So here’s a movie I’ve one hundred percent never heard of, and starring Duane Jones from Night of the Living Dead. So at least he got to be in another movie. And frequently full frontal whangdoodle a-flopping in another movie, at that. Good for you, Ben!

The podcast people got to Ganja & Hess through a scare of vampires and a style of arthouse. The vampire part may not be strictly speaking accurate, but boy howdy the arthouse part is. So there’s this doctor named Hess, who if I understood correctly is an MD with an interest in a lost African civilization, though it would make more sense if he’s like an anthropology PhD since I never saw him do any medical stuff that I can recall. Anyway, before the movie starts, he is stabbed by someone with a dagger from this civilization that he’s investigating, and gets infected via the dagger with the civilization’s craving for blood.

I am now going to proceed to spoil the hell out of this movie, in part because I’m not convinced I actually know what happened and in part because even if I do, I’m not sure plot spoilers really affect whatever the point was. Still, if you want me not to do that, this is your exit ramp.

So first Hess is hanging out with a guy who seems to be his friend, although maybe they had just met. But if not friendship, I’m not sure why he was staying at Hess’s house if they had just met or whatever, nor how they met. Anyway, they have a conversation, then the guy takes some truly grotesque actions with his toothbrush in the bathtub, then he tries to kill Hess I think because he secretly knew about the blood craving somehow? Then later he commits suicide and Hess goes to town on the spreading pool of blood.

Then we follow Hess around as he steals blood from doctor fridges and picks up insipid women only to later murder them. Eventually, a woman named Ganja calls him in search of her husband, with whom he claims infamiliarity, but she comes to stay at his house all the same.

Then, they fall in love, and also it comes to light that the dead guy from act one was probably her husband after all, but that’s not an impediment to them getting married, whereupon she has some weird dreams and maybe but maybe not gets converted via the same dagger that got Hess. Then there’s some weird Jesusy stuff in a black church, during which maybe they, uh, convert and get saved but definitely maybe not? Then the movie ends.

I sincerely don’t think I left anything out that would contribute to anyone’s understanding of this movie.

Obviously the strongest section is the one I most thoroughly glossed, in which they fall in love and sort out whether the many, many, many red flags involved in the relationship are navigable after all. Also, not for nothing, but Ganja is way hotter than Barbara ever was.

Perhaps the podcast will explain to me the proper frame of reference through which I might have understood this movie? Man, I dunno. But however incomprehensible it might have been, it was definitely interesting. Like Blacula if you replaced all of the exploitation with artistic vision, but also did you actually have any artistic vision, or were you just high?