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Sam Waymon,
Tara Fields,
Leonard Jackson,
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Bill Gunn
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: All Day Entertainment
: Horror, Independent, Vampires, Blaxploitation
: 110 min.
: English
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This title is currently out of print.
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A scientist stricken with an insatiable hunger for blood dominates this strikingly atmospheric drama. Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones), a wealthy and respected African-American anthropologist, is assigned a new assistant, an intelligent but unstable man named George Meda (Bill Gunn). One drunken night, George stabs Hess with a dagger from the ancient African tribe of Myrthia and then kills himself. The Myrthians were cursed with a thirst for human blood, and, by the time George's wife, Ganja (Marlene Clark), comes looking for him, Hess has developed a similar addiction to blood. Hess and Ganja fall in love, and they soon marry, but Hess infects his new bride with the Myrthian curse, which gives them eternal life, but at a terrible price. Actor, playwright, and novelist Bill Gunn was hired to write and direct a low-budget black vampire movie, but instead he delivered a thoughtful, impressionistic film that uses addiction to blood as a metaphor for African-American cultural and spiritual identity (and never once uses the word "vampire"). Ganja and Hess proved too deliberately paced and self-consciously surreal for the producers, who chopped it to 83 minutes, removed Sam Waymon's superb musical score, and retitled it Blood Couple. This mangled version was for many years the only one available, and it appeared under six different titles on home video before Bill Gunn's original version was restored for DVD release in 1998. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
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| Have Some Subtlety with Your Blood
by EFox
June 5, 2005 - 6:25 PM PDT
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5 out of 6 members found this review helpful
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| This is not a vampire or horror film in any conventional sense. It is an art film: a stately, meticulously composed, disturbing, and passionate meditation on the themes of addiction, lust, beauty and mortality. On some list a GC-er commented that it was more fun to talk about than watch; I disagree. I wanted to watch it over and over, and each time it meant something different to me, and I saw new beauties in it. It tells its story by moving through a series of environments: physical and psychological, visual and musical, European, African and African-American, historical and modern, Christian and pagan, indoor and outdoor, city and country. It is suffused with visual metaphor. The acting is stellar, and there are wonderful moments of humor. The dialogue is sparse but engaging. The lighting and the use of color and music are fabulous.There is also a very interesting commentary track that makes important points (among other things)about how radical this film was in its depiction of African-Americans in its time; it was the first American movie with a black cinematographer(as well as a black director)and he was the first cinematographer to emphasize the range of skin tones among black Americans. The movie is filled with wonderful music and artifacts from Africa and from African-America and Europe. Altogether it is beautiful and disturbing--in a marvelous way. It is a unique, low-budget radical art film for the sensuously and intuitively inclined. Don't miss it. (And see it again. It grows on you). |
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GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 6.85)
34 Votes
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