Ganja and Hess (1973)

Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones) is a renowned archaeologist who has been investigating the ancient Myrthian culture of Africa. To help with his research he is paired with a new assistant, actor George (Bill Gunn). George, however, turns out to be a mite unstable. After a failed suicide attempt earlier in the night, George stabs Hess with a Myrthian dagger and then shoots himself.

Only problem is, germs have clung to the dagger to the current day, and the microbes bring Hess back to life - with a craving for human blood. He attempts to maintain appearances while his butler Archie (Leonard Jackson) looks after his affairs. Things become even more complicated when George's wife Ganja (Marlene Clark) arrives looking for her husband. Hess decides to keep the suicide a secret as he and Ganja gradually fall for each other.

Ganja, though, turns out to be a complicated woman. Having suffered through a rough childhood, she has a possessive streak, but a tendency to be restless. Hess, however, wants her to be his forever, so he stabs her with the dagger, making her the same as him. She is not pleased in her new state, especially after finding out that Hess has been keeping her husband's death a secret. She quickly begins looking for a way out of her predicament.

That way is found by studying the ancient legends of Myrthia, which tell that the population suffered heavily from the affliction and only overcame it by severe religious epiphany. Hess decides this is the way to go, and Ganja agrees. However, she may have some ulterior motives of her own.

I expected Ganja and Hess to be similar to Blacula. In truth, an edited version called Black Vampire was released on the blaxploitation market, re-editing the movie and making it into a choppy gorefest. I have not seen it, but I'm sure it is much worse than the full version, which until recently had not been seen since the film won an award at Cannes.

Personally, I did not care for the film even in its true form. Bill Gunn is a great director and much of the filming is beautiful, and it is great to see Duane Jones (who you will remember as the lead in Night of the Living Dead) in another role. Jones does a fine job, as does Marlene Clark. The problem is the glacial pacing of most of the film, and a tendency by Gunn to try to be too artsy, which instead reminds me of an amateur film school project.

There are a number of deeper issues running through the film, but as removed from the time period as I am, most of them do not connect beyond the obvious religious allegories. It does give a hint that many of the directors sending b-movie material to grindhouse cinemas did have some bigger ideas brewing, and African-American cinema may have evolved quite differently if the backlash against blaxploitation had not been so harsh.

Ganja and Hess (1973)
Duration: 110 minutes
Starring: Duane Jones, Marlene Clark, Bill Gunn
Director: Bill Gunn

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's...
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in...
Read more