ISLAND OF GIANT INSECTS | REVIEW!

Here we are, 2020, and I'm about to tell you about my experience with Kyocho Reto, also known as the Island of Giant Insects. I'll be honest with you guys, I really thought this was going to be a long running series adapting a horror manga, but instead we were treated with an hour and some minutes long Island of Giant Insects is about a group of students that survive a plane crash. They are stranded on a seemingly deserted island. Mutsumi, our main character, finds other survivors and will use her wildlife expertise to help them. Expecting to be saved in three days, things obviously don't go as planned. The island is populated by enormous killer insects, and yeah, in fact I made the comparison in my head that this would be the anime equivalent of a weekend B-movie you'd see on the sci-fi channel, and to some extent I kinda got that. Unfortunately the plot isn't really there. You could have done some really cool things with the concept of giant bugs, I mean think back to those cheesy sci-fi classics from the 50s and 60s. Instead this OVA is just kinda boring. Cliched characters trying to survive but being complete morons in the process. I mean aside from the survival expert and the class rep or the sports club president, you've got delinquent students that only want to escape and not really help anybody, you've got a female character that dresses far too revealing, an eccentric, scared, idle character that really serves no purpose, she barely gets any development, and well, you kinda get the picture. Look, I'm sure there are fans of the original source material, and they are probably not pleased that 1. it was adapted into just an hour long movie, and 2. that I'm probably dissing on their favorite manga thing, so I'm sorry. You'd think that an island full of giant bugs would have a diverse selection, since after all they are the main antagonists. I only counted 5 types of bugs. Five. We literally have trillions of insects on this earth. I was misled into thinking hell, we'd get killer ants, giant roaches, disgusting centipedes. The title suggests we would be getting a horror gore fest, but the movie censors the few violent scenes we get, and instead gives us the viewer weirdly fan-service moments with nudity, sex, and pretty off-putting perverse situations involving larvae. I don't mind manga, shows, or movies that get a little sloppy with that plot, just as long as it knows how to have some fun. However, this does not. Everything is taken way too seriously, and comes off as rather comical. The art in this OVA is somewhat decent. To be honest, the initial portion of it is well-drawn, but some of the action scenes feature pretty bad character renderings that just made it feel like I was watching an OVA from the late 90s, or something that I would get strictly on DVD. The setting looks great, it's a deserted, tropical-looking island, and the bugs look okay too. I'm not a fan of the anime CG thing, but it works for what we're getting. Regardless, the story is just kinda choppy. You get an opening exposition with what is happening, and they're on this quest to save one of their friends, and then we get to the third act of the film, which involves a showdown with a giant Dobson fly. And while it would have been something that could have been taken care of rather quickly, because keep in mind, even though it's a giant bug, it's still a giant bug, we get a full 10 to 20 minutes to do it, and the result is kind of lackluster-looking. I don't know. Also, there's this really long, unnecessary scene with our main character. She's prepping up for this final showdown, and she's walking down a long hall, and you hear this electric guitar-sounding riff on the background, and you're like, okay, sure, just a transitional scene between what we got previously with the characters talking about what they're gonna do to defeat the huge flying insect, but instead, it goes on and on, and she keeps walking, and there's no point to it. I'm like, why are we wasting time with this transition scene when you could have fleshed out other character developments and plot points? The Island of Giant Insects. I wasn't expecting much, but with weak characters, uninspired horror elements, a lackluster plot, and uneven artwork, this is a big pass for yours truly. I'd rather watch anything else than to come back to an island filled with five giant bug species. But, hey, I am pretty sure somebody out there likes this movie, and I do not mean to have to defend, it's just what I thought about the film, or the OVA, or whatever, and for some reason, they decided to cut the film up into mini, like, ten to eleven minute shorts to probably sell it as a quote-unquote series on Blu-ray. That just seems cheap, in my opinion. Also, I think it was uncensored, but the actual film is pretty, I mean, aside from the violence, everything else is pretty uncensored. The violence, it's scarce, but when it happens, you just see a lot of shadows to, like, gore and dismemberment and stuff like that, but there are other scenes in this, which I talked about earlier in this review, that are just strangely fetishizing the heat, contact between certain bugs and people, and there's a scene later on that involves, like, they're washing down, and everybody's bug-naked, regardless if it's a dude or a girl, it was just weird, and I'm sorry. Not for me. I would have wanted something really different, really more scary. It's a big ol' pass, like I just mentioned. Have you seen The Island of Giant Insects? Let me know in the comments section down below. Guys, as always, thank you so much for liking, commenting, and being a part of A Week in Geekdom. Thank you so very much. Hit the notification bell so you know when new videos pop up. I have got to go. I will catch all of you on our next video.