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Released by: MGM Limited Edition Collection
Released on: October 18, 2011.
Director: J. Larry Carroll
Cast: Hiroshi Fujioka, John Calvin, Janet Julian
Year: 1986
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The Movie:
This is one of those 'should be fucking awesome' movies that isn't. Think about it - a master samurai is frozen in ice for hundreds of years and wakes up, thaws out, and hits the mean streets of eighties era Los Angeles to fight bad guys. This sounds rad, right? It's not. Even if it was produced by Charles Band and even if it has a great synth score, it's not awesome. Not even close.
So yeah, when the movie begins we meet a samurai (Hiroshi Fujioka) who finds himself on the losing end of a battle but slips off of a cliff and falls into icy waters before the bad guy he is dueling with can finish him off. Fast forward a few hundred years and a scientist, Dr. Alan Richards (John Calvin), finds him, takes him back to L.A. for testing and thaws him out. His moderately attractive pal and expert on Japanese studies, Chris Welles (Janet Julian), decides to help out and before you know it, she and the unfrozen samurai are friendly enough that he starts to trust her. Things are going quite swimmingly until a sneaky janitor tries to steal our samurai's priceless swords out from under him while he's sleeping - bad move, you don't steal swords from someone who deals in death! So yeah, the janitor gets cut up and killed and the samurai books it out of the lab and hits the streets of Los Angeles.
Truly a stranger in a strange land, he saves an old black guy from a bunch of muggers, cuts some guy's arm off, goes to a sushi joint where some dimwit recognizes him as Toshiro Mifune and eventually lands a spot on the muggers' collective hit list. Chris is on the hunt for him, trying to get him back to the lab before even more shit hits the fan, but it's too little too late, and soon enough there will be the inevitable showdown…
As mentioned, this movie should have been awesome. It should have been full of all sorts of awesome scenes of a time travelling samurai hacking up Warriors-wannabes and eighties gangbangers left, right and center. The samurai should have boned Chris and the old black guy should have been funny. Unfortunately none of this came to pass. Despite the film's R-rating it's only nominally violent, the aforementioned bit where the bad guy's hand gets cut off being the best part of the entire film. The picture doesn't deliver nearly enough action to sustain itself and as such, it winds up dragging.
If the movie had given us characters to care about, this probably wouldn't have been such a big deal but it didn't. Nope, everyone here is one dimensional at best, there's very little substance to any of this - most of the movie is made up of the samurai just sort of wandering around and looking simultaneously amused and intrigued by the modern world. To his credit, Hiroshi Fujioka carries a nobility about himself that makes him a great casting choice and the early scenes that we're supposed to believe were shot in Japan look great and start the film off well enough - but when the script fails to give him much to do outside of wandering around, you probably won't care.
Video/Audio/Extras:
MGM's 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer presents the film in what we can safely assume is its proper theatrical aspect ratio and generally it looks quite good here. Detail is strong, color looks great and there's not much print damage at all, really. Overall this is clean, well authored, free of compression artifacts or edge enhancement and generally a strong picture.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono track, in the film's native English (except for the parts spoken in Japanese, which have been left unsubtitled), is also fine. Levels are well balanced and there are no problems with hiss or distortion to report. Don't expect any subtitles or alternate language tracks, you'll be disappointed, but the audio is of perfectly good quality here.
If a static menu and chapter stops are your idea of extras, you'll be pleased, otherwise, there's nothing here, not even a trailer unfortunately.
The Final Word:
Ghost Warrior is a big stinking pile of wasted potential, but hey, MGM's barebones MOD/DVD-R release looks and sounds decent enough. Don't blind buy it, but if you're a fan of this one for whatever reason, at least now you've got a decent widescreen copy available.
