A World where ants take control over human beings! Welcome back to Movie Shortens. Follow us today to a 1974 science-fiction horror film called: Phase IV.
Before we start, be aware: there are spoilers! The film opens with the narration of a scientist about the change in behavior of ants after a meteorite impact on the earth's surface. Next we see a green ant breaking into a colony and starting to poison the queen.
Moments later, under the control of the queen, all the black ants in the colony become unusually aggressive. Specifically, the ants stop killing each other, they begin to attack all natural enemies such as mantises, scorpions, . .
. . This causes ants to increase rapidly in number.
Meanwhile, a car is rolling down the road in the Arizona desert. We are introduced to Dr Ernest D. Hubbs, an experienced entomologist, and James R Lesko, a senior scientist with a cryptological background.
The two men come to an abandoned town and are about to set up a research observation station there. Going a bit further away, they discover a few eccentric looking pillars about 3 - 4 meter tall in the middle of the desert. There is a small scratch on the head of each pillar.
The little ants watch the duo in silence as Dr Hubbs is taking pictures of the pillars. While inspecting the fields, they come across a dead sheep with small holes on its body, as if it had been penetrated and eaten inside by the ants. Some of the equatorial ants, Hubbs explains, will attack anything that affects their food supplies.
The smell triggers their behavior. The two tour the surrounding farm, where Mr Eldridge is filling his ditches with gasoline and preparing to burn all the ants. Dr Hubbs and James ask about the ants but the Eldridges don’t seem very concerned.
While they show the Eldridges an evacuation notice, their niece rides up with her horse approaching. Some time later, they successfully set up a station in the desert, just a short distance from the pillars. Thirteen days have passed, however, they still have not collected any information about the ant colony as they haven’t appeared yet.
The base is disappointed and wants them to collect information as soon as possible. While James is talking to the base, Dr Hubbs has an idea to trigger the ants while puffing on a cigarette. So they knock down the pillars, which spooks the ants, James records their signal and begins to get to the first steps after 13 days waiting.
At night, the ants along the ditch break into the Eldridge's farm. They begin to kill the horse slowly, causing it to squeal in pain. Mr Eldridge has to end the horse’s life with a gun.
The Eldridges set fire to the ditch to kill the ants, but it was too late, the ants had already crawled onto the roof and destroyed their house. The family is left with no choice but to get in the car and drive away. At the station, James is explaining to Dr Hubbs the method he used to “hear” the ants communicate.
He would record and record the ants' signals, and then find the correlation between the signals they give off and what they do. At this moment, the Eldridge family is driving on the road. While Mr.
Eldridge regrets that she should have listened to James and DrHubbs, she sees ants on her husband’s hair. She immediately panics and tries to brush them off. But in the confusion, the car wobbles and gets into an accident.
They have to walk to the station to seek help. At the station, the electric vehicle left outside is disabled by the ants and explodes. Dr Hubbs and James have to spray yellow poison to kill the ants.
Before they can eliminate the ants, the toxins spread all over, poisoning the Eldridge family. They fall to the ground. The next morning, they put on their suits and go out to check the results.
While James feels sorry to see the whole Eldridge family dead, Dr Hubbs doesn’t care at all. What fascinated him more is the way the ants stopped the car's engine. When checking on the corpse, they find 3 holes in the hand of a man, a green ant and black ants keep coming out of the holes.
While taking the samples of the ants to study, they discover that Eldridge's granddaughter is still alive. The girl faints after seeing her family lost. The two men bring the girl into the station.
When discussing how to study ants, they have a disagreement about that girl. James believes that the girl must be taken to safety immediately, while Dr Hubbs thinks it's less important than studying ants. At this time, the young girl appears, introducing herself as Kendra.
After seeing the ants in the test tube, she could not help but swing her hand and break the samples due to her hatred towards the ants that killed her family. James immediately takes her out, while DrHubbs is disinfecting the room and killing all the ants. Unfortunately, Dr Hubbs was bitten by an ant.
At this moment, in the ant colony, the black ants are passing a yellow poison to each other. Any one that touches the poison will die shortly, but eventually they sacrifice themselves and make it to the queen. After ingesting the poison, the queen becomes immune and lays a yellow egg.
The next day, James shows Dr Hubbs a visualized signal of the ants even though he has no clue what it means. DrHubbs lies to James that the girl will be rescued by a helicopter soon. James, after coming into contact with the girl, learns that she has no relatives left, so he feels sorry for her.
After that, Dr Hubbs shows James a shocking discovery. Both are surprised and terrified to see that they are under siege as the pillars begin to reflect the heat of the sun back to the station. The atmosphere in the station is getting hotter and hotter.
Temperature rises gradually rose 5 degrees in just an hour and a half. During this time, the queen is now ingesting the poison and giving birth to weaver ants with the ability to resist the poison. Meanwhile, after learning that no helicopters had come to rescue the girl, James calls the base.
But just as he is about to call, the ants are one step ahead, they destroy the phone not letting Jame contact with the base. On the other hand, the hand of Dr Hubbs becomes swollen after the previous bite. It is so hot outside that they have to turn on the air conditioner.
James comes up with the idea of destroying the towers with a loud sound wave. It is so noisy that the glass objects in the station almost break. The pillars on the outside collapsed one after another due to the impact of the sound.
In a corner of the station, a black ant is trying to bite the wire when it is eaten by a mantis. But unfortunately, another green ant bites the mantis, which leads to an electric leak incident in the station. As a consequence, there is a power outage inside the station, and the air conditioning system is broken.
After James launches the killing sound wave, a lot of yellow ants are dead. The black ants begin to neatly stack the dead weaver ants as if they are planning their revenge. At the station, they can only work for a few hours at night when the temperature drops.
At this point, James sends the ants some signals, which is a square because he thinks mathematics is universal amongst intelligent species. They should reply to his message. In the meantime, Kendra is sleeping and is burrowed in by a green ant, which doesn’t bite and just watches her from afar.
The following day, the pillars continue to reflect heat into the station, causing the temperature in the station to rise much higher. Therefore, Dr Hubbs has a fever and delusions. Kendra tries to take care of him but is dismissed.
He also discovers a green ant on the shelf and frantically smashes it, determined to kill the green ant at all costs. Kendra calls James to help, but Dr Hubbs seems to have killed that green ant. After a while, perhaps too scared and tired, Kendra asks James to give her a hug.
When the night comes, Dr Hubbs gains his consciousness and discusses how to kill the ants with James. He thinks that they must kill the queen so they can escape. The queen is what controls all the behavior of the ants.
He has located the queen and plans to kill it within tomorrow. But in the meantime, James thinks they've lost this wits game. He just hopes that tomorrow they could get a message from the ants.
Just then, a scream from Kendra draws attention from the men. All three are frightened to see a desert rat to be killed and eaten alive in the blink of an eye. Right at that time, after receiving a message from the ants, James discovers that they themselves are in a controlled experiment, in which they are the subjects.
The ants' message is a square, a small circle inside and a small dot in it. The ants are giving them an intelligence test and are looking for the smartest person, so that little dot could be any of the three. Kendra curiously asks James what the ants would do to that person.
That night, Kendra decides to go out of the station alone on bare feet. Minutes later, the ants emerge from the ground and bite Kendra, she screams in pain. At the station, Dr Hobbs arms himself, determined to kill the queen, but James doesn't think that is a good idea.
He wants to continue to communicate with the ants and convince them to free the humans. At this point, he discovers that Kendra has sacrificed herself in order to free James and Dr Hubbs. Later on, Dr Hubbs with a swollen hand takes a gun and goes out to kill the queen ant.
James chases after but this time Dr Hubbs falls into a deep hole. The ants appear out from the ground and kill Dr Hubbs immediately while James could only watch helplessly. After that, James puts on the protective suit and sprays poison all over the area with the aim of killing the queen.
He hoped the human and the queen ant could reach some mutual agreement, but that’s not how it turns out now. He learns about their expansion rate, ability to adapt… and discovers that the queen can anticipate human’s moves and continues to stay ahead. Thus, there is no other choice but to directly assault the queen.
Finally, he sees a hole above their colony, where the queen is, so he drops a tank of poison and falls into the hole along with it. Here, he sees a hand slowly emerging from the sand, it is Kendra. She is still alive and unharmed.
The two embrace and realize that these ants do not want to destroy humans, instead, they want to adapt to the human race and make us a part of their world. Even though they don’t know what plans the ants have ahead they choose to wait for further instructions. Like and Subscribe to watch more videos like this, and don’t forget to turn on your notifications.
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