Critics reviews

Less campy B-movie and more Ingmar Bergman or David Lynch, with a plot that’s deliberately enigmatic and driven by poetic symbolism.

Working on an intimate scale, Gunn's purview is nonetheless boldly comprehensive. He brings together Beethoven and the Blues, ritual practice and alluring artifice, the gloss of luxury and the pressure of poverty, the eruptive force of nature and the eerie chill of the supernatural, as well as the pull of ecstatic religion. He joins sexual pleasure to the violence of irrepressible desire.

Gunn was a black auteur working during a period when American directors were predominantly white, and if we are to perceive this masterpiece's apparent ‘flaws' as deliberate strategies, we must view them as part of an oppositional project rooted in the need to reject a language adjudged imperialistic.

A hypnotic and strange vampire film... Gunn's low-budget, deeply kinetic film is a tour-de-force of magic and skill, an accomplished and ambiguous allegory of oppression, faith, and outsider experiences that challenges us at every step.

Transposing the unfettered, slipshod visual language of exploitation into outright Impressionism, Gunn's vampire movie is one of the most multifaceted works of African-American cinema.

Ganja and Hess's thematic discord is matched by its dizzyingly diverse form.

[Gunn] may have had somewhat uncertain narrative skills as a director. You really have to squint to detect the plot points in this vampire love story—but it has atmosphere, a trancelike power, and a weird audio-visual flux of chanting, fractured montage and surprise musical moments.

Ganja & Hess, which has been retroactively, circumstantially cast as a berserk dash toward career suicide on Gunn's part, is so singular, so opaque, that it doesn't even have the draw of commerce-friendly exoticism. If Shaft is Barry White and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is the Sex Pistols, then Ganja & Hess is John Cage.

Gunn's purest expression was 1973's Ganja & Hess. Hired to crank out a Blacula knock-off (with a drug-joke title), Gunn instead wrote a surreal love triangle among black sophisticates, devoid of sex-machine phoniness, and directed it in a muttered, disorienting style, with a strange brew of Afro-Euro symbolism.

Certainly the most original and intellectually ambitious of all the blaxploitation films of the 70s, Bill Gunn's uneven and seldom shown but thought-provoking 1973 horror film is better known in Europe than here; the ritualistic phantasmagoria it creates—aided and abetted by James Hinton's cinematography—lingers in the mind.

Deliberately fragmented and punctuated with disquieting cutaways to art works, the film charts his growing sense that he is afflicted with a curse, across his marriage to his assistant's widow Ganja (Clark) and his provision of a stud-victim to feed her 'hunger'. Theological musings jostle with sexual-visceral imagery in a mix which is still very potent.