On the Anan islands near Japan, a couple are sunbathing, Annabelle (Kathy Horan) and her lover Joji (Yûsuke Kawazu) who is married to a young bride, Yukari (Emi Shindô). When he happens to open his eyes and look up at the skies, he notices a military aeroplane flying overhead, and on that plane one of the crew, Charly (Chico Roland), has noticed a small insect in the launching bay for the atomic bomb the plane is carrying. It bites him and sends him into wild hallucinations about the Second World War, leading his fellow crewmembers to try to restrain him, yet as they do so the pilot alerts them to the huge swarm of insects that are about to hit them, bringing the plane down...
Not so much down as completely obliterated in an explosion, and the crew manage to parachute out and land on the island - but what of the bomb? Ah, indeed, what of the bomb? This was one of those Japanese science fiction movies which fretted that if the nuclear explosions that halted World War II had happened before, they could happen again; usually such fears were masked by presenting the threat as a giant monster, only in this case the monsters were normal-sized insects, looking suspiciously like honeybees, albeit ones which bite in extreme closeups. But these are special kinds of insects, bred for their viciousness and their poisonous sting: get enough of them in the one place and your average human doesn't stand a chance!
As you can imagine, with a title like Genocide this wasn't exactly the cheeriest of films, especially when it links in the attempted wiping out of the human race with the Holocaust, which it does by having the villain be so terribly affected by her experiences in the Nazi death camps that she sees no hope for humanity and decides the world would be better off without us. She sounds like she'd be a wow at parties, and this rather crass usage of real life horror to underline the cynicism of the manner in which this plays out does little to help the movie's case, so right enough it has been described as a real turkey by those unsympathetic to the filmmakers' concerns. They were perfectly sincere, to all appearances, which renders a patina of camp to proceedings.
You could suppose it was to humanity's credit they could chuckle at a work depicting their imminent demise, but mostly that was down to them not taking this seriously, as if the gravity of the situation had the opposite effect. It's interesting that the more dire the warnings become here, the more ridiculous they are, the hyperbole and hysteria leaving no option but to laugh, and not because you think they were right and the end of the human race was just around the corner. The dubbing sessions for this must have been quite a sight to see given the amount of yelling and screaming that goes on as the results of the Cold War and its nuclear stalemate is shown to be just an itchy trigger finger away from setting off the next disaster, though this time the Japanese are the heroes trying to prevent mass annihilation.
Our actual hero is scientist Yoshito Nagumo (Keisuke Sonoi), introduced to us in the lab while poisoning a guinea pig, thus pointing to the mixed feelings at best the film has for the authorities which unthinkingly play with death. However, to the relief of guinea pig fanciers everywhere he proves himself to be a reformed character once the mayhem begins on the island and he is dispatched to investigate, though many characters here display tendencies that appear to be nudging us towards the conclusion mankind doesn't deserve to endure, from the main bad guys rallying the insects down to the sleazy guy who works at the hotel Joji and Yukari do, and menaces the young woman who alone is representative of a small sliver of hope that it might not be all over for us. In the meantime, the bugs are regularly unleashed to send their victims into frenzies - watch out, Charly has a gun with unlimited ammo! - before leaving them dead, their bodies covered in sores. How far you get on with this depends on how far you agree with its bleak worldview - or how far it amuses you. Music by Shunsuke Kikuchi.
