Synopsis
Some Marriages Are Made In Heaven. Others Are Made In Hell.
After being stabbed with an ancient, germ-infested knife, a doctor finds himself with an insatiable desire for blood.
Ganja & Hess
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Alternative Titles
Blood Couple, Black Vampire, Double Possession, Ganja and Hess
Popular reviews
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Vampirism as an ingeniously acid-angry rebuke to black assimilation, drinking a "savior's" blood as an act of self-preservation and of coercion. Visually rough but nevertheless a drone of disfigured reflections, body-obscuring superimpositions, and blurred focus. Even the slapdash ADR dialogue contributes to the derangement, as if Gunn himself felt (rightly, it would transpire) that his art was as out of his control as an entire people's selves were out of their own.
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Watching the restored version of this film was like watching the film for the first time. Another film that I forgot was so experimental in style. Fantastic end credit sequence. So sad that Duane Jones passed away at such a young age.
Watched on the big screen at The Cinematheque - Vancouver
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Underground experimental arthouse loaded with allegory and fractured storytelling. Evasive, passionate, and beautiful.
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dracula sits high up on a hill, alone in his castle
somehow this manages to be one of the truest vampire stories i've ever watched. the secret to why we continue to be obsessed with them has nothing to do with the glamour or the danger. the truth is that vampires are the most human of all ghouls. they drink blood not to be cruel but because that is what they need to survive. they are ruled by the same two base instincts humans have, hunger and thirst. they couldn't stop even if they wanted to.
all the ingredients to a good vampire story are here... but skewed and twisted and re-arranged enough to feel fresh. instead of a gothic…
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CW: blood/violence
Infected with a predator's disease, every kill comes with massive distortion (and even quiet moments scan be Dutch angled and dissonantly soundtracked). He does not seek salvation; he seeks first survival and then release. He embraces and rejects the poison at once; the cure is not a cure at all. He is infected with something ancient; something that serves as an infection on its own merits is the counter-balancing force. It is not a cure, but just a path to death. The cycle repeats, borne forward through love, so many possible metaphors alive within the fractured narrative (assimilation, erasure, actual disease). Unnerving orange blood and sweaty locales and crime-story grit make it not as much a Western vampire story as a reclaimed vampire story.
February count: 22/28
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"And he's an addict. He's not a criminal. He's a victim."
For all intents and purposes Ganja & Hess marked the directorial debut of celebrated writer/actor Bill Gunn (his previous film Stop was permanently shelved by Warner Brothers after receiving a preliminary "X" rating), who would sadly have only one other opportunity to direct nearly a decade later.
As is euphoniously explained in the bizarre musical exposition dump (by Nina Simone's brother Sam Waymon—who also features as a Holy Roller reverend with a sideline as the protagonist's chauffeur) that opens the film, Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones of Night of the Living Dead renown) is a prosperous but withdrawn Black anthropologist studying an ancient group of African blood drinkers known as…
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Vampirism as addiction and as a means of self-preservation, living off the veins of the lower class in a mansion filled with priceless African relics and Nina Simone records. I'm not the biggest fan of vampire stories, but I love just how malleable the lore is, allowing for both endless straight adaptations of Dracula, as well as singular works like Martin, Female Vampire, and, well, this. Bill Gunn's film looks and feels like an LA Rebellion take on those latter two, his socioeconomic and religious subtext as strong as the blown-out grain on the 16mm blow-up photography. This almost exists on the threshold between a dream and a nightmare, obfuscating the narrative by stripping it of its connective tissue and…
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SHOCKtober Day 8 of 31
When bourgeoning production company Kelly/Jordan Enterprises tapped playwright and stage director Bill Gunn to conceptualize and direct a low-budget film about a black Dracula, they were hoping for a profitable blaxploitation horror but instead were faced with an experimental allegory on vampirism as it relates to addiction within the Black experience. Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess is rife with cryptic visual doublings and juxtapositions that do little to explicate the themes of identity, assimilation and craving addressed within the film, rather they serve as a bounty of allusions for one to ponder after the credits roll.
The narrative proper is prefaced with three variations on a synopsis: delivered in a written introduction of lore, sung…
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I am absolutely convinced that there are so many masterpieces out there that remain underseen and underrated due to a multitude of factors: either they never account a large following and only remain a niche film for specific audiences, they're genre films that don't get evaluated by all types of audiences, they're challenging and would be unappealing to most audiences, or they feature and are made for minority audiences and get ignored by white audiences.
Ganja & Hess has the unfortunate situation of fitting into all of the above categories, an arthouse genre-film centered around Black vampires but also one of the greatest masterpieces of American cinema I've ever seen. It's a work that tackles race, assimilation, religion, minority-on-minority violence, diaspora,…
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"What is there to know about Ganja" -Ganja,
- Complex Top 50 Blaxploitation: boxd.it/1w5pa
- Daily Horror Hunt 15: boxd.it/3JrCO
Clue 20: Watch a blaxploitation horror film.Any servant that doesn't know what grits are needs to get the fuck out of my mansion I'll tell you that.
I wanted to like this but I don't understand it and I don't understand why people like it. I'm dumb. This movie makes me feel dumb. I don't think people are faking liking this movie and some parts are beautiful and interesting BUT, I also mostly found it boring and unapproachable and just wanted it to end so I could make some grits.
This movie reminded me I like grits so I'm forever grateful but otherwise I don't recommend.
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*mild thematic spoilers*
One can tell a lot about a film by its protagonist’s name, yet I cannot think of a film in which a simple name can summarise the work’s themes as efficiently as in ‘Ganja & Hess.’ Our lead character’s name, Hess Green at first may sound like just another funky name coined for a simple blacksploitation film, but this is no ordinary work of the genre, everything here is deliberate, thoughtful, subtle and highly metaphorical, and the same goes for the titular names. Hess is a German surname coined for people with roots from a state in the country called Hesse, whilst the Green in the name most likely refers to the African grasslands, and that contrast probably… -
Not only one of the best films from the early Blaxploitation days but feels very much as the model to all later art vampire films from Martin and The Hunger to the more recent Albert Serra and Jim Jamursch ones. Gunn is less interest in using vampirism as metaphor than let condition set a specific worldview and a series of decadent romantic gestures. It is unlike any other black American film of the period and in its own way every bit as confrontational as Van Peebles work. Nice to see Night of the Living Dead’s Duane Jones getting another lead role.