Spike Lee taps into horror with 'Da Sweet Blood'
<b>Mini-review: 'Da Sweet Blood of Jesus'</b>
Blood-slurping immortal beings hardly sound like the sort of characters you'd expect in a Spike Lee Joint. But in this bold and bloody remake of Bill Gunn's bold and bloody 1973 horror tale "Ganja and Hess" (winner of the Critics' Prize at the Cannes Film Festival), Lee mashes up dark artistic pretension with goofy grindhouse exploitation.
Like the current Oscar-nominated drama "Foxcatcher," Lee's "Da Sweet Blood of Jesus" offers a lethal tale of unrestrained one-percenter privilege.
A placidly unemotive Stephen Tyrone Williams plays Dr. Hess Green, a wealthy collector of African art in his massive Martha's Vineyard mansion where a suicidal colleague (Elvis Nolasco) kills him with a blade from an ancient blood-drinking cult.
Green violently awakes to discover he has become immortal - not a vampire, not a zombie - as long as he imbibes A, B, AB and O vintages. When his now-dead colleague's snooty wife Ganja (Zaraah Abrahams, creating the film's most complex character), arrives looking for her hubby, she quickly becomes a member of Hess' growing circle of resurrected blood addicts.
Lee's remake offers an irritating pace, contains no likable characters, and its scorchy, sexually explicit scenes lack the teasing titillation associated with the exploitation cinema that played the Chicago Theatre during the 1970s and the Liberty Theater on Manhattan's 42nd Street for a couple of decades.
"Da Sweet Blood of Jesus" does come equipped with Lee's signatures: Brooklyn references, sharply drawn scenes and politically charged dialogue (but Ganja's tearful revelation that "life's unfair!" Really?)
When the shapely Tangier (Nate Bova) arrives at Hess' estate, it's not long before she and the ever-game Ganja wind up in a classic exploitation cliché, the shower, exactly the place we'd like to be after witnessing Hess dine out.
"Da Sweet Blood of Jesus" opens at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago. Not rated; contains adult language, nudity, sexual situations and violence. 123 minutes. ★ ★