In the history of Black cinema, Bill Gun's movie is certainly a bizarre oddity. It doesn't fit at all with the Blaxploitation films of the same period, nor is it in any conventional sense a horror film. It does address many recognizable aspects of Black culture (or, it might be more accurate to say, the "pop" culture version of it): the Baptist church, the gaudily-dressed pimp, the blonde-wigged whore, the gun play, the jive talk, the mystical back-to-Africa mythological hokum. However, its visual style owes more to Bergman (Hour of the Wolf) and Argento than to Van Peebles and others. This is a film about the corruptions and decadence of the Black bourgeoisie; before most folks even knew there was one. But this isn't the Cosby Show. Doomed from the outset--not because it doesn't have a striking visual style, it does--but because it failed to offer audiences, Black and White, the view of Black culture they crave, even today; the Black culture even Spike Lee invariably provides on cue. For this reason, a groundbreaking movie, and one worth another look and further re-evaluation. It has more than a hint of the Dorian Gray, of the knowingly camp, about it. Gunn makes it hard to tell how seriously to take the religious imagery and symbolism. If, however, a White director had made the scenes in the Black church--the behavior of the congregation as outlandishly over-the-top and "insane" as anything in the Dr. Hess household--he or she would surely have been accused of being racist. Gunn himself plays against Blaxploitation type: a somewhat effete intellectual, almost certainly homosexual, whose violence is ultimately entirely self-directed. The image of Black masculinity as vulnerably exposed, and painfully so, is perhaps more honestly revealed here than in any other "Black" film. Compared with this, even Lee only pussyfoots around the issue.
Review of Ganja & Hess
