Requiem for a Killer

The deadliest hit-man in Europe is actually a woman and sings contralto. The toughest secret agent detailed to stop her is a guitar virtuoso. If you can swallow that and watch the rest of it as a straight thriller, you have a mental age of four. Tops.

In fact, this is a hilarious send-up of three different genres all at once: Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse thriller, Agatha Christie whodunnit and Italian giallo. Perhaps the director (quite rightly) doubted that the producers would allow him to make three different films in this vein, so he lumped all three together. Which I suppose makes the whole even funnier.

The script goes out of its way to invent the most bizarre situations and then sabotage them in the most outlandish ways possible. Witness the outrageous murder method employed in the opening sequence, or the episode where the killer uses poison to fulfill her contract, only to realise she is a breath away from having a mass murder on her CV. All characters behave like children in a playground sand pit, set to gorgeous strands of Handel's Messiah. And the film looks ravishing, too, in the best 70s fashion, both outdoors and in.

Bound to be a flop at the box-office (way, way too tongue-in-cheek for the popcorn-munching crowd), but should become a cult classic if there's any justice in this world.