Swarms of insects take down a plane carrying an H bomb. Three guys manage to parachute out. Two are later found dead. One is in a coma.
Jozi Akiyama (George) has been gathering insects on a Japanese island. He has a couple clients. Annabelle (Kathy Horan), who says she just likes insects and Dr. Yoshito Nagumo. He sends one interesting one to the doctor at his Tokyo lab. The lab finds out that the toxins from the insect are poisonous. They cause insanity and then death. He’s got a tortured guinea pig to prove it.
Jozi tries to sell a fancy watch to a couple fishermen. They turn him in. Jozi gets arrested for murder. Apparently the guy who owned it is dead. The police think he stole the watch from the pilot of the downed plane. In reality he found the watch while on the beach with another woman. The insect loving Annabelle. Jozi’s wife Yukari works in the local bar. Not only is she being pestered by the bar owner, her husband is cheating on her and he is now in jail. She contacts Dr. Nagumo for help.
Junko Komuro is the Red Cross doctor sent to the island to take care of the one man from the plane who is still alive, Charlie. When Charlie does regain consciousness he has lost his memory. Not only can he not clear Jozi of murder, he can’t tell the military where the H bomb landed.
When they try to transfer Jozi he escapes and ends up at Annabelle’s. At the same time Charlie is being transferred. A band of mercenaries shoot the MPs and take Charlie away. They bring him to Annabelle’s. It turns out that Annabelle was in a Nazi concentration camp when she was a child. Her parents were tortured and killed. Annabelle is insane. She is also a scientist. She tortures Charlie as an experiment.
One of the mercenaries runs and tells the bar owner. The bar owner gets on the shortwave and radios someone else. The bartender is a spy from an Eastern Bloc country that is looking to get their hands on an honest to goodness H bomb.
Annabelle is creating the weaponized insects. The eastern bloc country wants the insects for germ warfare as well as the H bomb. Annabelle wants to distribute her insects all over the world. Annabelle wants everybody dead. Jozi hears what she wants to do. He runs back to his pregnant wife Yukari. When the goons show up Jozi hides in a shack on the island. Yukari finds Dr. Nagumo they take Dr. Komuro and find Jozi.
To really know what Annabelle is up to Dr. Nagumo needs to experience what Charlie went through. Thanks to the guinea pig Dr. Nagumo has developed and antidote for the insect poison. He has Jozi make one of the insects bite him. Dr. Komuro is on standby with the antidote. He starts to hallucinate and goes on a psychedelic trip. He hears the insects talking. They say that they must destroy all humans.
“Genocide” AKA “War of the Insects” was released in 1968 and was directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu. A little on the obscure side, it is a science fiction/horror film and a really strange movie. It’s very much a dark and, to a point, disturbing film in some ways. Japan is noted for nuclear themed movies where nature runs amok. Case in point “Godzilla” 1954 et al. On August 6th 1945 the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Another was dropped August 9th on Nagasaki. Thirteen years later when “Genocide” was released the wounds were still raw. Perhaps they still are today to some degree. It is, for the most part, an anti-American movie and in addition a pretty much anti-everyone movie. The American Air Force is portrayed as gung-ho, overbearing and single minded. OK. Then there is the holocaust victim who is a product of Nazi Supremacy. A shot over the bow of one of the axis powers. The film concentrates more on the political message than on the insects themselves.
There is also a dizzying array of sub plots all interwoven together. How they all work together is, at times, tenuous. With all those subplots going on the movie did moved briskly. Trying to keep all those proverbial balls in the air did make for some plot holes so there were some times that you just needed to go with the flow.