Feb 18, 2018
Today’s movie is “Ganja & Hess”, the experimental horror film from Bill Gunn, and starring Duane Jones as Dr. Hess Green and Marlene Clark as Ganja. The film was well received at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, considered one of the top ten American films of the decade, but suffered at the box office. The film was re-edited and re-released as “Blood Couple”, and remade by Spike Lee in 2014 as “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus”.
Bill Gunn was an American playwright, novelist, actor and film director, most active beginning in 1959 until his untimely death in 1989, just before his play “The Forbidden City” was set to premiere. Kelly-Jordan Enterprises approached Gunn with a $350,000 budget to create a black vampire film, receiving a great deal of creative control. The result is a very experimental horror film that uses vampirism as a metaphor for addiction, along with a very biting, somewhat offensive take on a host of ideas.
The film follows Dr. Hess Green, a wealthy black anthropologist who is studying an ancient African nation of blood drinkers known as the Myrthians. One night, his new assistant, George Meda (Bill Gunn), stabs Hess with a cursed dagger that turns Hess into a vampire. Six months later, George’s wife Ganja arrives looking for her husband and falling in love with Hess, eventually becoming a vampire as well, before suffering the horror of the life that is entailed.
I really wish Gunn had a larger budget and today’s technology when creating this film. The film quality is so poor that it distracts from the often too heady story. I definitely appreciated the experimental film and sound editing, while groundbreaking at the time, could be so much better produced with today’s tools. Duane Jones turns in a muted performance, drastically different from his role as Ben in “Night of the Living Dead”. Marlene Clark, by contrast, has a more emotive performance.
“Ganja & Hess” is definitely not for all audiences. Its experimental nature will turn off a lot of viewers, if themes like black assimilation and the hypocrisy of organized religion don’t do that first. And yet, compared to other vampire films, this one feels a lot more real and definitely a more woke take on the genre, one of the first to treat horror with artistic care, and well before many other attempts to use vampirism as a metaphor instead of a storytelling element.
Rotten Tomatoes: 83%
Metacritic: NR
One Movie Punch: 6.4/10
“Ganja & Hess” is rated R and is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.