With the whole franchise leading up to this final entry, director Naoyuki Tomomatsu unfortunately brings his sleazy exploitation series to a conclusion with more of a whimper than expected. Taking more of a science fiction route than the over-the-top excess of his previous films in the series, a multitude of reasons could potentially explain this efforts' fall from the rest of the films in this series even with a few enjoyable elements.
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Convinced of the final outcome, a team of scientists travel back in time to stop the spread of a virus turning men into zombified rapists through society and causes them to finally uncover the source of the deadly disease which instigates them to attempt to stop it before it happens again.
For the final franchise entry, “Lust of the Dead 5” was somewhat problematic. The film's biggest problem is the fact that this one really makes no sense at all as to what's going on, as there's a serious misuse of time-travel. Supposedly going back to previous entries in the series to alter how the timeline played out, the narrative makes a rather irritating error in having repeat showings of the scenes that originally happened and then have the new footage of the actors observing rather than taking an active intervention in the proceedings. This creates an incredibly sloppy situation where it really makes the film feel redundant by not doing anything new with the material as instead it just rehashes the same scenes all over again. Regardless of how much fun it was to revisit those particular scenes, this approach simply causes the beginning to feel like stock footage rather than attempting anything new with the story as was attempted in the previous installment.
Moreover, the manner in which it features the two traveling back throughout the different time-periods in the franchise is laughably inconsistent and never makes any sense. It just shows them running in slow-motion through the backgrounds and then just appearing in stock footage apparently meant to show the previous actions. That, in effect, causes this one to really diminish the amount of newfound action with the zombies here. “Lust of the Dead 5” tends to feature the same scenes all over again and never attempting anything new with them. The attempts at time-travel take up a large portion of this one and it causes the film to drastically overlook the zombie footage, to the point of barely even featuring any new ones at all here so the action doesn't have the same impact.
It still has the major problematic issues as before in that the ease of which it indulges in topics like the continued rape and exploitation on display which does make this one somewhat hard to get through. As well, there's also the fact that it tends to feature the same utterly atrocious CGI effects that are just laughably awful and never really offer any kind of realistic actions, which really lowers this one considerably. It still has a few positives, as the flashback scenes give this a plethora of nudity and sleazy gore so it still works on those levels. Likewise, the fact that it manages to touch on the topic of suicide and bullying in a rather honest and open manner gives it something else to look forward to as there are some worthwhile effects on that topic that are brought up and make for a somewhat powerful statement.
While there are a few worthwhile elements to be found here, the fact that “Lust of the Dead 5” tends to play like a greatest hits package of the previous entries without much new material makes this one a bit of a struggle to get through. You've already seen the best bits taken from this one elsewhere so unless you're dead-set on finishing out the franchise then stick with the other entries and heed caution with this one.
