Who Wants to Kill Jessie?

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.

SWOOSH! ZOOM! THUD! CRASH! ROAR! RIP! No, not the opening credit sequence from a Batman film - but from "Who Wants to Kill Jessii ?" (released in 1966 - which would be a year Batman fans would recognize;) two years before the Prague Spring was crushed by Soviet tanks rumbling into Czechoslovakia. Books, films, and newspapers were able to get in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) digs at the establishment; science fiction has frequently provided a way to make social commentary which flies "beneath the radar" of censors, be they capitalist, communist, or socialist. But besides the sly jabs here and there - "Liberty to dreams!" - "Your identity card!" - "Can't she be re-educated?"(said: by a comic superhero; to a comic superhero; about a comic superhero) the film provides much amusement just on its own.

Rosie & Henry both work in a university setting. Rosie is a medical researcher doing research on dreams, presenting her KR VI injection as a way of changing nightmares into pleasant dreams. She demonstrates this with a sleeping cow - headphones attached, a monitor shows the cow's dream of being pursued by gadflies. After the injection, the cow is sleeping in a hammock, a string quartet playing for her. Her husband Henry is faced with the problem of securing an extremely heavy piece of machinery to an overhead rail in a university laboratory. He picks up a comic book one of his co-workers has brought in and muses how great it would be if he had the use of Jessii's anti-gravity gloves. The intersection of these story lines provides an abundance of humor and commentary.

Read no further if you want to save the surprises, although it's unlikely the 35mm scope print I saw from the Czech Film Archive will be making it to your town anytime soon and I don't think a video version is available.

Thursday seems to be the day of the week that the couple sleeps together. Henry is in a dream with Jessii - they are both bound and he's attempting to untie her with his teeth. Rosie sees him chewing his pillow in his sleep. She slips the dream monitor on him, sees Henry with Jessii and gives him an injection of KR VI and sends him to his separate bed. In the morning, much to his astonishment, the comic strip Jessii is alive and in his bed! And she is not the only character brought to life - the bad guys are in the bathroom.

Rosie has a feeling that her experiment has gone awry and locks the comic trio in their flat before she and Henry leave for work. Her colleagues tell her that gadlies have appeared in the lab, seemingly from abiogenesis - her serum seems to cause things in dreams to cross over into real life. At the husband's factory he and his co-workers attempt construction of the anti-gravity gloves. Both Henry & Rosie send a co-worker to their flat with instructions: Henry asks a female worker to bring back Jessii; Rosie tells her male coworker to get train tickets and send the comic characters "to Kookle".

But by the time they arrive at the flat, Jessii has escaped and the bad guys (a superman-like character and an old-west gunslinger) have broken through the wall of the flat in pursuit, crying "Liberty to dreams!". The police arrive about the same time as the coworkers (each of whom thinks the other is the one they are to bring) and take them into custody over their objections. Jessii tunes in her TV wristwatch to see Henry giving a lecture to a class at university about ideas from science fiction crossing over into reality. The classroom turns into bedlam after Jessii arrives with the strong man in pursuit.

Writer Milos Macourek has a lot of fun with comic book convention - those characters talk in "bubbles" of text. When one of them asks a young boy what time it is, the reply is "I can't read, sir." In a court appearance Jessii answers a question by telling Henry "I love you!" and he turns the "bubble" so the court recorder can read it. Henry is sentenced to jail for disruption of the peace. He uses the walls of his cell to do equations for the antigravity gloves.

Rosie and the authorities determine that the dream characters are dangerous. Rosie says "I've been charged with their liquidation." The strong man is bound and put on a conveyer belt into a crematorium to the strains of Sibelius. Just about the time they think the problem solved, the strong man appears out of the fire saying "Very refreshing - how much?" Those attempting to dispatch Jessii have similar difficulties. Tying her between two trucks pulling in opposite directions, the trucks only spin their wheels.

Henry manages to escape from jail and picks up the partially functioning gloves and uses them to rescue Jessii. They return through the cell bars (Henry pulls them apart with the help of the gloves to get back to his cell surruptitiously) and Jessii points out a mistake in his calculations.

Rosie has concocted a new serum, A VII, and finds an injection of this will cause a dream figure to be re-absorbed into a nearby subject. She injects a rabbit from a dream of their dog. It dematerializes and re-appears in the dog's dream on the monitor.

Rosie is giving the strong man a sponge bath (I forget exactly how this came to pass) and tells him "It's Thursday!" Apparently he knows what this means and escapes to inject himself with A VII. He dematerializes and also ends up in the dog's dream. Rosie, seeing this on the monitor, injects herself and follows. Henry and Jessii look at the monitor seeing the dog chasing the bunny and the wife chasing the man. Henry remarks that he'll never get away from her.

Henry teaches Jessii how to speak without the comic strip bubbles and apparently they live happily ever after.

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.

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

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!