Nightmare Fuel / Lupin III: Part II

• Episode 1 "The Return of Lupin the Third" features Scorpion doing whatever he can to kill Lupin and his gang during a cruise on the USS Sirloin, and he doesn't care about collateral damage. This includes crushing people during dinner, releasing poisonous snakes in the onboard dentist's office, and releasing a shark in one of the pools Lupin and Fujiko happen to be swimming in. The crew manages to escape each time, but innocent passengers are killed during each incident.
• Episode 6 "Tutankamen's 3000-Year Curse" is a rather un-nerving episode as a whole. Lupin wears King Tut's burial mask, and is apparently possessed by the boy king's soul. One especially disturbing part is after Jigen removes the mask, and we are treated to the lovely sight of Lupin seemingly staring into a void with purple shadow under his eyes◊.
  • Then, in the eyecatch, instead of the usual "Hai!" when he lands, Lupin moans, "Tatarri ja!" (Japanese for "I'm cursed").
  • Fujiko restrains Lupin to the bed to keep him from escaping, and later comes back to find that he's gone. She then notices that there's blood on the handcuffs, and realizes that the cursed Lupin must have struggled really violently and badly to break out of them, because if he was his normal self, he would've slipped out of them as naturally as breathing.
• "The Vanished Special Armored Truck" involves Zenigata sneaking into an armored truck Lupin stole from an Australian factory. Unfortunately, it turns out the back of the truck was designed to be airtight, and Zenigata begins to suffocate.
• "Fujiko Doesn't Look Good in a Bridal Gown" has its main villain, William Huffner, who kills the women he marries and preserves their bodies as statues in a twisted gallery of sorts. When it turned out that Fujiko was only pretending to have died in an attempt to rob him, he is glad to be able to kill her himself.
• "Steal Everything of Lupin's" involves a dying old man switching bodies with Lupin using a mind-switching machine. In a series of events, Zenigata ends up in the dying old man's body. The horrifying thing is when Lupin and the gang destroy the machine after Lupin gets his body back leaving Zenigata a few short days left to live. What the hell, Lupin!? Just a good thing Pops somehow managed to get his old body back.
• "When the Devil Beckons to Lupin"... Good lord, that episode is such an assortment of various horrors. It's bad enough Lupin receives a Creepy Doll that controls him in his sleep making him commit the theft of the episode's macguffin without him knowing. It gets worse with Lupin having a Nightmare Sequence in which the doll comes alive and walks him into a Circus of Fear tent where he has an encounter with the episode's Big Bad: Mephistopheles. He introduces himself as an Evil Puppeteer figure who goes on about how he's in full control of Lupin and brags about having the former's heart in his hand. And then squeezes it, making Lupin writhe in pain on the floor, while creepy living puppets come out laughing at him in unison before Mephistopheles subjects Lupin to a prolonged and disturbing People Puppets sequence using a life-sized Lupin marionette. Then it's revealed that Mephistopheles is a huge Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds as his true identity is that of Jacob, a survivor of The Holocaust who wants his revenge on former Gestapo members who took part in the death of his family and the theft of their diamonds. The elderly ex-Nazis are grouped in a stadium that Jacob intents blowing up by igniting a giant Gruesome Goat balloon filled with explosive gas. To avoid a disaster that may claim more lives than Jacob's targets, Lupin's gang intervenes to stop him, but at the end of a final confrontation, Jacob gets impaled by one of the nails that hold the explosive balloon into his belly and clings onto it to avoid getting eviscerated, and is dragged into the sky as the balloon floats away. Lupin and Jigen, while flying back to America to bring the diamonds to Jacob's family, end up coming across the Devil balloon with Jacob's corpse still clinging onto the rope stuck in his belly. Lupin can't help but feel sorry for his fate, because while Jacob was murderously insane and subjected him to a horrifying experience with the mind-controlling doll, he was still a victim of the Holocaust, and didn't quite deserve what's arguably the worst Cruel and Unusual Death of the franchise.

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