Helm is sent to the ICE (Intelligence and Counter Espionage) Training Headquarters to uncover a traitor in the organisation. While there he meets ICE agent Sheila Sommers, a test pilot who has been recovered from a Central American jungle with no memory of what happened to the experimental flying saucer she flew. Due to the electro-magnetic power of the saucer, only a woman is able to fly it, as males of the species are killed by the energy. Helm had worked with Sommers on an assignment where the two had posed as man and wife. When Sommers meets Helm, her memory comes back. Mac, the head of ICE, decides to send Helm and Sommers (posing again as his wife) undercover as a photographer doing a story on the Montezuma Beer Brewery, whose advertising jingle is the same tune as the anthem of Ortega's political movement. Along the way, they must deal with Ortega's henchmen, Francesca Madeiros (an operative for Big O, Helm's main nemesis), who poses as a
model and seduces Helm, an
assassin named Nassim and a tough thug named Rocco.
Sparkler guns are the gimmick weapons used to levitate objects, weapons and people.
Themes The film was the third of four produced in the late 1960s starring Martin as secret agent
Matt Helm. It followed
The Silencers and ''
Murderers' Row'' and like those earlier films followed the approach of being a
spoof of the
James Bond film series rather than a straight adaptation of Hamilton's novel. It was followed by one more,
The Wrecking Crew in 1969.
The Ambushers features a scene similar to one in the later James Bond film
Live and Let Die (1973), in which one of the hero's love interests is stripped of her clothes by way of a magnetic gadget. This film also boasts a very early onscreen appearance of a rudimentary
powered exoskeleton to lift and throw heavy beer kegs. ==Cast==