Kyochuu Rettou Movie

Way back in 2014, I joined MAL and wrote my first review for a shitty OVA called MD Geist. I’ve now just logged my 1,000th completed anime, proving that I spent WAY too much time watching Chinese cartoons over the course of my life. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate than by reviewing the shittiest anime of the last couple years. The Mars of Destruction for the 2020 decade. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you “The Island of Giant Insects”!!!

Island of Giant Insects is a throwback to the “Lost World” genre of fiction that was popular in the 1800s and early 20th century. At that time, there was no satellite mapping and we were still making discoveries. Europeans encountered the Komodo Dragon for the first time in 1910 and were absolutely shocked that such a creature could exist. In the late 1800s, an American explorer reached an unmapped area of Afghanistan and claimed to have discovered the descendants of Alexander the Great’s army, still worshipping the Greek Pantheon. Eventually we learned the Nuristanis are actually an Indo-Iranian people and were practicing a form of Hinduism, but papers reported them as lost Greeks for decades. Back then, it was almost believable that somewhere in the Pacific, an island with dinosaurs or other cool creatures existed. The idea of an undiscovered island just off the coast of Japan in the year 2020 is pretty silly.

A high school class’s plane crashes on our undiscovered tropical island and the students wake up miles apart because I guess the plane broke up in mid air. It’s never established how the fuck they managed to survive. Most of these characters are unbelievably stupid and exist solely to provide fanservice and then die. The only exception is a young entomologist who exists to inform the audience what species all the insects must have mutated from. For example, several classmates are sucked dry by blood sucking butterflies that apparently belong to Papilio maackii, a common Japanese butterfly species. They could have just had giant mosquitos, but decided for some reason to choose butterflies. I did a little research and there is a single member of the Lepidoptera order that has evolved a proboscis to pierce human skin and drink blood. That species is Calyptra thalictra, the Siberian Vampire Moth. Unlike the writers of this show, I learned how to use the internet. I guess this show doesn’t want to be educational.

The manga is straight up porn and exists in the guro genre. Girls get penetrated by parasitoid wasps, which lay eggs inside of them and they get eaten alive by the larva. Lots of stuff like that. The anime doesn’t dare be so graphic, so it’s a completely unsatisfying ecchi. The guro hounds won’t be happy, general audiences won’t be happy, nobody is happy.

You will IMMEDIATELY notice that the cgi in this series is laughably awful. Even if you were deathly afraid of insects, this series becomes a comedy the moment our antagonists show up. This anime is the first and only product of the mysterious Studio Red Ice. I can’t find a lot on these guys. All search results just bring up a Neo-Nazi youtube channel that accrued 200,000 subs before being taken down for allegedly inciting domestic terrorism. I’m pretty sure this anime isn’t related, but what if the CGI is so bad because it’s some kind of Psy-op perpetrated by Nazis?! This anime is certainly an act of terrorism against standards and good taste.

The soundtrack seems convinced that this is Doom. Sadly, it isn’t.

Is there any reason to watch Island of Giant Insects? Sadly…not really. It’s pretty hysterically bad, but never reaches the jaw dropping lows of Mars of Destruction. If you’re looking for gore, you can do FAR better than this shit. If you want quality ecchi, you’ve definitely come to the wrong place. This is the first non-hentai I’ve reviewed in a long while that truly deserved its 1 rating. I have nothing positive to say about this anime. Fuck you Island of Giant Insects for wasting an hour of my life!