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| A dark and ominous poster for Bill Gunn's Ganja & Hess |
An anthropologist doctor gets infected with a horrific disease, which gets him to crave blood. A strong-willed woman turns to him in a search for her husband, whom he has sucked dry. Now the two become an item.
Ganja & Hess is written and directed by Bill Gunn (Stop! (1970)).
Psychedelic and very 1970s independent film, which is hard to categorize but despite this, not very exciting. The man, who later perishes, gives a kind of interview to us, and so does the woman later on, and she is pretty affecting in her portrayal of life. The love scenes bridge into church scenes with wild percussion and spacey manipulations of sound.
Ganja & Hess is a highly symbolic and possibly political film, but what it says remains too intangible for my taste. It is mostly a mystifying film.
Listen to a song from the film's soundtrack here
Cost: 350k $
Box office: Unknown
= Uncertain
[Ganja & Hess premiered 20 July (New York) and runs 110 minutes. Gunn was hired to do a "black vampire movie", but later confided to a friend; "the last thing I wanted to do was make a black vampire movie". He instead envisioned vampirism as a metaphor for addiction. Shooting took place around March 1970 in New York. Unhappy with the unconventional film and its small box office earnings, the producers sold it on to Heritage Pictures, who cut it down to 78 minutes and released it as Blood Couple. Details of the two releases are regrettably not available. Spike Lee remade the film as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014). Gunn returned with Personal Problems (1980). Duane Jones (Night of the Living Dead (1968)) returned in Losing Ground (1982); Marlene Clark (The Landlord (1970)) in Enter the Dragon (1973). 1,726 IMDb users have given Ganja & Hess a 6.2/10 average rating.]
What do you think of Ganja & Hess?
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