Konchû daisensô

In GENOCIDE (aka: WAR OF THE INSECTS), a new insect species is discovered on an island. Disturbingly, the venom of these tiny creatures causes insanity in anyone bitten by them.

Meanwhile, a B-52 Bomber, complete with its full nuclear arsenal, crashes nearby, after being swarmed by the killer bugs. Carnage ensues, as nefarious men attempt to procure the bombs, and the insects begin destroying humanity.

The most interesting aspect of this movie is its diverse, unusual cast of characters. There are actual, flawed people inhabiting the island, some of whom are very damaged. Some are downright reprehensible! Especially, the wicked Annabelle (Cathy Horan), a concentration camp survivor who takes on the very characteristics of the Nazis from her tortured past. Her plot for global annihilation is the black center of the movie.

This is an ambitious project that suffers from its miniscule budget, as well as the merciless march of time. Released in the 1960's, it's certainly a movie of its period. Still, it's worth seeing at least once...

GENOCIDE (1968) is a Japanese sci-fi movie with an apocalyptic theme and a mix of intriguing elements that culminate in a rather bleak denouement. I don't want to give away any of the twists, so suffice it to say that a series of separate experiments involving poisonous insects by a pair of disparate characters fuses with a plot about an American H-bomb that's been accidentally dropped—intact—on a remote Japanese island and is the subject of a frenetic search by American officers and shady local characters with ulterior motives of their own. What I found most significant about this film is the presence of so many non-Japanese characters, including an arrogant American Colonel (played by Ralph Jesser), a black American airman named Charly (Chico Roland), and Annabelle (Kathy Horan), a blonde from Eastern Europe with deep emotional scars from WWII. The majority of scenes feature interaction with non-Japanese characters and the tensions between the Japanese and the Americans are quite palpable, much more so than in most Japanese films I've seen set in the postwar era. In the Japanese-language/English-subtitled edition which I watched for this review (released by Criterion), all the characters speak Japanese to each other and all are post-dubbed by Japanese voice actors. Even inside the plane, the Americans speak only Japanese to each other. This is not always the case with Japanese movies featuring non-Japanese characters. For instance, I've seen Chico Roland in other movies, including Koreyoshi Kurahara's BLACK SUN (1964), and he speaks only English in that one. And in numerous kaiju (giant monster) movies, there are scenes with American crew members or scientists and they often speak English to each other (albeit sometimes dubbed by Japanese voice actors speaking heavily accented English).

The plot of GENOCIDE is rather complicated but is deftly told in a compact 84 minutes, with all the different tangents coming together for quite a suspenseful finale. The Americans are not only eager to find the missing H-bomb, but are also intent on finding out who—or what-- killed two of the American crew members. The local police on the island take custody of an insect collector named Joji (Yusuke Kawazu) who is in possession of a watch that belonged to one of the crewmen. Joji is married to a local girl, Yukari (Emi Shindo), but is having an affair with Annabelle. Joji's employer, a biologist named Dr. Nagumo (Keisuke Sonoi), comes to the island to try to aid Joji's efforts to prove his innocence and help with the case any way he can. He becomes the nominal hero of the piece. Annabelle experiments with insects and may have something to do with the strange, unpredictable behavior of insects in the area, including a cloud of them that enveloped the American bomber plane and brought it down. Things heat up with various characters in the course of the narrative and Charly, the black airman wounded in the crash of the plane carrying the bomb, becomes the cruelly-treated pawn of the various factions in conflict on the island. Eventually, we learn that the insects have an agenda of their own.

There are some special effects sequences, chiefly involving obvious miniatures representing the planes seen in the film and the insect "clouds" that attack them. There are some miniature sets of structures on the island, although most outdoors scenes were shot on location on an actual island, with indoor scenes done in studio sets. The insect action seems to be done mostly with live insects, which must have been quite a chore for the crew to handle, although the scenes are quite effective. One extremely harrowing sequence involves the young couple, Joji and Yukari, trapped in a hut under attack by the insects. There are frequent closeups of insects at work, including quite a few gruesome shots of insects biting flesh or leaving eggs inside the skin or organs of human victims. I don't know how much special effects work was involved in these shots, but they're all quite convincing. Viewers who get freaked out by these kinds of images should avoid this film.

There are distinct anti-nuclear and anti-war sentiments expressed throughout the film and a disgust with the way U.S.-Soviet confrontations impact negatively on everyone else. Memories of World War II are frequently invoked. Some of the characters seem to have been designed purely to voice certain sentiments heard in the film. The fast pace of the narrative keeps us from dwelling on that problem too much. The ending may not be a conclusive one, although I think that might have been the point. This isn't a fun film like something you'd see in the Godzilla and Gamera series of the time or, say, THE GREEN SLIME, which came out a month later and offers its own distinct pleasures, but it is compelling and much harder-edged than the average Japanese sci-fi film of the 1960s. Some may find it disturbing, but I'd definitely recommend it as a unique and unusual viewing experience for fans of Japanese genre films.

I'm rating this movie higher than it probably deserves for a couple of reasons. Firs, one has to admire the audacious, lurching combination of genres and plot lines, hallucinatory in their variations. Secondly, the final two shots of this movie are stunning. I won't give them away, although I wish I could because they are just some of the coolest final images of any science fiction movie of that era, and make the entire movie worthwhile.

All of these impressions reflects some advice I would give if you choose to watch this movie. I don't think one ought to watch it literally, as a plot-driven film, because doing so could be frustrating given some of the illogic and seeming randomness of the events. Instead, I ultimately watched it for the imagery, the drunken, staggering wackiness of it all, and the utterly fascinating cultural aspects of the movie (for example, wow, do Americans not come off particularly well in this flick!).

I would also recommend Genocide for those who enjoy eco-horror or eco-scifi, such as Frogs, Phase IV, Bug (the Bradford Dillman flick), Food of the Gods, and even classic giant irradiated "bug" movies such as Them and Tarantula, which were among the first eco-scifi movies.

All the insects on Earth become wild and attack humans, causing Armageddon.

The film's staff includes Shizuo Hirase as the cinematographer, who also worked on the Shochiku films "The X from Outer Space" and "Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell". Composer Shunsuke Kikuchi, who also worked on "Goke", does the music here; he may be best known today for "Female Convict Scorpion" or perhaps "Dragon Ball Z".

Because this was the last horror film Shochiku would produce, it is suitably ambitious and apocalyptic. This is dark, bleak, and edgy beyond what we typically see from horror of the era, especially in Japan. We (at least Americans) expect men in rubber suits to beat on each other, but this is a far worse menace!

Let's not beat around the bush: this is a mess. It's not all bad, but a bounty of good ideas are fumbled terribly in too many ways. We do get the variation on "nature run amok" genre cinema that is promised by the very name of 'War on the insects,' and the alternate name 'Genocide,' but this is delayed, sidelined, and scarcely more than alluded to for a majority of the runtime, only slowly becoming more central in the latter half. This might be fine if the storytelling at large were strong and compelling, but the thriller-orientated human drama that defines the preponderance is garbled and scattered, with all its very workable notions being treated questionably if not outright poorly. To wit: a U. S. Air Force bomber, a murder investigation, and the suspect's expecting wife; U. S. airmen, Soviet spies, the Cold War, and hatred of war and humans; and to top it all off, nihilist, misanthropic biological warfare, experimentation, and eco-terrorist supremacy. Amada Kingen penned a fine story with engaging thoughts, admirable themes, and bleak despair. Screenwriter Takaku Susumu took that story and devised a screenplay that's far more heavy-handed than his work for another contemporary Shochiku horror piece, 'Goke, body snatcher from hell,' and frankly downright sloppy and harried. The film isn't downright awful, but that's not saying much.

For as gawky as the screenplay is, plot development is commonly brusque and forced, and the pacing is a mixed bag that mostly, increasingly, pushes along too swiftly. The narrative at large feels overfull in only eight-four minutes as ideas are smashed together inelegantly; swell as the root conceptions for characters, scenes, and dialogue may be, they are reduced and rendered with such blunt, tactless forthrightness that their potential is overcooked. Add some Movie Magic for good measure, moving the plot along as it requires without concern for judicious, sensible story progression. To much the same end, while he could only work with the material he had, Nihonmatsu Kazui's direction here comes across as harried, struggling to keep the proceedings cohesive - which makes it all the more unfortunate that Terada Akimitsu's editing is even more curt and forcible than the plot development, so dubious that at times a beat or scene is altogether cut short. For the record, that includes the last minutes. And it bears repeating that all throughout the length we're given spoken reference to insect activity, but it's certainly not handled in a manner that allows the thought to resonate; in the second half these thoughts are brought to bear more concretely, but still the potency is plainly lacking owing to how the picture was written, directed, and edited.

Other facets are more appreciable. Under all these conditions the cast is regularly put in the regrettable position of overacting (I feel so bad for Chico Roland in particular), recalling contemporary 'Star Trek,' but they put forth an honest effort and mostly come off better than not. Hirase Shizuo's cinematography is fairly smart at times, capturing some nice detail. I love the stunts and practical effects, of course, and the special makeup; where more fanciful visuals are inserted the use is quite fetching. The production design and art direction are fantastic, and likewise the costume design, hair, and makeup. I like Kikuchi Shinsuke's original music as it complements the proceedings, even if it tends to get overwhelmed by all else on hand. Broadly speaking 'War of the insects' is well made. It's just that for all the skill and intelligence that did go into it, these are sadly not reflected in the writing, the direction, or the editing, and the end product stumbles significantly in imparting its tale. We do get what we came for, but the power of the material absolutely is not there. I tend to refer to Fukasaku Kinji's 'Virus' of 1980 a lot because it has stuck with me every day since I watched it, but it seems like a particularly relevant point of comparison here: while the plots differ, the features reach for the same region of tying together an apocalyptic nightmare, the shortsightedness of humans and military endeavors, and the faint spark of hope for a future. Where 'Virus' resonates thunderously over its two and one-half hours, however, the doing here is such a clunky mishmash that it is robbed of all impact.

It's not all bad. There are much worse ways to spend your time. For what this title does well, I want to like it more than I do. For all those ways in which it falls short, emphatically including the almost laughable last stretch, I wonder if I'm not being too generous. I'm glad for those who get more out of 'War of the insects' than I do, but in my opinion this is just too flawed to earn a specific recommendation.