Perhaps the only film ever to bill itself as coming from "the timewarp tradition of Iceman," Ghost Warrior opens on a scene in 1550s Japan, a mysterious land that bears a suspicious resemblance to the Rocky Mountain region of North America. There, heroic ronin Hiroshi Fujioka makes a desperate last stand to protect his woman from a band of marauders before taking an arrow-stricken dive into a snowy river. After enjoying a few centuries of peace and quiet, his frozen body is discovered by modern cross-country skiers, and promptly (though inexplicably) taken to Los Angeles. That's where intrepid journalist Janet Julian discovers him, after following hunches and rumors, cynically commenting, "It was the kind of story that sparks the imagination, gives newscasters something to joke about, and then fades into oblivion." Little does she suspect, however, that through the miracle of whirring machines and beeping monitors, Fujioka will be brought back to life. Confounded by such features of contemporary life as helicopters and W.A.S.P. videos, Fujioka needs to be gently immersed in the 20th century. With the careful use of symbol-bearing flash cards, Julian makes significant progress in this area, and eventually, in what might not be the most carefully considered move, she returns his sword to him. A series of accidents deposits Fujioka in contemporary L.A., where, after a night of confusedly poking holes in car tires, he breaks up the attempted mugging of jovial senior citizen Charles Lampkin. "You damaged the merchandise, man. That was stupid," taunts one gang member, apparently not suspecting that he's the stupid one for tangling with a fully armed samurai. After their fight spills into a local sushi restaurant, where one patron mistakes him for Toshirô Mifune, Fujioka finds he has more than gang members on his trail. Soon, he's eluding government agents unwilling to go public with their 16th-century secret weapon. After some time spent walking peacefully through a meadow with Julian, Fujioka walks into a trap and discovers, in the timewarp tradition of Iceman, that unfrozen warriors from the past don't have much of a future. After a good fight, he makes like the 19th-century Tokugawa government and falls.
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