I had been aware of 1973’s Ganga & Jess long before finally seeing it and was excited to finally take the plunge.  There was a fair amount of promise in an independently produced horror film from a Black writer/director, a film which often had the word “poetic” used when describing it.  Now I have seen it, and I might very well use that word to describe it, because it made almost no sense to me.  When logic and clear storytelling go out the window, it never hurts to fall back on such terms.

Superficially, this might sound like a fairly conventional film, as Duane Jones plays a doctor who has a an appetite for human blood.  The film never directly addresses the V-word, and it plays fast and loose with the rules of the trope.  He can eat, and I assume needs, regular food.  He moves around freely in the daylight.

Instead of blood being a necessity, it is apparently instead an addiction for him.  I’m going to take a leap and conclude the intention was to present this as a metaphor for how real drugs were destroying Black lives.  Conversely, the church is portrayed as a unifying force, and it is telling that the shadow of the cross is the only thing which can kill our protagonist.

This is a framework which somebody could built a substantial film upon, but writer/director Bill Gunn did little that justified for me this film’s two-hour runtime.  It is an incredibly disjointed work, and often feels like the output of different filmmakers, each one with a different vision. 

Gunn even casts himself in the film, as a visitor to Jones’s mansion who proceeds to be far from the ideal houseguest.  At dinner, he tells rambling anecdotes, such as a film shoot in Holland that is complicated by the English word “cut” being the Dutch word for “cunt”.  Later that night, Jones finds the man sitting in a tree in which he has dangled a noose from a nearby limb. Even later, he stabs his host to death with a bone dagger.  Then he writes a poem that is a open letter to Black children of the world before turning a gun on himself.  Jones, having recovered from the knife attack earlier, proceeds to lap up the resulting blood like a cat.

Even as weird as all that is, this is the closest the film comes to any kind of action.  It slows down even more, while also becoming a tad more literal, when Marlene Clark enters the picture.  She is Gunn’s wife and she has traced his disappearance back to Jones’s mansion.  Initially angry, she seems to forget about her husband after a few minutes with Jones, and she is so swayed by his charm that she seems to forget she was looking for her husband.  That she marries Jones without Gunn’s body turning up suggests a weird ambivalence of the authorities in regards to polygamy.

She instead will find his body in a basement freezer room.  Similar to her demeanor when she first arrived, she’s angry for a very short amount of time before she seems to brush aside any concerns.  She even allows Jones to turns her into a fellow vampire-but-not-in-name (and still not really a bloodsucker).

An odd aspect of the film, and Clark’s performance in particular, is how dismissive she is towards a couple of Black men.  When she first arrives at the mansion, she fails to realize Jones is the doctor who owns the estate and not one of the “help”.  The apparent sole employee of Jones is also Black, and there is an odd scene where she toys with him like a cat that is bored with a mouse it is tormenting.  The antagonism between these two will come to a head when she demands from that butler the location of the wine cellar, or at least where to start looking.  It seems to me the obvious place to look for something with “cellar” in its name would be below ground level, so I wish that guy had told her to start in the attic.

The performances are…not great, but then I don’t know how anybody would be expected to act in this episodic mess of ideas, many of which are barely explored.  Jones is the most defined character here and, even then, he is still largely a cypher.  I found this disappointing after finally having an opportunity to see the star of Night of the Living Dead in another film.

Gunn is an odd figure in cinema.  In Odie Henderson’s book Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema, I learned about the director’s preceding film Stop!, which had been made for Warner Brothers and then immediately suppressed by the studio.  Unavailable to this day, this is the kind of film the studio seems to have an odd personal vendetta against, in the same way it is unlikely to ever let The Devils see a release on US home video.

I found Ganja and Hess to be a deeply unsatisfactory jumble, interesting in neither its stated objective as a vampire film, nor in the great many tangents it explores.  In the end, it feels like a deeply personal film that Gunn had to make, but how I wish he had made some effort to meet the audience halfway.

Dir: Bill Gunn

Starring Duane Jones, Marlene Clark, Bill Gunn

Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray