Time Slip (1981)

A squadron of Japanese soldiers find themselves transported through time to Japan s feudal period...400 years in the past, where rival samurai clans are battling to make their leader the supreme Shogun. The squad leader, Lt. Iba sees this as the perfect opportunity to realize his dream of becoming the ruler of Japan. To achieve this, he teams his troops up with those of Kagatori, a samurai who also aspires to become Shogun, using their high-tech weaponry to rule Japan.

Starring Shinichi Sonny Chiba, Isao Natsuki and Tsunehiko Watase. Directed by Kosei Saito
Written by Toshio Kamata Produced by Takeshi Motomura - Directed by Mitsumasa Saito Product Description

 Some Surprising Moments
Basically a bunch of modern (1981) Japanese soldiers and their equipment (one tank, one half-track, one truck, one jeep, one boat, one helicopter--it's like a bad video game premise) accidentally go back in time for no darned reason and meet up with their Samurai fellow-warriors. It's a weak start and it's a bit incoherent (almost certainly due to bad translations for the English dubbing) but at any rate they end up siding with a Samurai leader with the intention of taking over Japan...or going back to their own time. It's unclear which or why or who or what.

What makes this film memorable is a series of scenes where these modern soldiers (armed with modern weapons) fight increasingly larger feudal Japanese forces (not armed with modern weapons). This belligerence culminates in a spectacular and ferociously brutal battle with a genuinely immense Samurai/Ninja army. Sure, this sort of thing has been done before but not on this epic or visceral level. It's as if Kurosawa did his own version of "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" and tossed in quite a lot of "Saving Private Ryan" and "Zulu." There's more than a whiff of "Seven Samurai" here too. During these scenes the movie stops being laughable and starts getting thought-provoking. I'd love to see it cleaned up with subtitles. It'd probably make more sense.

Sadly, this film looks like it may be heading to oblivion--I paid all of 99 cents for my copy--but it at least should be salvaged for these astonishing battle sequences. That's why I'm giving it four stars.

UPDATE! Just released on DVD as part of a group of Sonny Chiba releases! Forty minutes of extra footage! Wowser! April 16, 2004

 Solid B-movie entertainment
This movie is about a small group of Japanese GIs who enter a time warp and are transported back about 300-400 years during Japan's warring states period and do battle with the samurai.

You would expect that the GIs would slaughter the samurai, who lack modern firearms and explosives, but because the GIs are so vastly outnumbered, they have a heck of a fight on their hands.

This movie wastes little time with plot or characterization and most of the movie focuses on overlong, underproduced battle scenes that get somewhat tiresome after awhile.

However, I felt that the long action scenes indicated a sincere effort on the part of the filmmakers to make a film that is at least entertaining, if not particularly thoughtful.

I would recommend watching this one on a lazy Saturday morning over a bowl of Capn Crunch, but don't kill your Friday or Saturday night with this one, it's just not that good. June 11, 2002

More reviews at Amazon.com ...