''Attack Force Z'' (alternatively titled ''The Z Men'') is a 1982 Australian-Taiwanese

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

film directed by

Tim Burstall Timothy Burstall AM (20 April 1927 – 19 April 2004) was an English Australian film director, writer and producer, best known for hit Australian movie ''Alvin Purple'' (1973) and its sequel ''Alvin Rides Again''. Burstall's films featured ea ...

. It is loosely based on actual events and was filmed in

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

in 1979. It was screened at the

Cannes Film Festival The Cannes Festival (; french: link=no, Festival de Cannes), until 2003 called the International Film Festival (') and known in English as the Cannes Film Festival, is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films o ...

on 18 May 1981. The film is noted for starring

Mel Gibson Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson (born January 3, 1956) is an American actor, film director, and producer. He is best known for his action hero roles, particularly his breakout role as Max Rockatansky in the first three films of the post-apocaly ...

and

Sam Neill Sir Nigel John Dermot "Sam" Neill (born 14 September 1947) is a New Zealand actor. Neill's near-50 year career has included leading roles in both dramas and blockbusters. Considered an "international leading man", he has been regarded as one o ...

, who were relatively unknown in the US at the time but who went on to become international stars. The plot concerns Captain P.G. Kelly (Gibson), who leads a team from the elite

Z Special Unit Z Special Unit () was a joint Allied special forces unit formed during the Second World War to operate behind Japanese lines in South East Asia. Predominantly Australian, Z Special Unit was a specialist reconnaissance and sabotage unit that in ...

against the

Empire of Japan The also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was a historical nation-state and great power that existed from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 until the enactment of the post-World War II 1947 constitution and subsequent fo ...

during the Second World War. The film fictionalises the exploits of the Z Special Unit, which was also known as Z Force. It was a joint Australian, British and New Zealand commando unit. Its main brief was to conduct reconnaissance and sabotage missions throughout Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia.

Plot

In the Straits of Sembaleng, five men are dispatched by submarine in Klepper canoes to rescue survivors of a shot-down plane on a nearby island which is occupied by the

Imperial Japanese Army The was the official ground-based armed force of the Empire of Japan from 1868 to 1945. It was controlled by the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office and the Ministry of the Army, both of which were nominally subordinate to the Emperor o ...

. Led by Paul Kelly, an inexperienced commando officer, the team secretly lands on the island and hides their kayaks. As they venture in land, Ted 'Kingo' King is hit by fire from an unseen machine gun post, the team quickly eliminates the Japanese defenders and return to their wounded comrade. King has been hit on the leg, the bullet smashing his kneecap. King cannot be allowed to fall into enemy hands and compromise the mission under interrogation, and after sharing a cigarette with him, Costello shoots him. The four remaining men return to their search; coming across a rice farmer, they learn of the area in which the plane crashed. The rice farmer is also killed in order to preserve secrecy. But as they near their destination they spot a Japanese squad at a local house, after the Japanese leave, they enter the house and meet the local resistance leader Lin, his grown-up daughter Chien Hua and her younger brothers and sisters. With a guide to lead them, they head off to the plane but are attacked by Japanese soldiers at a Buddhist temple. Separated from the rest, interpreter Jan Veitch ends up returning to Lin's house where Chien Hua hides him from the returning Japanese. After the deaths of their soldiers, the Japanese officers Watanabe and Imanaka torture Chien to tell them the location of her father, who they believe is hiding the survivors of the crashed plane, but Chien Hua refuses. Lin's son Shaw Hu falsely tells the Japanese that Lin, the Z men, and the plane's survivors are heading for the island's capital. All the Japanese leave except for two soldiers guarding Chien Hua; Veitch kills both with help of Shaw Hu. Meanwhile, within sight of the plane, Kelly watches as locals blow up the wreckage. Lin is evasive, and after quizzing the inhabitants of a village, the team head on to the plane. Kelly manages to get Lin to tell them that the two survivors are being taken to his home, so they turn around and head back. In the capital, Veitch is led to the survivors. One of them is a defecting Japanese government official Imoguchi, and he is believed to hold a secret that could end the war faster. Only Kelly knows that he must be rescued at any cost - or killed. As the pieces of the puzzle begin to fall together, Kelly must persuade his own men that Imoguchi is worth rescuing and the local resistance that it is worth fighting against their Japanese enemies.

Cast

John Phillip Law John Phillip Law (September 7, 1937 – May 13, 2008) was an American film actor. Following a breakthrough role as a Russian sailor in ''The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming'' (1966), Law became best known for his roles as g ...

as Lieutenant J.A. (Jan) Veitch *

as Captain P.G. (Paul) Kelly *

as Sergeant D.J. (Danny) Costello *

Chris Haywood Chris Haywood (born ) is an English-born Australian actor, writer and producer, with close to 500 screen performances to his name. Haywood has also worked as a casting director, art director, sound recordist, camera operator, gaffer, grip, l ...

as Able Seaman A.D. 'Sparrer' Bird *

John Waters John Samuel Waters Jr. (born April 22, 1946) is an American filmmaker, writer, actor, and artist. He rose to fame in the early 1970s for his Cinema of Transgression, transgressive cult films, including ''Multiple Maniacs'' (1970), ''Pink Flamin ...

as Sub Lt. Ted 'Kingo' King * Ku Chun as Rice farmer *

Sylvia Chang Sylvia Chang (born 21 July 1953) is a Taiwanese actress, writer, singer, producer and director. In 1992, she was a member of the jury at the 42nd Berlin International Film Festival. In 2018, she was one of the jury members of the main competition ...

as Chien Hua * O Ti as Shaw Hu * Koo Chuan Hsiung as Lin Chan-Lang

Production

The script was based on a real-life commando rescue raid,

Operation Opossum Operation Opossum was a World War II raid undertaken by Australia's Z Special Unit in 1945 on the island of Ternate near Borneo to rescue the Sultan of Ternate, Muhammad Jabir Syah. Operation The island of Ternate had been occupied by Japan sinc ...

, where a team of commandos rescued the local sultan on the Japanese-held island of

Ternate Ternate is a city in the Indonesian province of North Maluku and an island in the Maluku Islands. It was the ''de facto'' provincial capital of North Maluku before Sofifi on the nearby coast of Halmahera became the capital in 2010. It is off the we ...

near Borneo.Sue Johnson, 'After 37 years and 10 beheadings, Operation Rimau Explodes Again', ''The Sydney Morning Herald'', 27 March 1982 p 41 The film was originally entitled ''The Z Men'' and was to be directed by

Phillip Noyce Phillip Noyce (born 29 April 1950) is an Australian filmmaker. Since 1977, he has directed over 19 feature films in various genres, including historical drama (''Newsfront'', ''Rabbit-Proof Fence'', ''The Quiet American''); thrillers (''Dead Cal ...

. Pre-production commenced in Taiwan where for six weeks Noyce worked on the script with writer Michael Cove. However, Noyce clashed with the producers - McCallum later claimed in particular that Noyce refused to use one of the Chinese actors who had been cast in a small roleJohn McCallum interview with Brian McFarlane, ''The Oxford Companion to Australian Film'', Oxford Uni Press, 1999 p 300 - and was fired the night before shooting was meant to start. He was replaced by

in November 1979.David Stratton, ''The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival'', Angus & Robertson, 1980 p39 & 213 Filming was further delayed by constant rain and re-writing of the script.David Stratton, ''The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry'', Pan MacMillan, 1990 p43 Among the changes made were adding a fifth character to the team - a soldier played by John Waters who would be killed within the opening ten minutes by one of their own men.Interview with Tim Burstall, 30 March 1998
accessed 14 October 2012 This film was based on the book 'The Night the Z Men Landed' written by Gene Janes under his pseudonym of several military books, Owen Gibson, in the 1960s and published by Calvert Publishing in Sydney. There was a legal dispute between the author and McCallum Productions over the screen rights. Janes took the production company to court holding up the release of the film and was finally awarded the rights in an out of court settlement.

Reception

''Attack Force Z'' was only released theatrically in Australia in Melbourne, where it took $88,000 at the box office, which is equivalent to $364,484 in 2022 dollars. After the film's release, Tim Burstall was quoted as saying:

It sold everywhere, sold all over the world, and it got its money back. And it did perform the task of getting some co-productions going with the East, which was useful and very important. But it's always awful when you take over from somebody else - and Phil is a friend - but he really wanted to do something quite different and I was regarded as much more of a whore, I suppose.

Mel Gibson later called the film "pretty woeful... it's so bad, it's funny.""Not just a pretty face in his new movie, Mel debuts as a director -- and puts the hunk on hold", Jay Carr, Globe Staff 22 August 1993 The Boston Globe BSTNGB City Edition B1 John McCallum later said he and Robinson wanted to make another film in Asia, about drug running in Thailand "starting from the poppies and the hill factories where they distil the damned stuff and send it down to Bangkok" but were not allowed to make it because of the dangers involved in filming in Thailand.

References

External links