The Pink Panther Strikes Again

At a psychiatric hospital, former Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) is largely recovered from the murderous insanity that saw him repeatedly attempt to kill the thorn in his side, Inspector Jacques Clouseau. He is about to be released but Clouseau (Peter Sellers), who is now Chief Inspector and has arrived to speak on Dreyfus's behalf, comes to visit, and his clumsiness and repeated tendency towards accidents drive Dreyfus insane again. The opening credits begin with an animated Inspector Clouseau entering a cinema hall to watch a film. He is constantly beleaguered by the Pink Panther, however, and when the Panther appears on the screen impersonating various features (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Batman, King Kong, The Sound of Music, Dracula, Singin' in the Rain, and Steamboat Bill Jr.), the Inspector finally loses his temper and climbs into the screen to get him... ending up trapped inside. Soon thereafter, Dreyfus escapes from the asylum, intent on killing Clouseau. His first attempt involves planting a bomb whilst Clouseau destructively duels with his manservant Cato (Burt Kwouk), who is under orders, from Clouseau, to keep Clouseau alert by randomly attacking him. The bomb merely destroys Clouseau's apartment whilst Clouseau himself is unharmed, largely because Clouseau has been distracted by an inflatable costume and a telephone call by Dreyfus which was meant to keep him in place for the bombing. Cato, however, ends up in the hospital. Dreyfus sets his sights higher. Using his knowledge of the underworld, he enlists the help of an army of vicious criminals, kidnaps nuclear physicist Professor Hugo Fassbender (Richard Vernon) and the Professor's daughter Margo (Briony McRoberts), forcing the professor to build a "doomsday weapon" in return for his daughter's freedom. As Hugo Fassbender cannot bear to hear his daughter undergoing Dreyfus's torture (which consists of forcing her to listen to nails dragged across a blackboard), he agrees. Clouseau travels to England to investigate Fassbender's disappearance, with typically chaotic results, as Scotland Yard Section Director Alec Drummond (Colin Blakely) and Superintendent Quinlan (Leonard Rossiter) painfully learn. However, Clouseau manages to set his sights on Jarvis, the cross-dressing butler of the Fassbenders, and while Jarvis is killed by the kidnappers, to whom he had become a dangerous witness, Clouseau follows a clue found on the crime scene to the Oktoberfest in Germany. Meanwhile Dreyfus broadcasts himself to the world to announce his ultimatum. Disintegrating the United Nations headquarters in New York City before the disbelieving eyes of the world, he blackmails the leaders of the world, including the President of the United States (a thinly veiled impersonation of Gerald Ford, advised by a similarly poorly camouflaged Henry Kissinger), into assassinating Clouseau. Forced to take Dreyfus's threat seriously, several nations send assassins to kill Clouseau at the Oktoberfest. Many of the nations, however, instruct their assassins to kill other assassins if necessary in order to ensure that their own country can kill Clouseau and thus win Dreyfus's favor and possibly get hold of the Doomsday Machine themselves. This, combined with Clouseau's typical bumbling fashion, enables Clouseau to evade each assassination attempt just as it is about to happen, so that the assassins all kill each other instead. In the end, only the operatives of Egypt and Russia remain alive. The Egyptian assassin (an uncredited cameo by Omar Sharif), sneaking into Clouseau's hotel room, shoots a man he believes to be Clouseau (who is in fact one of Dreyfus's henchmen, who had taken it upon himself to kill Clouseau). The Russian operative, Olga Bariosova (Lesley-Anne Down), who has sneaked into Clouseau's room, seduces the Egyptian, similarly mistaking him for Clouseau. His passionate sexuality convinces her not to assassinate him; when the real Clouseau makes an appearance, he is surprised to discover a beautiful yet nude woman in his bed who confuses him further by declaring her undying passion for him, snogging him all over his face every few minutes in the process, and by finding a dead man in his bath. A tattoo on the dead man, combined with Olga's dismissively revealed knowledge, reveals to Clouseau Dreyfus's location at a castle in Bavaria. He leaves immediately leaving a confused and frustrated Olga behind him. Dreyfus is elated at Clouseau's apparent demise, but his joy is soured by a bad case of toothache. Clouseau, who has arrived in the village near Dreyfus's castle but has been denied entry into the castle by a mischievous drawbridge, eventually infiltrates Dreyfus's castle hideout disguised as a dentist, intoxicates Dreyfus (and himself) with Nitrous oxide, and pulls one of Dreyfus's healthy teeth. Realising the deception, Dreyfus orders Clouseau killed, but Clouseau escapes. Enraged, Dreyfus means to seek vengeance on the world by destroying England; as he prepares for this, Clouseau, who has been thrown into the castle's barnyard, is literally catapulted onto Dreyfus's doomsday machine. Clouseau's weight redirects the dis-integrator so that the beam hits Dreyfus (causing him to start to disintegrate, from the feet up) and the castle. As Dreyfus's henchmen, Fassbender, and his daughter, and eventually Clouseau himself escape the dissolving castle, Dreyfus plays "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" on the castle's pipe organ, while gradually disintegrating. The castle then disappears entirely, taking Dreyfus with it. Returning to Paris, Clouseau is reunited with Olga, who has dismissed Cato for the evening and intends on completing her seduction of Clouseau. This is interrupted first by Clouseau's apparent inability to remove his clothes without a struggle, and then by Cato, who chooses this time to once more follow his orders and attack Clouseau and Olga. The consequent struggle ends when all three are hurled by a reclining bed into the Seine. Immediately thereafter, a cartoon image of Clouseau emerges from the water, which has been tinted pink, and begins swimming, unaware that a gigantic version of the Pink Panther character is waiting below him with a sharp-toothed, open mouth (a reference to the film Jaws made obvious by the thematic music). The film ends when the animated Clouseau gets chased by the shark in the water (which was actually the pink panther) as the credits roll.