Spike Lee makes a great point in his update of Bill Gunn’s 1973 cult film Ganja & Hess. If you’re gonna do a remake, just make the exact same movie, BUT with hot lesbian love scenes added. Works for me. I hope the makers of the upcoming Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones reboots are paying attention.
On one level, I hate remakes of good movies. We get too many of them these days. They’re uninspiring, useless and the sign of an industry that’s run on pure cynicism. They’re lazy grabs at another film’s credibility and a cheap shortcut to attention. No matter how violent or profanity-filled a recent remake might be, they’re so safe they should all be G-rated.
On another level, hey, it’s all just folklore. Retelling old stories, resurrecting characters. Been going on forever. Just replace the campfire of centuries past with multi-million dollar budgets and lighted screens.
It’s the latter that I suspect to be Spike Lee’s motivation here. Ganja & Hess is a landmark film that the world nearly cast aside. Suppressed in its day by a company who didn’t know what to do with it and existing underneath the underground for decades until a restoration in the late 90s reached a small audience, it’s a masterpiece from a pioneering (and now deceased) black filmmaker who has yet to get his due.
Enter Spike Lee here, storyteller, messenger and vindicator, not just remaking the film, but also passing down the story, treating it as folklore, mixing Bill Gunn’s unique blood into the present cultural circulation. The Wolf Man and Dracula have been remade umpteenth times. Why not Ganja & Hess? Lee doesn’t change much of it. He sets it in the present day, adds emphasis on the original film’s humor and sex, smooths some of Gunn’s low-budget edges and goes more Afrocentric with a main set filled with African art (Lee’s camera goes out of its way to show off the paintings and sculptures). Otherwise it’s the same story of a wealthy academic who becomes a victim of a vampire-like dependence on drinking human blood, has a colleague commit suicide in his home and then starts up a thing with the dead man’s ex-wife. Gospel music interludes and hallucinatory sequences line the path.
This isn’t better than Ganja & Hess, but it is the work of a man on a mission, a blood oath handshake from the present to the past and not just another remake. Worth seeing.