A group of Australian Commanders land on the southern Indonesian coastline* in search of a crashed airplane that has some mystery American in it. They must get to the plane defend themselves against the Japanese and possibly recruit some Chinese fighters on the way.
The Japanese forces are starting to become wise to their assaults. The ever-expanding body count is becoming harder and harder to disguise. The Japanese are going through various Villages and Farms looking for the Australian forces. They find one woman which they're pretty sure knows about them . They try to convince her to talk by dumping her hand into a pot of boiling water which leads one of the children lying about location of the Australians .
It's supposed to be one of those Ultra secret missions wear if one of your men is injured you shoot him dead so he can't tell the enemy anything. And this happens to one of the poor Bastards in the first 5 minutes of the movie. And as time goes on they'll come across a Chinese man who's leading some sort of resistance force against the occupying Japanese. They're both helping the Australians to find the crashed plane and at the same time destroy the crashed plane to stop anyone from figuring out what was there. This leads to a shot where one of the Australians tries to offer a local woman a cigarette when she refuses. Pulling out her own pack of American Camel cigarettes. This seems to indicate that not only were the Chinese at the plane but that they're lying to the Australians about never seeing it before.
The leader of the Chinese Rebellion informs the Australians that he's aware of the location of the two man on the plane but they're looking for. One's an American agent the other ones in Japanese Defector.
The Australians eventually make it to The Hideout of these two men. Here there confronted with the Grim possibility of actually Escaping The Island. The Japanese Defector is very injured, he can barely move, their canoes were discovered by the Japanese Imperial Army and the entire island is on lockdown. Then there's the secondary problem of the locals, many of which don't want to fight the Japanese others that do and a fine group of people that don't know what they want. They are able with a bit of time to be convinced that the Australians are worth the effort and they put in a full frontal attack against the Japanese occupying forces.
Here just about every major character dies, most of the Australian Commandos. Lots of the townsfolk, the Chinese leader of the Rebellion And in particular or star of the movie "John Phillip Law" who had a little love affair with the daughter of the Chinese Rebellion.
Almost all of them get killed and just at the end when you think the Commandos have finally made it out of harm's way That is the head Commando Mel Gibson looks over at the Japanese Defector to see that he's been shot and Now lies dead. And thus the entire operation was for naught. Everybody's dead there's no true Victory on any side.
The film overall wasn't that bad. It's your typical run-of-the-mill action film from the 70s it has solid enough sets good acting and the slightest caveat of intrigue to make you want to keep watching. I also like that they didn't sugar coat with the languages. There's plenty of English but there's also a lot of Japanese and Mandarin as well. I'm not sure if all these Chinese people would have actually been speaking Mandarin but I know nothing about Chinese migration to Indonesia.
*I thought originally it was an Indonesian Island but they make reference to port ''Alexishafen'' witch from the best from what I can tell. It's a small area in the country of Papua New Guinea which had been under occupation of the Japanese. I know we like to generalize geological features together but these two countries weren't even under the control of the same Colonial powers.
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