Popular reviews

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★

  Vampirism as an ingeniously acid-angry rebuke to black assimilation, drinking a "savior's" blood as an act of self-preservation and of coercion. Visually rough but nevertheless a drone of disfigured reflections, body-obscuring superimpositions, and blurred focus. Even the slapdash ADR dialogue contributes to the derangement, as if Gunn himself felt (rightly, it would transpire) that his art was as out of his control as an entire people's selves were out of their own.

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  Review by sakana1 9

  To The Editor:

  There are times when the white critic must sit down and listen. If he cannot listen and learn, then he must not concern himself with black creativity.

  ... I want to say that it is a terrible thing to be a black artist in this country — for reasons too private to expose to the arrogance of white criticism.

  One white critic left my film Ganja and Hess, after 20 minutes and reviewed the entire film. Another was to see three films in one day and review them all. This is a crime.

  ... Another critic wondered where was the race problem. If he looks closely, he will find it in his own review.

  If I were…

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★½ 4

  Underground experimental arthouse loaded with allegory and fractured storytelling. One of a kind for sure.

  Evasive, passionate, and beautiful.

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  Review by Sean Baker 4

  Watching the restored version of this film was like watching the film for the first time. Another film that I forgot was so experimental in style. Fantastic end credit sequence. So sad that Duane Jones passed away at such a young age.

  Watched on the big screen at The Cinematheque - Vancouver

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  Review by kailey 17

  dracula sits high up on a hill, alone in his castle

  somehow this manages to be one of the truest vampire stories i've ever watched. the secret to why we continue to be obsessed with them has nothing to do with the glamour or the danger. the truth is that vampires are the most human of all ghouls. they drink blood not to be cruel but because that is what they need to survive. they are ruled by the same two base instincts humans have, hunger and thirst. they couldn't stop even if they wanted to.

  all the ingredients to a good vampire story are here... but skewed and twisted and re-arranged enough to feel fresh. instead of a gothic…

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  Review by Liz ★★★★½ 3

  Vampirism as addiction and as a means of self-preservation, living off the veins of the lower class in a mansion filled with priceless African relics and Nina Simone records. I'm not the biggest fan of vampire stories, but I love just how malleable the lore is, allowing for both endless straight adaptations of Dracula, as well as singular works like Martin, Female Vampire, and, well, this. Bill Gunn's film looks and feels like an LA Rebellion take on those latter two, his socioeconomic and religious subtext as strong as the blown-out grain on the 16mm blow-up photography. This almost exists on the threshold between a dream and a nightmare, obfuscating the narrative by stripping it of its connective tissue and…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black

  CW: blood/violence

  Infected with a predator's disease, every kill comes with massive distortion (and even quiet moments scan be Dutch angled and dissonantly soundtracked). He does not seek salvation; he seeks first survival and then release. He embraces and rejects the poison at once; the cure is not a cure at all. He is infected with something ancient; something that serves as an infection on its own merits is the counter-balancing force. It is not a cure, but just a path to death. The cycle repeats, borne forward through love, so many possible metaphors alive within the fractured narrative (assimilation, erasure, actual disease). Unnerving orange blood and sweaty locales and crime-story grit make it not as much a Western vampire story as a reclaimed vampire story.

  February count: 22/28

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★½ 7

  "And he's an addict. He's not a criminal. He's a victim."

  For all intents and purposes Ganja & Hess marked the directorial debut of celebrated writer/actor Bill Gunn (his previous film Stop was permanently shelved by Warner Brothers after receiving a preliminary "X" rating), who would sadly have only one other opportunity to direct nearly a decade later.

  As is euphoniously explained in the bizarre musical exposition dump (by Nina Simone's brother Sam Waymon—who also features as a Holy Roller reverend with a sideline as the protagonist's chauffeur) that opens the film, Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones of Night of the Living Dead renown) is a prosperous but withdrawn Black anthropologist studying an ancient group of African blood drinkers known as…

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  Review by reibureibu ★★★★★ 5

  I am absolutely convinced that there are so many masterpieces out there that remain underseen and underrated due to a multitude of factors: either they never account a large following and only remain a niche film for specific audiences, they're genre films that don't get evaluated by all types of audiences, they're challenging and would be unappealing to most audiences, or they feature and are made for minority audiences and get ignored by white audiences.

  Ganja & Hess has the unfortunate situation of fitting into all of the above categories, an arthouse genre-film centered around Black vampires but also one of the greatest masterpieces of American cinema I've ever seen. It's a work that tackles race, assimilation, religion, minority-on-minority violence, diaspora,…

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  Review by Zoë 🐛 ★★★★ 4

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★

  And here I am naively thinking that Spike Lee's remake was weird, and watching the original film .... how do I explain it? Using denominations as an example, Lee's is similar to a white Baptist church, whereas this one is similar to a charismatic and whacky one. More than a movie, it's like a 2 hour fever dream where you don't know what's going on, creating a level of anxiety almost equal to that of a Safdie Brothers film, enhanced by an soundtrack which is both beautiful and disturbing, messing with people's minds. Not to mention the level of sexual charge this film exhumes, it almost feels like an affront, violent but never pornographic, rather artistic. The cinematography has a…

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  Review by Lou (rhymes with wow!) ★★★★ 9

  Unlike any blaxploitation film I have seen before and also unlike any vampire film I have seen before. Ganja and Hess is a very singular movie. It is artistic but it remains grounded in reality. I usually roll my eyes when vampirism is used as a metaphor for some real-life affliction but I really didn't mind it here. I just wanted to see how it all unfolded.

  I had a lot of fun watching this one-of-a-kind vampire flick with Adrian.