Anyway, a couple of these students somehow managed to see Bill Gunn's "Ganja and Hess" on its initial release in 1973. By the time I'd seen it on a double bill at a neighborhood theater a year or so later, Gunn's visionary work had been recut and repackaged as gritty "blaxploitation" fodder. I was told by those who'd seen Gunn's original movie, the one that stirred a standing ovation at Cannes, that the version I saw wasn't the real deal.
Even in this truncated form, the movie seemed to me peculiar enough to stand out among just about everything else being released at that time. (I re-emphasize, for perspective's sake, that this was the early 1970s, when both "anything goes" American cinema and insurgent black genre movies were at or near their respective peaks.) Yet for years, those who'd seen "Ganja and Hess" in its original form insisted that I was missing something.
In the years since Nunn's death in 1989, the lone original print of "Ganja and Hess" was recovered at the Museum of Modern Art. The movie was eventually re-released in repertory theaters and on home video as it was meant to be seen. The fact that this version is being re-released (just in time for Halloween) on a fresh new DVD indicates just how entrenched it is as a cult object.
One is at least curious to see what would happen if both the original and its truncated version were sold as a single package. That's not happening yet. For now, this version offers the unwary much to sift through and ponder.
The synopsis, when written out, looks altogether loony. The late Duane Jones - whose immortality in horror movie history is sealed for playing the sane, stalwart hero of the 1968 classic "Night of the Living Dead" - stars as Dr. Hess Green, a wealthy African-American archaeologist who takes on an assistant (Nunn) who's apparently suicidal and homicidal.
One night, the assistant stabs Hess in the chest with one of the latter's recent finds: an ancient dagger, which, it turns out, is contaminated with a virus that gives its victims immortality and blood lust. The good doctor finds immediate gratification when the assistant butchers himself in Hess' bathroom. This, of course, is nowhere near enough to sate his thirst.
At first, he burglarizes local blood banks. Then he goes after live victims, most of them poor minorities living far from Hess' lavish upstate New York digs. Soon, Ganja (Marlene Clark), the haughty, arresting wife of Hess' dead assistant, arrives unannounced on the doctor's doorstep looking for her "crazy" husband.
Hess insists the assistant is long gone, but she camps out at the manse, abusing the help and seducing the master. Hess, in love and in need of someone with whom to share the hunger, infects Ganja. Reader, they marry - and then look for more victims.
Ganja, it turns out, doesn't have the heart for the chase, which seems a little surprising, since she showed no prior evidence of having any heart whatsoever. None of this plot description hints at the movie's savage imagery, thorny ironies and cunning symbolism. As with its many predecessors, "Ganja and Hess" seeks to make vampirism a metaphor for more grounded, but comparably desperate, human addictions, whether they're sex, power or stimulants.
The movie also shares a gauzy nightmarish veneer common to such classics of the genre as "Nosferatu" and "Vampyr." At the risk of pounding the point into the ground, one must emphasize that there was nothing like "Ganja and Hess" at the time it was made and there has been nothing like it since. You could stretch the point and say that Nunn's movie reminds you of such Japanese-inspired Gothic dreamscapes as "The Grudge.
" But you won't find even the most allusive of today's shock-and-slice thrillers attempting the metaphoric leaps of "Ganja and Hess." Some might even think that's a good thing. I wonder if such people know what they're missing.
SCARFACE: THE PLATINUM EDITION (Universal), two discs. What more could possibly augment this much-beloved 1983 collaboration of director Brian De Palma and screenwriter Oliver Stone? Well, how about 20 minutes of deleted scenes?
Not enough? OK, how about a scoreboard that actually keeps count of the number of bullets fired and the number of times the "F" word is used? If that isn't enough, there's some stuff on how the video game was created.
(Not the video game itself. I mean, dudes, what do you want? The world?
) Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing a stand-alone platinum edition of the original 1932 "Scarface," but I guess I'm asking too much, too.
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