British neoromanticism and areas in between - you really feel that these ants are intelligent and purposeful, and in fact they're more worth rooting for than the humans, which brings up the major problem. The human storyline just isn't terribly interesting - Frederick is there just as a pretty face but doesn't really have a role until the very end, Davenport is a rather clichéd stuck-up and self-important intellectual type, Murphy plays mostly at being his opposite. And the ending, clearly meant to have some deep spiritual or cosmological meaning, just doesn't work as the events leading up to it are rushed and poorly developed.
Still, all in all, one of the more interesting American sf films of its era - certainly light-years beyond "Damnation Alley" which I had watched just a few days before. Pan-and-scan VHS but it didn't seem to lose too much.
The film begins with narration by British scientist Hubbs (Nigel Davenport) sent to an area that has experienced odd troubles with ant colonies; he is accompanied by American statistical theoretician Lesko (the seriously under-appreciated Michael Murphy) and the two start their studies of the odd insect populations inside a self-contained geodesic dome. It's clear the ants in the area have mutated, developed some kind of superanimal intelligence and the two ill-matched (of course) scientists spend most of the film studying and trying to communicate with, or defeat the potential threat of the insects. Their work is disrupted by the appearance of a young woman, played by the stunningly gorgeous (also of course) Lynne Frederick who doesn't really get what they're doing and whose early crazy fit results in Hubbs getting bitten by an ant and various odd things starting to occur.
From this point (a little before halfway through) it's a race against time as the scientists struggle to figure out what the ants are doing, how they communicate, and how to defeat them. Much of the middle part of the film is quite exciting, and most of this is provided by the exquisite insect photography (cinematography is by Dick Bush, don't know who else to credit for special close-up microscopic photography) and the eerie music (Brian Gascoigne) which goes from typical 70s electronic stuff to British neoromanticism and areas in between - you really feel that these ants are intelligent and purposeful, and in fact they're more worth rooting for than the humans, which brings up the major problem. The human storyline just isn't terribly interesting - Frederick is there just as a pretty face but doesn't really have a role until the very end, Davenport is a rather clichéd stuck-up and self-important intellectual type, Murphy plays mostly at being his opposite. And the ending, clearly meant to have some deep spiritual or cosmological meaning, just doesn't work as the events leading up to it are rushed and poorly developed.
Still, all in all, one of the more interesting American sf films of its era - certainly light-years beyond "Damnation Alley" which I had watched just a few days before. Pan-and-scan VHS but it didn't seem to lose too much.