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Guinea Pig 5: Android of Notre Dame, 1988, dir. Kazuhito Kuramoto

Unfortunately, this is the point at which the series becomes noticeably weaker. The focus on plot is continued, and this time a sci-fi angle has been added to the horro, with a midget performing twisted experiments in an attempt to find a way to help his dying sister. Oddly enough the gore is downplayed this time, perhaps because the people involved just weren't as talented as before, as can be seen in the lackluster script and acting. Granted, these were never the selling points for the series, but since there is an attempt to give even more plot than any entry before it, a better script and acting would have been necessary to make this effective. Instead, the characters and their conflicts come off as yawn-inducing, which really wouldn't have been a problem if the gores was piled on like it was before. Instead there's a prolonged scene where we get to see a few things done to a corpse, which are really small in effect considering what's already been shown in the series. When one character has his legs cut off, it's considerably less realistic than in the previous entries in the series. One high point, though, is the severed head attached to a robotic arm kept alive by the midget, which is the best done effect in the film as we see it gradually get more and more disgusting. In the end, though, I feel like I've seen very little for what could have been done with this minimal story in fifty minutes. Worse than this is the plot hole which remains as my last impression of the film: if the midget's sister was terminally ill because of a heart problem, why didn't she just get a heart transplant?