U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur is about to return to the Philippines as he promised before the Japanese ran him off. In 1944, an amphibious Navy aircraft lands a Marine commando force near the island of Luzon, and they paddle ashore to obtain valuable information from a source deep within enemy territory. As First Sgt. Steve Corey, Hugh O'Brien of "The Brass Legend" is tough-as-nails, and Mickey Rooney is no slouch as career Gunnery Sgt. Ernest Wartell who totes around a .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun almost as big as he is. The youngest member of the unit is Private First Class James Grenier (Jim Mitchum of "Moonrunners") who has never seen combat. It doesn't take long for Sgt. Corey and Pfc. Grenier to get to dislike each other. Corey makes it clean in no uncertain terms that Grenier is supposed to cradle the radio set that is their life-line to Allied command. Indeed, Grenier is the member of the team is chosen at the last minute to fill in the regular guy. He provides the voice-over narration that introduces us to the commando team at the beginning of the film and concludes it at the end of the movie.Our grim-faced gyrene heroes in camouflage fatigues learn from their contact, Miyazaki (Tisa Chang of "Year of the Dragon") that the Japanese have prepared an unusual minefield for the U.S. Navy. These mines are radio controlled and are anchored to the bottom of the bay. They are released and rise to the surface to blow up whatever they come into contact with. Grenier loses his radio with which he was entrusted. They have no way of contacting the Admiral Halsey's task force and MacArthur plans to land in 48 hours! Consequently, "Ambush Bay" is a thriller with a deadline. Instead, Corey and Grenier have to slip into the Japanese base, shoot their way into the radio control room and detonate the mines. Naturally, tough guy Corey keeps the enemy at bay with a 50. caliber, tripod-mounted machine gun from the roof of the installation.Altogether, everybody dies except Grenier. Rooney has an amusing death scene. The Japanese find him sitting by a tree and threaten to kill him if he doesn't ante up information about himself and his cronies. He produces two hand grenades and invites them to dinner. He tells them that he will share his "potatoes" with them and they can have them with "the jackets on" and then hurls them at the Japanese as they beat a quick retreat. "Ambush Bay" is nothing special as far as behind-enemy-lines combat movies go. Essentially, this is a traditional war movie. The Americans are good guys, and the Japanese--who shoot women in cold blood--are the bad guys. Good performances, standard-issue heroics and lots of green scenery keep "Ambush Bay" from being too dreary. Incidentally, no sooner do our heroes immerse themselves in combat than their officer is attacked by a Japanese soldier and stabbed to death. This is a traditional World War II movie because the Americans aren't trying to kill their leaders like they did in "Tawara Beachhead" or "Attack." Composer Richard LaSalle's orchestral soundtrack sounds as if he listened to Malcolm Arnold's music "The Bridge on the River Kwai" because LaSalle incorporate a similar melody. No, I'm not talking about Colonel Bogey's march. Scenarists Marve Feinberg and Ib Melchior have penned a screenplay that amounts to an anthology of clichés. "Ambush Bay" represents Feinberg's only screenplay, while Melchior earned a reputation writing sci-fi films such as "Robin Crusoe on Mars," "Angry Red Planet," and "Journey to the Seventh Planet."

I have seen the movie before years ago on TV and I don't remember much about it from that time. However, this time the first thing I notices all through out the film was-WHATS WITH THE HATS! Each character wore a different style or color hat. I guess the producers wanted the audience to be able to distinguish each actor by the color and style of the hats. Hugh O"Brian was a former Marine so he probably refused to wear an unauthorized COVER (see I did use the right term). His had the symbol in the front. In addition, Mitchem wore jeans. I can't see a real Marine doing that and I also can't see a real Marine talking in such a disrespectful manner. He would have gotten that beaten out of him the first day in boot camp. Me being a gunnut I did notice the man with the M! Garand having the side mounted scope on it (M1D). That really surprised me. When the story opened and the comment was made that the man was an expert with the Garand, he would have carried a M1D and sure enough in the story he did and he used it. All in all it was a good war movie. It was not Platoon but good.

A crack team of US Marines is sent to one of the small Phillipine islands because there's an agent there who's got some big news, but can't get it out. Almost from the beginning Captain Clem Stadler is killed in some contact with a Japanese patrol. That leaves command of the mission to fall on Sergeant Hugh O'Brian.Ambush Bay managed to hit all the war movie clichés without a miss in its running time. One of the most prominent was the new guy on the mission, in this case radioman James Mitchum. He was a last minute replacement and with the exception of Mickey Rooney, he's not well regarded by the seasoned Marines on the mission.I can't say what it is or how the team deals with the information, but let's just say they've got one big old surprise cooked up for Admiral Halsey's task force.The movie was shot entirely on location in the Phillipines and the scenery is quite lush. I'm sure that the promise of a tropical vacation might have induced a few of our American players to work in this film.I feel either ambushed or just plain bushed right about now.

Excellent majestic, dramatic location filming in the Philippines is wasted on 'Ambush Bay's' cliché crippled script and on its other, ginsu production values (e.g., very fake-looking fake blood, amateurish explosions, racks upon racks of 1966-modern electronics suites pretending to be WWII Japanese gear, shabbily unsynched post-production dubbing of spoken Japanese over the moving lips of the Filipino actors portraying them). It also doesn't help this film that most of the raiders - those who are given no character development beyond the opening scene's terse narration of each man's combat specialty; and the most laughable of these is for Mickey Rooney's character who is "expert" with a Thompson submachine gun). The DVD image and sound transfer are, however, surprisingly good.Since I first saw 'Ambush Bay' on late-night TV (in the Age Before Cable), and many times thereafter, I've always loved the cheesy scene of the wounded Mickey Rooney sassing his Japanese interrogators before he grenades them along with himself. It's one of the cheesiest bravado scenes ever to have been captured in celluloid - and yet it's the chief reasons I watch this almost painfully cheesy movie every few years or so. That scene, indeed the entire film, is like a 1960's censors'-toned-down-for-macho-blue-language echo of men's pulp magazines, which usually bore full-color cover illustrations that depicted bosomy Nazi women whipping bare chested virile Yanks, or inscrutable sloe-eyed Japanese women bent on seducing square-jawed, and always Caucasian, G.I.s) of the 50's and 60's (see James Lileks's website for amusing samplings thereof). I might add that a man of Rooney's abbreviated stature may not have met the marines' minimum pre-WWII height requirement, which thus casts doubt on the script's revelation that his character is a "career" marine: all I know is that I've NEVER seen a Gunnery Sergeant so short as Rooney's - so diminutive is Rooney that the Thompson gun he brandishes nearly equals his gnomish height. Yet he gives a good effort despite the script's wince-provoking haplessness.Though the marines in the film speak the most lines, it's the Filipino actors (the ones playing Filipinos, not the ones badly playing Japanese) who achieve something like verisimilitude. Plainly, some of those actors, and many of the Filipino extras, retained vivid memories of their pitiless WWII subjugation and occupation by the Japanese.The storyline isn't worth recounting at all, except to say that it's nearly as improbable as that of 'The Guns Of Navarone' - but at least 'The Guns Of Navarone' profited from its nearly high-camp capacity to, again nearly, lampoon itself as it plays out. But 'Ambush Bay' neither has, nor attempts, any such wittiness, overt or underlying, and thus its worst, thoroughgoing flaw is that it takes itself much too seriously. The other inherent flaw is in the plot: the notion that a fixed minefield could have somehow defeated or deflected the massive 1944 U.S. invasion of the Philippines is beyond risible.At least the prop crew got all the personal weapons on both sides, and those "beach camouflage" (that's what the pattern was officially called) gyrene uniforms, right. We even see some Japanese troops toting and firing U.S. M1903 Springfield rifles: which is factual since the Japanese captured large numbers of these when they took the Philippine archipelago in 1942, along with considerable stocks of the proper ammunition for them.Hugh O'Brian - never a contender for acting awards - is stiff, stolid, and wooden almost to point of petrification, and it doesn't help his performance that he was given awful dialogue to try to speak convincingly; in a few instance in 'Ambush Bay,' though, it seems he would have been a perfect casting choice had Hollywood decided to adapt DC Comics' nigh-superhero Sergeant Rock character to the cinema. James Mitchum inherited precious little of his father's superb talent: here as Grenier he's just gawky, awkward, sorely unconvincing every time he recites a line; his only - and scant - saving grace here would seem to be appears to have been a natural, relaxed athleticism.On the whole, however, viewers knowledgeable about WWII history will find 'Ambush Bay' historically lacking; and anyone familiar with the canons of scriptwriting and production technique will find its flimsy plot, hackneyed dialogue, and ginsu special effects almost unendurable. But watch it for the Classic Cheesiness in that one Mickey Rooney suicidal bravado scene, for the lovely location photography, and for some serious and fairly impressive acting by the Filipino actors whose performances, one can't help construing, benefited from their having had their hearts in this story that purports to tell, at least obliquely, of the ordeal they endured and the feats of sacrifice and fortitude they achieved throughout Japan's WWII tyrannization of them and their islands.