From the director of Three Wishes for Cinderella, Václav Vorlíček’s Who Wants to Kill Jessie? is a delightfully demented, absurdist 1966 comic fantasy that is unlike anything else in the Czech New Wave - and presages the DC and Marvel comic-book franchises by several decades.
Co-written by Miloš Macourek (Happy End), Who Wants to Kill Jessie? is a deliriously off-the-wall gem. Exploding with ingenuity and wild ideas, and intertwining real and pop-fantasy worlds, the film audaciously subverts the fledgling superhero genre into a bold piece of political satire, and a daring defence of the unfettered imagination.