Genocide

Declining profits within the Japanese film industry in the mid-Sixties prompted the nation's major studios to rethink their game plans. Founded in 1895 as a theatrical company specializing in kabuki, Shochiku Studios turned to film production after 1920 and patterned its business plan after the American example, to the point of hiring actresses to play female roles traditionally assigned to men and importing Max Factor cosmetics from Hollywood. Shochiku's specialty was prestige films and the studio was a home base for such major and rising talents as Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Nagisa Oshima. To keep their accounting in the black Shochiku followed the example of rivals Toho and Daiei, who had won over audiences at home and abroad with fantastic sagas of giant monsters, marauding extraterrestrials, animated statues, and sundry tales of the grotesque and arabesque. Between 1967 and 1968, Shochiku bankrolled a quartet of beyond-the-pale horror-science fiction hybrids: The X from Outer Space (Uchu daikaijû Girara, 1967), The Living Skeleton (Kyuketsu dokuro sen, 1968), Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro, 1968), and Genocide (Konchu daisensô, 1968), whose Japanese title translates to "Insects, Great War" or War of the Insects, as it was called in English speaking markets. Released in Japan around the same time that America got its first bitter taste of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, Genocide manages to be the bleaker of the two. Both films tender what amounts to civil war erupting within their respective societies, with the Shochiku film swapping for flesh-eating ghouls bugs whose sting brings madness and certain death and who can, en masse, bring down American B52s. Anticipating the eco-terrors of such later US films as Frogs (1972), Phase IV (1974), The Pack (1977), The Swarm (1978), and Day of the Animals (1977), Genocide tears a page from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) before going wildly off the rails in its second act, dragging into the mix a missing hydrogen bomb, the coldblooded response of the American military complex, a beautiful but hopelessly deranged Holocaust survivor in cahoots with Eastern bloc spies, and insects sharing a single purpose to annihilate mankind before mankind can destroy the planet. Genocide shares the candied aesthetics of Toho's earlier Matango (US: Attack of the Mushroom People, 1963) and looks, from time to time (given its reliance on scale models) naïve, even primitive... but the payload delivered during its final frames is anything but kid's stuff. Director Kazui Nihonmatsu, who had previously directed Shochiku's giant monster movie The X from Outer Space, seems to have called it quits after wrapping Genocide, which is a pity. Writer Susumu Takahisa shared a writing credit on Shochiku's even madder Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell. Lead actor Yusuke Kawazu later turned up in such kaiju eiga reboots as Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1993) and Gamera 2: Attack of the Legion (1996) while American Kathy Horan, a former Braniff Airways stewardess who enjoyed a significant part in Goke and popped up as well that same year in Kinji Fukasaku's The Green Slime, enjoys the best role of her brief career as the bikini-clad but hate-filled Annabelle, Genocide's Typhoid Mary, an Auschwitz alumna whose disappointment with the world has led her to embrace its lowest forms. By Richard Harland Smith Sources: Japanese Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films: A Critical Analysis and Filmography of 103 Features Released in the United States, 1950-1992 by Stuart Galbraith, IV (McFarland & Company, Publishers, 2007) Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo! The Incredible World of Japanese Fantasy Films by Stuart Galbraith, IV (Feral House, 1998) "The Classical Cinema in Japan" by Hiroshi Komatsu, The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Oxford University Press, 1999) "Nationalizing Madame Butterfly: The Formation of Female Stars in Japanese Cinema" by Daisuke Miyao, The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, ed. Daisuke Miyao (Oxford University Press, 2014)