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The Pink Panther Strikes Again Movie Review

The Pink Panther Strikes Again is a 1976 film directed by Blake Edwards and starring Peter Sellers. It’s such a funny, underappreciated flick.

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“That is not my dog“

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Charles Dreyfus is scheming to kill Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau. He threatens to destroy everything if Clouseau is not killed. This is the only movie in the franchise that actually tried to connect the previous movie to the sequel and they did that fairly successfully. Charles Dreyfus has been driven so mad here that he is utterly insane to the point that he basically became a full-on cartoon/comic book villain.

While the predecessors all had their fair share of cartoony elements, this is the point in the franchise where they turned into a full, legitimate live-action cartoon. Naturally, that isn’t appealing to some, but to me it was delightful as I love childlike cartoons and movies that emphasize that youthful spirit. This one is so incredibly charming and unlike anything that I have seen in recent memory when it comes to the endearment factor.

Clouseau is extremely idiotic and incredibly lucky, much more so than he was even before. The result is a hilarious variety of scenes where he evades death in the increasingly convenient circumstances. The performance from Peter Sellers is one of his best. His facial expressions are golden as is his ridiculous French accent.

Herbert Lom is phenomenal and his unhinged turn here is truly hilarious. The best scene is the pulling of the tooth one as it was so perfectly executed in its entirety. That entire castle was just incredibly memorable in interiors and that exterior canal while the effects in this movie are quite advanced and expensive for the mid seventies.

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The Pink Panther Strikes Again is also very funny in the scenes with Cato who has become an indispensable part of this ensemble. With that being said, it was odd to me that Omar Shariff got such a small role and the female character is also underutilized. The flick is ridiculous, don’t get me wrong, but the fact of the matter is that its slapstick is ingenious and the cartoony elements, though progressively comic-booky and over-the-top, are undeniably charming in their childlike goofiness that I totally surrendered to its charms.