Samurai

From Universal Television, this is just one of a slew of television pilots which never got further than the starting gate, and it’s not hard to see why. Attempting to combine the drastically contrasting worlds of the samurai warrior and the district attorney is a doomed idea from the start; the final result demonstrates this unequivocally. There is far too much dialogue to capture an audience who tuned in for some warrior action, which when it does arrive, is over too quickly and flatly choreographed to boot. Leading man Joe Penny is miscast, being totally unconvincing as the supposedly tough combatant of the title.

Penny portrays Lee Toshido Cantrell, a Nipponese American clean-cut lawyer, working for the San Francisco County Prosecutors Office. He becomes intrigued by a court case involving four burly men — arrested and charged for late night trespassing in a downtown warehouse. Following a hunch that there is more to this than meets the eye, he forges ahead with his own personal investigation, discovering that a huge conglomerate — Horizon Enterprises — is buying up all the properties in run-down areas of San Francisco.

Further probing reveals that Horizon’s CEO, the powerful Amory Bryson (Charles Cioffi), is executing a forced urban redevelopment programme in which he uses intimidation against the residents (carried out by operatives Tigner (Geoffrey Lewis) and Lacey (Michael Pataki), in order to buy up their properties at knock-down prices.

Bryson’s thugs re-visit the warehouse, this time torching the stock, but when Cantrell helps out the afflicted residents both legally and as the ‘Samurai’, he manages to neutralise any further scare-tactics from Horizon Enterprises.

The unyielding Bryson enlists earthquake expert Professor Owens (Philip Baker Hall), who creates a sonic wave machine which can cause an earthquake in a constrained localised area. With the machine loaded into the back of a truck, they head back to the warehouse in order to level the area with powerful sonic tremors…