I am a horror aficionado who is always open to seeking out a lost treasure or new discovery on my horror quest. I had heard this movie pop up a few times over the years in discussion and felt it was time to give it a shot. Truth be told, it took everything in me just to make it through to the end of this one.Let's start with the obvious statement that needs to be made, this is not really a horror movie, or a vampire movie. If you are going into this with the expectation of finding a drive-in or grindhouse flick from the 70s, this is not going to meet your expectations, at all.This movie is very much in the art-house realm, using the archetypes of vampire mythology to explore concepts of addiction, religion and cultural identity. That would be fine with me. I was a Lit student in college and enjoy an intelligent movie with themes to explore. The problem here is that's all this movie has to offer. It's essentially two hours of conversation between Ganja and Hess, intercut with softcore sex, an occasional post-kill death scene and an overwhelming amount of directorial masturbation meant to convey symbolism. I'm completely open to abstract film and the use of images to convey your symbolism, but you can achieve the same effect and still present an entertaining narrative. Even to have kept the same artistic flourishes, but to have actually explored the vampirism a little more in between might have produced a better film. Instead, the relief we get from the barrage of images is nothing more than conversation between two main characters. This, in itself, is a problem because of the odd dialog style employed here. The acting and dialog delivery often feels like a bad 60s documentary. It's like watching WOODSTOCK and listening to the drug-addled metaphysical ramblings of hippies, "you dig me man". The opening convo with Bill Gunn as the maniac assistant, or the scene of Ganja explaining her childhood. Nothing felt professional or even more, if often felt like they would trip over words on purpose, or struggle for the next thought. I eventually started feeling like everyone on the cast and crew was high and I was watching a film that probably amused them greatly but did nothing for me.I'm sure I'll get Not Helpfuls from the folks who assume that I'm just not intelligent or artistic enough to appreciate this "classic masterpiece", but this could have been done well, done intelligently and still created a much more entertaining film in the meantime. This is just dull and boring and make most wish for the two hours of their life back.

After being stabbed with a ceremonial dagger but finding himself unable to die, a man tries to control his insatiable blood-lust while keeping himself safe from his new wife who grows curious about his strange activities.This is a truly abysmal effort that has very little elements that are enjoyable and wasn't all that entertaining at all. The main thing with this is that nothing happens at all in here and it's an endless repeat of boring blather about nothing in particular or endless looping of an admittedly-catchy tribal song and not much else, as the film's barely-there plot unfolds in such a confusing, mystifying manner that there's almost no way to ensure what's going on at all. That just makes the film seem endlessly long and excruciatingly boring, since we don't have anything to really get a grasp on at all beyond the few decent moments of eroticism and sensuality present in their romance with each other. That mostly comes along during the final half which is where the few moments of enjoyment come from with the final revelation of the curse forcing this into some decent areas, but overall, this one just isn't all that worthwhile.Rated R: Graphic Violence, Language, Nudity, strong sexual content and drug use.

Ganja & Hess (1973)** 1/2 (out of 4) Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones) is stabbed with an ancient dagger, which transforms him into a vampire always in need of blood. After the suicide of his assistant, the man's wife Ganja (Marlene Clark) comes to the home and soon she and Hess have a strange relationship building. Legend has it that director Bill Gunn was hired to turn in a blaxploitation film like BLACULA but instead he came back to the producers with this bizarre, surreal art-house film and it pretty much destroyed his career. The studio cut the film down to 78-minutes to try and make it sell-able but I was able to see the uncut 110-minute version. This is a hard film to judge because there's no question that it comes up well short of being a good movie but at the same time you really have to respect Gunn for trying to do something artistic and not just deliver some sort of drive-in trash that would have played at four in the morning. Of course, by doing a picture like this its appeal is going to be very limited but even though the flaws I think there's quite a bit of stuff to enjoy here. There's no question that Gunn has created a wonderfully dark atmosphere. This can be seen from the opening shots to the closing one. Gunn, who also wrote the screenplay, wants to make sure you never fully understand what's going on. Bits of dialogue flow that seem to have nothing to do with the film. We get scenes shot so strangely that you're more focused on how they were shot instead of what's going on. We even get a few additional characters that pop into the story and other strange bits like a wedding scene and a drawn out sequence inside a church. If you're expecting blood and horror elements you're going to be disappointed because both of those things are very small and don't have much of an impact on the film. The visual look is something very impressive as the cinematography really adds to the atmosphere. The way the film is edited is another major plus. Then we have the two lead performances. It's somewhat shocking to see that this was Jones first film since the release of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD five years earlier. I always wondered if his wonderful performance in Romero's classic was just a fluke but after seeing this film it obviously wasn't and it's a real shame that he didn't appear in more movies. Jones is extremely good in the part of the haunted doctor and it's one of those performances that requires very little dialogue. You can tell what emotions the doctor is going through just by looking into the eyes of Jones. I was really surprised at how well he could play this haunted soul but he pulls it off. Clark is also extremely good in her part able to play the overbearing witch but also the alternate moments of her character. GANJA & HESS is a really odd little movie and it's not going to appeal to most but if you enjoy weird and different bits of work then you might find it interesting.

Bill Gunn was paid to make Blacksploitation movie, basically a knock off Blacula and instead made an insanely ambitious, lyrical, high art film called "Ganja And Hess", which happened to have an all black cast and involve vampires, though the v-word is never mentioned.One of the defining criterion of Blacksploitation cinema; a black cast working with white writers, directors and producers is absent in G&H. Bill Gunn wrote, directed, and stared in the film, where there are no white characters present anywhere at all (accept briefly in Hess' dreams/visions), eliminating the usual reference to "the man" as villain and planting the discussion singularly in the black community.There is nothing exploitative about any of this, it just happens to be a movie with a low-budget. In fact I think it's the best and most complex film about African American Christianity I've ever seen. Ganja and Hess is not that simple, to say it's spiritual on one hand or a critique on the other, is a matter of whether you prefer Ganja or Hess.Hess (Duane Johnson of Romero's original Night of the Living Dead) is a wealthy anthropologist studying the ancient Mythria tribe in Africa who takes on a new assistant named George (played by Gunn), who begins to appear more and more manic.Hess stops George's first suicide attempt, but George later inexplicably attacks him stabbing him with an ancient knife Hess keeps as a kind of tribal art on his bed stand. George then bathes ritualistically and commits suicide on his knees, naked with a gun shot to the chest.Hess quickly adjusts to his new thirst which is cued by an echoing African chanting and images of tribal ceremonies in a field.Hess drinks blood from a glass, an image later echoed in Abel Ferrara's "The Addiction", a similarly complex religious vampire film (and to think, Anne Rice said she couldn't write both at the same time). Ganja is George's wife fresh from Amsterdam, who knows his "crazy" tendencies, and asks to stay at Hess' home to wait for his return. Ganja is confident and direct where Hess is cool and coy. Ganja berates and insults Hess' butler Archie, only after implying Hess treats him coldly and impersonally. She gages his reaction and when she see's he isn't concerned proceeds to dominate Archie, and subsequently positioning herself as mistress of the house.The couple marry, and Hess seems genuinely in love, while Ganja is genuinely in love with her new position, and not in the least bothered by her belief that Hess killed George for some reason which to her doesn't need explaining. He loves her so much they have their second wedding as he sire's her with the Myrthrian dagger used on him.This scene is as ritualistic as the Church wedding that came before, only now Hess pronounces they will be free of guilt, fear, and sin before knifing her. The sex scenes recalls Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, consisting of ambiguous body close ups and glistening sweat, only at the end of Gunn's scene, when the lights come on, the sweat is revealed to be blood.Hess attends Wayman's church, perhaps put off by Ganja's sleeping with another man, or insisting that he was not dead when they took his body to the field, and in any event, experiences a religious awakening of his own in silent movements across his face like Dryer's "Passion of Joan of Arc".This complicates what had been a simple binary of African ritual/savagery/hedonism to Christian/restraint/morality/love. This binary is further complicated when Hess allows himself to starve to death sitting in the shadow of a cross, and the scene is juxtaposed with a flash black of George killing himself. "The cross is only an instrument of torture; it's the shadow of the cross that creates its meaning. Shadows conquer everything.", says Hess to Ganja during one of their chats.Neither is above reproach for Gunn though, one may be liberating to fault when over-indulgence becomes neurosis and eternal youth resembles eternal adolescence (George's character) while the other may only be repression of cultural traditions, class relations which amounts to ennui and stagnation.I don't think Gunn wants us to pick a side, the film is called Ganja and Hess after all, and neither one's self sacrificing nor the others self absorption seems definitive. "I feel like both a murderer and a victim" George says early on. The rest of the movie plays on this contradictory impasse; the horror of the film comes from the philosophical ambiguity resembling a visually driven "No Exit".Gunn is speaking directly to a black audience, his intended and studio mandated demographic, and though his themes are philosophically universal, they speak specifically to a newly radicalized post-Civil Rights black audience budding between calls for socially conscious realist Nationalism and Black Christian moralism; Hess and Ganja respectively.The images of the field become a place of burial (corpses) and of things past returning (the procession of the ancient tribe). The music by Wayman predicts Animal Collective's droned out psychedelic African tribal chants by thirty years. The rest of the score is upbeat 70's pop, soul, and gospel, all styles that cascade together in the church scene, when the non-digetic music, is reveled as the church band, and a principle structuring element for much of the editing.Ganja and Hess is at minimum a marginalized if not completely forgotten masterpiece of American cinema. It got a standing ovation at Cannes (where it was the only American film entered that year), and ensured no American producer would work with Bill Gunn on a theatrical film ever again. Bill Gunn's corpse is still locked in the cultural cellar, discovered from time to time, but easily (and tragically) ignored in favor of more profitable ventures.