Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Derry Herrera Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

preppy-3 Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones) is stabbed four times with an infected knife. It doesn't kill him but leaves him with an insatiable taste for blood. He meets beautiful and strong Ganja (Marlene Clark) and falls in love with her. But can he love a woman with his blood lust? A disastrous, boring and just dreadful attempt to make an art horror film. I was "lucky" enough to see the 110 minute uncut version. I had trouble making it through! The film was made on a very low budget so it looks pretty bad. It also is constantly throwing African music and images in the viewers face (that's where Hess got infected). It's (somewhat) interesting at first but leads to nothing. The sound recording is muddled and the camera-work is so off that I couldn't figure out what I was watching at times. Conversations go on endlessly with no rhyme or reason. Most of them have nothing to do with the plot! This moves VERY slowly and the constant cutting to imagery and African music quickly gets annoying.Acting is no help. Jones (so good in "Night of the Living Dead") is terrible here. He takes forever just to finish one sentence and acts like he's on drugs most of the time. Clark plays Ganja as a foul-mouthed obnoxious woman. I couldn't stand her at all and couldn't figure out WHY Hess loved her! Director Bill Gunn complained that people didn't "get" what he was doing with this film. All he was doing was trying to mix two genres--horror and art--together and it never works. Most importantly this is never once scary or creepy. A sleep-inducing mess not worth your time. Ignore all the critics who are raving about it. They just see a film with virtually no plot and tons of pointless imagery and immediately decide it's an art film and a masterpiece. You know what? It isn't.

lastliberal There are others that can talk about the symbolism in this film much better than I can. It was made for Black audiences, and I certainly won't try to describe what director Bill Gunn was trying to say.This film effectively ended Bill Gunn's short career. He was supposed to make a Blaxploitation film like Blacula. He failed his producers by making an art film, which they chopped up and released under another name. This is the fully restored film with an amazingly beautiful score by Sam Waymon.If you are looking for horror or blaxploitation, you came to the wrong place. This film was shown at Cannes - the only American entry that year - and received a standing ovation.

ferbs54 To be perfectly honest, the first time I watched Bill Gunn's 1973 art-house horror movie, "Ganja and Hess," it left me quite cold and even managed to put me to sleep. I felt that the film was unbearably slow moving, featured unsympathetic characters, suffered from lackadaisical direction and mumbled line readings, contained numerous scenes that petered out listlessly and meaninglessly, and concluded with an excruciatingly protracted gospel finale. During a repeat viewing, however, to ascertain whether this film, which I'd loooong wanted to see, was really that bad--and with not so much lowered as altered expectations--I realized that the picture, despite its previously mentioned faults, does contain many fine qualities. In it, we meet Dr. Hess Green, an anthropologist who is stabbed by his unbalanced assistant with a knife from the fabled land of Myrthia and becomes a blood addict (the "v" word is never mentioned in this film), just as likely to sip his beverage of choice from a cut-glass decanter as to lap it up from a dirty floor. He takes up with the wife of his attacker, a beautiful though obnoxious woman named Ganja Meda, in a very unusual romance indeed. Duane Jones, the hero of 1968's seminal "Night of the Living Dead," is excellent and charismatic here as the bearded Dr. Green, and Marlene Clark does well in her difficult role. The film makes great use of an African chant that weaves through Hess' consciousness when he is, uh, thirsty, and its lethargic pace struck me, on a second viewing, as not so much glacial as dreamlike. This is a picture that almost demands and requires a second look to appreciate all its subtleties and various symbolic allusions. Put aside your expectations of fangs and capes and bats and you may find yourself really getting immersed in Hess Green's nightmare. This picture turns out to be not nearly as anemic as I initially thought!

InjunNose I've never seen the full, unexpurgated version of "Ganja and Hess" as director Bill Gunn intended it to be viewed. However, since a handful of other reviewers have mentioned the little-seen edited version, I thought I'd offer my thoughts on it. I remember when Duane Jones's obituary appeared in "Fangoria" magazine in January 1989. I was a huge "Night of the Living Dead" fan and his passing came as a shock to me. The people at "Fango" gave him a beautiful, deeply respectful send-off; the article contained an interview with Jones (a rarity in itself) as well as a discussion of his other horror film roles, the most prominent of which was in "Ganja and Hess". I had never heard of this film prior to reading the article (which also mentioned that the movie could be found on video under various alternate titles, including "Blood Couple" and "Black Vampire"), but it sounded intriguing and I kept an eye out for it. Just about a year later, I found a brand new VHS copy of "Blood Couple" at the supermarket, of all places. Before I comment on the film itself, let me say that I fully understand why Bill Gunn, Duane Jones, and company did not care for "Blood Couple". Reading about the uncut "Ganja and Hess", it's obvious that "Couple" was a savage edit of Gunn's labor of love, and at times it doesn't make sense even on its own terms as an 83-minute exploitation flick. But by the same token, it contains quite a bit of footage that went unused in "Ganja and Hess", and there are plenty of frightening, gut-wrenching moments. In those dim, distant years before rare films found new life on DVD, it was nice to see Gunn's movie in any form. In "Blood Couple", the murder of Dr. Hess Green (Jones) by his assistant George Meda (Gunn) takes place during the first ten or fifteen minutes of the film. This is followed by the harrowing scene of Green's resurrection, Meda's suicide, and Green's terrible realization that he is now addicted to human blood. The next scene, which is almost as disturbing, shows a desperate, tearful Hess Green reciting a prayer and then attempting to kill himself, too--but he cannot. He was rendered immortal when Meda stabbed him with the ancient Myrthian "dagger" (actually a piece of wood, sharpened at the end and containing bits of human bone). He will not die unless the shadow of a cross touches his heart, which is mentioned--but not clearly explained--in a brief song on the film's soundtrack. This is where things start to get a little fuzzy. Apparently, a curse was visited upon the Myrthians that they should live forever unless they were touched by the shadow of a cross...but, as the song says, "Christ had not come yet and the cross did not exist", so the Myrthians were doomed to hundreds of years of existence as blood addicts. But who cursed them? And how did this unnamed person know that Christ ever *would* come? I guess it's silly to expect too many answers from a sliced-and-diced exploitation movie. Hess Green's son is nowhere to be found in "Blood Couple", and Ganja (Marlene Clark) apparently dies along with her new husband in the film's grim conclusion. Gunn's direction and dialogue are often self-consciously artsy, and when he stumbles, he stumbles rather badly (mostly in the early scenes featuring Green and Meda). In my opinion, however, Gunn scores more hits than misses even in this edited version of his film. From the moment "Blood Couple" begins, there is a pervasive mood of unease and doom; you *know* that terrible things are going to happen. That kind of mood is very difficult to achieve, judging from all the stacks of lousy horror movies out there, and that's why I give this film an 8.