YMMV / Lupin III: Dead or Alive

• Complete Monster:
  • General Headhunter is a violent nanomachine android who murdered the royal family of Zufu to take power. Instilling a military dictatorship, Headhunter has any dissidents sent to prison where they are either formally executed or used in a sadistic annual hunting game for the warden to enjoy. Seeking to amalgamate himself with the control center of the nanomachines when the former Prince seemingly attempts to launch a rebellion, Headhunter tortures the Prince's lover and boasts of his intent to crush the freedom fighters and continue his tyranny.
  • Crisis is the smug and sadistic right-hand man to Headhunter. Ensuring his boss's reign of tyranny never ends, Crisis heads a spy network, even forcing the former Prince's lover to work for him weeding out and imprisoning any who go against the regime. When Lupin arrives on Zufu, Crisis calls countless assassins to the nation and tries to torture the Prince's lover for the secret of the nanomachines.
• Genius Bonus: Crossed with Freeze-Frame Bonus, if the viewer knows their periodic table, when Lupin is analyzing the Nanomachines, they'll know the nanomachines are made out of mostly gold before the movie actually reveals it.
• Harsher in Hindsight: This film would mark the first instance of a villain performing an onscreen decapitation in the series, with a few images that show just what happened when Headhunter lives up to his name near the climax. Fastforward 21 years after this film with the release of Goemon Ishikawa's Spray of Blood, and we see another graphic decapitation, with no imagery showing what happened, just the graphic image of Hawk's head sliding off of his body after being slashed by Zantetsuken.
• Woolseyism:
  • In the dub, Jigen refers to the process of Lupin's hacking as "someone could use a new web designer," to which Lupin responds with "I'm not talkin' about jpegs, Jigen," ironically making this line an Unintentional Period Piece given the 9-year gap between the original Japanese release and Funimation's DVD release. In the original Japanese, Jigen instead says "You got into the enemy's computer pretty easy", with Lupin not saying anything until he goes over the details about the island.
  • In the dub, the Zufu police arrive to take Zenigata to prison, telling him that one of them will put in a good word to the other inmates once he's in the slammer, to which Pops responds with "Come on, cut me some slack. I'm a cop, same as you." In the Japanese version, this is more of a manner of Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking because the police disagree with Pops' entering the country, citing it as illegal. Here, Zenigata responds to them with "Only my superiors may drop my name suffix," with the police stating that everyone will drop the title attributed to Zenigata.
  • In the dub, Spanky is heard singing a drunken version of La Cucaracha, while he sings something elese in the original Japanese.