Charles Dreyfus escapes from the mental asylum and tries to kill Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau. He doesn't succeed at first, so he takes on another strategy, namely to build a Doomsday machine and demand that someone else kills Jacques Clouseau, or Dreyfus will use the machine to wipe out whole cities and even whole countries... With about 22 assassins from all over the globe on his tail, Clouseau decides to find Dreyfus alone and put him back in the mental asylum.
—Lars J. Aas



Charles Dreyfuss, the Chief Inspector of the Surete and superior of Inspector Clouseau was last seen in the previous movie, suffering a breakdown cause of Clouseau's torment. He decides to try and kill him but fails and was last seen confined to a mental asylum. This movie begins three years later, Dreyfuss' doctors think is well enough to be released but before he is, Clouseau visits him and agitates him into killing him, so he's not released. But he escapes and tries to kill Clouseau but fails. He then decides to recruit some of the best criminals in the world, and then kidnaps a noted English scientist and creates a device that can destroy the world. After using it, his only demand is Clouseau. So every country in the world sends their best assassin to kill him but fail. And Clouseau tries to find Dreyfuss before he does any more damage.
—rcs0411@yahoo.com



Now seriously mentally ill after working with Clouseau for such a long time, Inspector Dreyfus escapes from the mental asylum he was being held in and vows to destroy Clouseau forever. He kidnaps an eminent scientist and forces him to build a machine capable of destroying the world, with the intention of doing so unless Clouseau is delivered to him. Meanwhile oblivious to the danger he faces, Jacques Clouseau is currently only worried about not letting his manservant, Cato, get the better of him...
—Graeme Roy



Former Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus is nearly set to be released from a mental hospital after being cleared. However, a visit from current Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau resurrects his insanity, and he is denied leaving. Determined to take out Clouseau once and for all, he escapes and blows up Clouseau's apartment, but fails to kill Clouseau. As a back-up plan, he abducts a famous scientist in order to build a Doomsday Machine which vaporizes whatever it shoots. Dreyfus threatens to use it unless Clouseau is exterminated, so reluctantly, 26 countries send their top assassin to kill the Chief Inspector. His clumsiness saves him again, and the assassin's attempts kill each other. In a conquest to save the world, Clouseau heads out to put an end to Dreyfus's terror once and for all.
—Anonymous



Charles Dreyfus, who has finally cracked over inspector Clouseau's antics, escapes from a mental institution and launches an elaborate plan to get rid of Clouseau once and for all.
—jgp3553@yahoo.com





SYNOPSIS

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 (from the previous Pink Panther films, A Shot in the Dark, and Return of the Pink Panther). 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 proneness to accidents drive Dreyfus insane again.

Soon thereafter, Dreyfus escapes from the asylum, intent on killing Clouseau, who apparently had become a deranged good-cop-gone-bad. His first attempt involves planting a bomb under Clouseau's apartment whilst Clouseau destructively duels with his manservant Cato (Burt Kwouk), who is under orders 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. Cato ends up in the hospital.

Using his knowledge of the underworld, Dreyfus frees Anthony Tournier (John Sullivan), a bank robber Clouseau had recently arrested, from prison. Other criminals with a grudge against Clouseau flock under their banner. His next step is to kidnap 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. Because Hugo Fassbender fears to have his daughter harmed, 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. Meanwhile Dreyfus broadcasts himself to the world to announce his ultimatum: destroy Clouseau or he will destroy mankind. 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 in Germany (whose antics include two accidentally shooting each other in bathroom stalls and one shooting another and then getting shot). Many of the nations, however, instruct their assassins to kill other assassins if necessary in order to win Dreyfus's favor and possibly get hold of the Doomsday Machine. 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. The assassins of 26 nations are killed in the attempt, so that the only survivors are the Egyptian (an uncredited cameo by Omar Sharif) and a Soviet Union operative. The Egyptian assassin, sneaking into Clouseau's hotel room, shoots a man he believes to be Clouseau (who is in fact Tournier, 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 woman in his bed who confuses him further by declaring her undying passion for him, and by finding a dead man in his bath. A tattoo on Tournier, combined with Olga's dismissively revealed knowledge, reveals to Clouseau Dreyfus's location at a castle in Bavaria, Germany.

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 and has unsuccessfully attempted to breach the castle, thwarted every time by a drawbridge that appears to be mocking him, eventually infiltrates Dreyfus's castle hideout disguised as a dentist, intoxicates Dreyfus with nitrous oxide, and pulls one of Dreyfus's healthy teeth. Realizing the deception and laughing hysterically, 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 disintegrator so that the beam hits Dreyfus (causing his feet to disappear) and Dreyfus's castle. As Dreyfus's henchmen, Fassbender, and his daughter, and eventually Clouseau himself escape the dissolving castle (Clouseau nearly thwarted by the drawbridge), Dreyfus himself plays "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" on the castle's pipe organ, laughing insanely and gradually disintegrating. The castle then disappears entirely, taking Dreyfus with it and destroying him once and for all (or so it seems).

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.