There are certain films where you can’t help but wish you’d been a fly on the wall in whatever room where the brainstorming for the plot occurred. In the case of Ghost Warrior, you can’t help but feel someone read an article about the discovery of a caveman frozen in ice, and then began fantasizing about how much cooler it would be if, instead of a caveman, the frozen person was a samurai or a Viking. At which point, the mind starts overflowing with hypothetical situations. What would then happen if the frozen samurai was unfrozen in modern times? How would he survive in a modern city? How would he react to gang violence? Would he pledge allegiance to a master, or be a ronin (technically, his master is dead)? Maybe these thoughts haven’t crossed your mind, but they did to Tim Curnen and Charles Brand, and so we have Ghost Warrior.
Fallen into a freezing lake after a climactic showdown in Japan’s feudal era, a samurai’s frozen body is discovered centuries later in modern day by a pair of hikers. Their discovery prompts the warrior’s excavation and shipment to the US where he’s thawed and revived. What at first seems like a blessing eventually becomes a curse as the samurai discovers himself out of his depth and in the hands of a company with less than honorable intentions – that is, until he escapes and begins fending for himself in the big city. Caught in the middle and the samurai’s only ally is a young reporter hoping to make a name for herself off the story of a man revived after years of icy preservation.
You can’t deny the campy and somewhat comical slant inherent in such a story, but it would have carried off much better without the unnecessary narration by the reporter character. All the information we receive from the voiceover would have come across more naturally in the dialogue, and it would have made much more sense for it to be offered there than through a narrator track that feels awkwardly tacked on, as if the audience couldn’t easily keep up with the weird, but simple story.
It’s silly, but man this would have been a fun series.
DVD Bonus Features
None.
"Ghost Warrior" is on sale October 13, 2011 and is not rated. Action, Sci-Fi. Directed by J Larry Carroll. Written by Tim Curnen. Starring Hiroshi Fujioka, Janet Julian, John Calvin.
