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A bunch of locked room killings baffle the police, including one on an
airplane that basically makes no sense, no matter how you look at it -
unless of course the killer was an invisible man. When investigating
inspector Wakabayashi jokingly drops this remark talking to one of the
witnesses, professor Hayakawa, he gets a weird reaction, and it soon turns
out the professor has indeed developed an apparatus to render things
invisible, but it has not been tested on humans yet. More murders
happen, and the onlky things they have in common is a strange humming
noise before and after the murder, and the fact that the victims tried to
chase something like a fly away - so could the murderer be a human fly? There's
one thing all the murder victims have in common, they served in the
organization in World War II, and somehow every trail leads to Kusunoki, a
suspected war criminal who had to flee the country for a decade or so but
has since returned and become a respectable businessman. Thing is, he has
watertight alibis for most of the murders. What inspector Wakabayashi
doesn't know of course is that Kusunoki has an assistant, Yamada, who
murders in his employ. And Kusunoki has really developed a serum that
turns people into human flies, which explains pretty much everything - but
that serum is also highly addictive, and it makes people violent. So much
to the dismay of Kusunoki, Yamada soon uses the serum to settle a few
scores of his own. Eventually, Kusunoki decides to lure Yamada into a trap
unwittingly set up by the inspector to be rid of him. What Kusunoki
doesn't know of course is that Tsukioka, professor Hayakawa's assistant
and the inspector's best friend, has since successfully tried the
invisibility ray on himself and has collected enough evidence to have
Kusunoki arrested - but Kusunoki escapes using his human fly serum. From
now on, Kusunoki the (new) human fly terrorizes all of Tokyo. Why? Because
he wants professor Hayakawa's invisibility machine. Finally, inspector
Wakabayashi agrees to hand it over, and he counts on invisible Tsukioka to
help out. But Kusunoki has foreseen that and forces Tsukioka to render
himself visible. Then he takes off in a helicopter, with the invisibility
machine. What he does no know of course is that the professor's daughter
Akiko has since rendered herself invisible as well, and she has followed
Kusunoki into the helicopter, and now forces him to land again. Kusunoki
soon gets into a brawl with Wakabayashi and Tsukioka, at the end of which
he falls from a rooftop to his death ... Part science fiction,
part police procedural, this film has its moments - but it also has its
letdowns, that unfortunately outweigh the film's positive aspects:
Somehow, having both a human fly and an invisible man in one and the same
murder case is just a bit too much to believably work at least in the
science fiction context. On top of that, the villain's motives are too
hazy in the murder mystery context. And the fact, that all the characters
remain disappointingly pale in whatever context doesn't help either. Sure,t
eh film is still some fun due to its far-out story, but far from great ...
or at least as much fun as you'd expect from the title.
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