Housewife Rosemary Edmonds leaves her family to take up residence in a remote cottage on the Otago coastline so that she can conduct a photographic essay on the yellow-eyed penguin. No sooner has she moved in than she becomes the victim of a series of increasingly more malevolent attacks from an unknown assailant.

The film tells the story of Chinese guerrillas fighting for the Allied cause in Burma during Early in World War II, Chungking schoolteacher Lin Yang is recruited to help with the dangerous mission of protecting the Allied supply line from Burma into China. In spite of the danger involved, her determination to help is strengthened when one of her young students is killed in a Japanese air raid. Some time later, she is part of a group of Allied representatives departing from Lashio, on a bus traveling the Burma Road back to China. A bridge outage forces them to spend the night in a monastery along the way, and during the night they watch in horror as a supply convoy of trucks is bombed by Japanese planes. The timing and accuracy of the raid brings them to realize that either one of their group, or perhaps the priest in the monastery, is really an enemy agent

Everyone is chasing a little wooden dog. Old and young, they all think it contains an elixir of life. Miranda, a manic cosmetics tycoon, thinks it's worth millions. A mob of old folk led by a pair of deranged doctors is convinced it contains the secret of eternal youth.