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Time Slip aka Sengoku Jieitai - "GI Samurai" (1979) ------ Detailed look of the full Japanese version is here: "GI SAMURAI"

Dir:Mitsumasa Saito.

This wonderfully entertaining slice of Japanese fantasy cinema, from 1979, has been sadly almost forgotten for too long, which is a great shame.

Japanese movie icon Sonny Chiba stars as Lt Iba, who with his company of men (including their tank, jeep, supply lorry and armoured car), a helicopter crew and a patrol craft are (via some delightfully bizarre, if cheap, visual effects) transported back in time to Feudal Japan, and run right into a war between rival Shoguns.

Joining up with the Commander of one of the Shogun's armies, named Kagetora, Lt.Iba decides to help take over and become joint rulers of this violent land....

This is a dubbed, edited version (roughly 40 minutes gone!) of the Japanese language original, (Directed by "Ninja Wars" helmer Mitsumasa Saito) and a lot is taken away from the film due to the VERY bad dubbing used.

The film, despite being packed with some of the most entertaining, balls out, battle scenes you will ever see (no expense spared on the budget either as literally hundreds and hundreds of fully equipped and clothed Samurai swarm over the hills and plains), also has a few serious, if simplistic, moral points to make.
Sadly much of this is rushed though (obviously due to the editing out of so much footage) with some of the relationships built up by the Soldiers with their new comrades (including a very hurried romance between one of Iba's men and a young woman) seemingly to sprout from little or no on screen interaction.

The moral stance is quite interesting. One of the Soldiers is against interfering in history, but his opinions are ignored by the increasingly power mad Iba.
There is much to do with honour as well. When Lt Iba takes on the leader of the opposing army with a sword, the Samurai orders his men to stand back. They could easily have cut Iba down, but as he says "this is a duel". But when this noble duel starts not to go Iba's way, he simply pulls out his gun and shoots the Samurai, before hacking off his head (as he had seen Kagetora do earlier) and parading it around.
This less than noble act will later become an essential plot point.

The camera (helped by the overly melodramatic music) also pans with genuine sadness over the heaps of Samurai bodies that litter the massive battlefield. These men, who were trained to fight one to one with their enemies, one man's skill against another's, are simply mowed down by weapons and technology they could not even start to comprehend. This viewpoint adds a nice little extra to the outrageous carnage that unfolds before the viewers' eyes.
And what a spectacle it is! To see a whole army of ancient Samurai on foot and on horse, armed simply with the odd musket, swords and bow and arrows, take on a group of machine gun toting, grenade throwing Soldiers in a tank and a machine gun mounted armoured car while a helicopter circles overhead spraying bullets, is quite simply amazing. It must really have been something on a big screen!

Hordes of men are shot and blow up, yet more flood the screen...to see all these extras in shot adds so much more to the battles. It truly makes them wonderful events to watch.

The gore is minimal, but used well. With some bloody sword fights (including a great spurting neck wound) 3 decapitations, numerous splattery bullet hits and lots of arrow pierced flesh.

The music is pretty bad though, the end song being a major offender (and damn long with it as well), with over the top military tunes blasting away.
Only in one brief scene, showing bodies of horses and men being scattered, does some genuinely effective music come in (right after a well used bit of complete silence as the carnage progresses) and it's a shame the rest of the film was not this well scored. In fact the scoring is even worse in ithe full Japanese edit!

As mentioned, the dubbing and translations take away a lot of the films seriousness and add some unintentional humour...but that's not the movies fault.
And underneath this morass of bad voices it's hard to judge the acting, but Chiba is a commanding force and pulls off some great horse riding stunts, and the rest of the cast is at least professional and up to the job of filling in their characters. The original language, a better translation and the restored character building scenes in the full version do certainly make for a more rewarding acting experience.

So to sum up, we have a very entertaining movie, packed with violence and truly EPIC battle scenes (who's very nature will have the viewer enthralled), but also with a moral stance and a (if now sadly diluted in this form) serious edge to the full-on crowd pleasing events that unfold.
If seen in it's subtitled, fully restored print, with an enhanced picture, this film would be seen as a gem of Japanese action/fantasy cinema, as it is, it's simply a great piece of entertainment with enough going on underneath to make for a completely satisfying viewing experience.

Luckily, since this review went up, a worthy subtitled, full length DVD release does now exist (as part of the 'Sonny Chiba Collection') on the 'Adness' label and I have taken a detailed look at it 'HERE'