Wer will Jessie umbringen?

Part of a Czech film festival travelling around North America in 2003, WHO KILLED JESSI? (on screen title - WHO WANTS TO KILL JESSI?) is a charming SF Fantasy that is too little seen. Seek it out if you can.

Certainly, some of the "Eastern Bloc" humor of the piece is both dated and obscure for Western audiences, but this isn't the kind of turgid Pro-Communist tract that scare away many. No, JESSI was part of the brief Czech artistic freedom era that produced Milos Forman among others.

All that stated, JESSI stands as one of the most successful fusions of Comic Books and Cinema ever. Similar in some ways to THE PROJECTIONIST, JESSI is about a man's comic book dreams becoming a reality thru a serum invented by his wife. The heroine of the comic, JESSI, fleshed out (literally!) by the gorgeous Olga Schoberová (her looks alone should end all the jokes about babushkas named Olga!), is chased by two...uh...Terminators. The Terminators are comic book stereotypes - a "Superman" and a Cowboy.

Before Jane Fonda/BARBARELLA, Lynda Carter/WONDER WOMAN or the TV & Film trios of CHARLIE'S ANGELS - there was JESSI! Jessi looks great, wears the sexiest of clothes, eludes her would-be captors, and sports a super-strength pair of Gloves! Much charm and genuine wit develop as the trio of comic book characters invade the "real world" - complete with Comic Book Dialogue Balloons instead of actual speech! To give away too many particulars might spoil the fun of this brief 80 minute fantasy. There are the requisite mildly anti-government jibes (in particular, a police guard who doggedly guards his post - a sewer opening!), some disarmingly simple Special Effects and every Comic Book geek's fantasy ending.

A discovery waiting to happen!

I believe that Who Wants to Kill Jessie? may be the only Czechoslovakian comedy/sci-fi/fantasy film I've ever seen. Who am I kidding - of course it is. And to my surprise and delight, it's a winner. In the film, a research scientist, Dr Ruzenka Berankova, has developed a drug that can alter dreams. The unknown side effect is that the dreams can leave the subject's mind and end up in our reality. In this case, Ruzenka's husband, Dr Jindrich Beranek, has been dreaming about antigravity gloves that could help with a research problem he's been having. In his dream, however, the gloves are owned by a gorgeous blond woman, Jessie. In the dream, she's being chased by a Superman-like character and a cowboy who also want the gloves. Jindrich takes Ruzenka's drug and, viola, he wakes up to find Jessie in his bed with the two goons hot on her heels. Much hilarity ensues.

What an incredibly odd, absurd, and completely whacked-out film that somehow manages to work. This is screwball comedy at its finest. And unlike a lot of the other European comedies I've seen that I really can't stand, Who Wants to Kill Jessie? remains consistently funny from start to finish. The acting is much better than I expected. The married scientists at the center of things, played by Dana Medricka and Jiri Sovak, are very good. I'm not surprised to see that both had long careers. Jessie is played by Olga Schoberova. She fits the part of the dreamy (pun intended) Jessie perfectly. Finally, I appreciate the way the movie blends the comic-book style dreams with real life. I really got a kick out of the fact that the dream characters are silent, relying on speech clouds to get their thoughts across. The funny bit is the way the other characters interact with the speech clouds. Really clever stuff.

If I were a much smarter person, I'm sure I could write at length on the underlying anti-communist messages found in Who Wants to Kill Jessie? Because I'm not that smart, I'll just say that it wasn't lost on me. The idea that you can do what you want to someone, but you can't take away their dreams was loud and clear.

8/10

The Czech sci-fi comedy Who Wants to Kill Jessie is one of the most oddball, whimsical, original films I've seen in quite a while. It starts off with a brilliant yet seldom explored premise: What happens when fictional characters find themselves trapped in reality. It then proceeds to explore this idea in a most comical fashion, and to blend fantasy and reality in a way that is both seamless and jarring.

It all begins with an older married couple. The husband, a mechanical engineer, has become hooked on a comic serial which shares the name of this film. The wife, a neurologist, has developed a method of viewing and modifying a person's dreams, which unknown to her, also brings their dreams to life. When she hears her husband talking in his sleep about some 'Jessie', she promptly tries out her invention on him. And sure enough, they are soon joined not only by Jessie, but also the villains who have been pursuing her for the secrets to her inventions. Mayhem ensues as the living dreams chase each other across the city, the cops try to keep up, and the wife grows more and more jealous.

Who Wants to Kill Jessie gets high marks for the originality of its ideas, and even higher marks for how it explores them. For instance, the way the fictional characters continue to communicate in speech bubbles, leading one boy to reply "Sorry miss, I can't read." Or the way that when someone takes an uppercut, they take a ballistic trajectory over the nearest rooftop. You can tell that something's off with the jerky way they move, but that only makes it more cartoonish. And in the comic books, it doesn't matter how much destruction your battles leave, but in the real world, you put a hole in someone's bathroom wall and you're looking at a lawsuit.

Which brings up an interesting question: Can visions be held liable for damages, or are they the responsibility or the one who dreamed them? This and other questions are dealt with in the most ridiculous courtroom scene since Duck Soup. The scientists' attempts to figure out what to do with the figments are equally comic and unorthodox.

Not all of the laughs come from the fish-out-of-water paradigm either. The henpecked husband angle is played for all it's worth. And the wife's jealousy has ironic payoff when she finds the man of her dreams. The weak-willed, bribe taking prison guard is also good for a chuckle, and perhaps a subtle comment on the government. More direct is one doctor's comment about the party's potential uses for the dream modification technology. One thing about the Czechs; even when they're cracking you up, they know how to make a serious point.

One of the first "pop" 60s movies to appropriate comic-strip imagery (including dialogue balloons), "Who Killed Jessie?"--a ruse, since nobody kills her--is a buoyant, sometimes bawdy exercise in fantasy farce. Two dully married, middle-aged scientists create havoc when her experimental device releases figures from his dreams into the real world. Thus a musclebound superman, bodacious damsel-in-distress and laconic cowboy are suddenly running around Prague, wreaking havoc with their indestructible nature and archetypical fantasy behaviors. It's a hilarious novelty-a sci-fi screwball comedy.

One of the first movies to cleverly mingle pulp fiction characters with real life persona.Olga, looking specially naive and sexy, added a spicy flavour that would make it quite watchable 30 years later. Though it was usually shown at classical Czech movie festival, I guess by now it is listed among the long lost pictures of the past.I would give an arm to see it again today.