Dr. Hess Green becomes cursed by a mysterious ancient African artifact and is overwhelmed with a newfound thirst for blood. Soon after his transformation he enters into a dangerous romance with Ganja Hightower that questions the very nature of love, addiction, sex, and status.
Сладкая кровь Иисуса, Il sangue di Cristo, The Sweet Blood of Jesus, 耶稣哒圣血, 다 스위트 블러드 오브 지저스, A Doce Sede de Sangue, 耶穌噠聖血
USA American Black Film Festival USANR USA 
rami malek kinda serving in this
a remake that undoubtedly wants to show respect to the original film, and imo, it manages to do so reasonably well...
we're still talking about an independent movie funded via a Kickstarter campaign (partly "thanks" to that horror of Oldboy 🤐)
however, it’s a bit of a shame that it loses the dreamlike, absurd and gospel soul of the original, making room for a surface-level realism that doesn't leave much to the imagination
i also felt like Spike was a bit uninspired here, using techniques and shots that felt somewhat recycled from his previous works
so, while it remains a sweet homage, it definitely won't be replacing Ganja & Hess
(and my patron subscription just expired in the meantime 🥲🥲💔💔)
ecstatically unsupervised silly/serious hot black vampire Gatsby story of violence disguised as salvation. i loved it?
longer thoughts to follow.
Action! - Spike The Power, Lee The Riot
Following the very questionable results of his last remake, Oldboy, Spike Lee tries an attempt at another classic, this time Ganja & Hess. The result? I am unable to say for sure, since I have not seen the original.
However, if I am to judge the film by the rumors that I read and heard about the somewhat random and bizarre style of the original, which made its producers trim it, then Lee does a great job. This film has something off about it from the beginning, although it is structured like any other movie, the performances are out of "Greener Grass" or something like that. As much as it is a love…
Flips GANJA & HESS's ambivalence about black assimilation and the intrinsic colonialism of Western religion around to suggest the beginning of a new, culturally hybridized (and maybe even anti-patriarchal) diaspora. On the other hand it's just not that exciting. Personally I would have preferred this to be in a more stylized, confrontational register, but dismissing it as a timid cover seems short-sighted.
Strange and heightened for sure.
Hooptober 8.0: Film 26 (list here)
Spike Lee's remake of Ganja & Hess is just awful. It is a re-imagining, a bold one, in which he takes every element that worked from the original and ruins it, and then adds extra crap for good measure.
First of all, this film is incredibly ugly. The moody cinematography is replaced with horrible compositions, flatly lit like TV adverts. The visual language is incredibly uninteresting, but it keeps some of the jarring editing of the original, which (without the connecting style) is just awful. We then have a soundtrack that doesn't work at all, just noodling piano and bizarre needle drops that all have the feel of a low-key dinner party rather than the…
A movie about sexy aristocratic black vampires should not be this boring. Imagine what Jordan Peele could've done with a Ganja & Hess remake.
Hess: "That's an impolite question"
Ganja: "There the only ones worth asking"
- Spike Lee Ranked: boxd.it/1XDiG
- 5x5 Directors Challenge (Spike Lee: 1/5): boxd.it/48AW4
I'm a sucker for stories where a vampire tries to live a mostly normal life.
I just think it's interesting to see a drama that addresses how a monstrous malady impacts things like love, sex, work, etc... it's so much more interesting than the biting and sucking. In Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, Dr. Hess Green becomes a vampire and then starts a love affair with Ganja Hightower. Vampirism is paralleled with Christianity and living as a person of color and addiction. It's pretty great.
Unfortunately I didn't like the original Ganja and Hess because…
As often in Spike Lee’s cinema the messier he gets, the more interesting are the results. It is not really surprising if one knows Lee – it pretty much is what one would expect a Spike Lee updates Ganja & Hess to Obama’s USA to be like – but has a lot of charms along the way. At its best it has a certain hard earned melancholia that is Lee’s own. Much like Red Hook Summer it reinforces how out of step with current cinema, Lee is. Dude has entered his late master who couldn’t care less what people think phase and all the better for that. I particular appreciate how this is self-councious about its own disconnect. Ganja & Hess was confrontational film from a radical artist, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is the work of someone genuine worried about matters of assimilation that also knows it confronts them for a rather safe upscale position.
Spike, sit your ass down.
Hooptober 12, pt.27- Mirror my malady/Transfer my tragedy
1/1- Black Director, Black Lead
14th Spike Lee
I once heard that addiction is hardest for the smartest of us, the ones most capable of justification, self-delusion and intellectualisation. How appropriate that Lee’s modern vampire odyssey takes a respected anthropologist, a black intellectual, as its lead. Here is a man who prides himself on his removal from the baseness of desire, who lives within the rarified atmosphere of intellectual stimulation alone. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that he would tumble so effortlessly into the viciousness of bloodthirst. The vampiric impulse allows him to experience a raw sensuality missing from his otherwise sterile existence. It satisfies a need, and thus he’ll make any intellectual…
