Stop! (1970)

          Years before he made the strange vampire saga Ganja & Hess (1973), multihyphenate Bill Gunn wrote and directed this arty meditation on identity, mortality, and sex. Made for Warner Bros. and slapped with an X rating, Gunn’s movie was either given scant distribution or completely shelved, depending on which reference material one consults. Whatever the particulars, Stop! largely disappeared after 1970, so as of this writing it’s only viewable through rare festival screenings and/or private copies. It should be noted that some of those private copies (including the one viewed for this post) feature edits imposed on the movie by Warner Bros., so it is conceivable that Gunn’s original version is substantially different.

          As for the Warner Bros. version, it’s beguiling, erotic, sad—and more than a little pretentious, given the obvious influence of European filmmakers then popular with the intelligentsia, notably Michelangelo Antonioni. When Stop! connects, the experience is hypnotic and unsettling. And when the movie doesn’t connect, it’s indulgent and needlessly opaque. The story begins with attractive young couple Michael (Edward Bell) and Lee (Linda Marsh) traveling from the U.S. to Puerto Rico because of a recent tragedy—Michael’s brother killed his wife and then himself. Over several sweaty days in San Juan, Michael and Lee navigate sexual bliss and marital strife while it becomes evident that Michael is nearly as tormented as his late sibling. When Michael and Lee encounter another couple, played by Marlene Clark and Richard Dow, new sexual complications ensue and the threat of violence is omnipresent.
          While Stop! is occasionally (and deliberately) cryptic, the film overflows with mood. Gunn and cinematographer Owen Roizman employ striking compositions, some quite melodramatic, so every shot feels like a piece of an art installation. The leading actors are all lean and pretty, allowing Gunn to use the angles and surfaces of the human body like colors in a painting, especially during atmospherically filmed sex scenes. (Despite the X rating, nothing explicit is shown.) Gunn also employs trippy editing techniques, from the predictable (languid montages set to ominous music) to the unpredictable (splices that render unclear who is having sex with whom). And while the dialogue can tend to be obvious and stilted (“I really think I love you—I don’t know”), Gunn renders several memorably weird moments of human interaction. The vignettes involving a prostitute are as humane as they are unflinching, and the scene during which Lee paints her husband’s toenails while he makes out with Clark’s character feels personal and real.
          Yet the test of a piece like Stop! is not its ability to command attention with glossy images and alluring flesh, but rather its ability to explore heavy concepts. A superficial reading of Stop! would interpret the title literally, thus positioning the picture as Gunn’s plea for people to transcend psychosexual gamesmanship. However it seems unlikely Gunn was after anything that reductive or tangible. Note, for instance, the centrality of mental illness and sexual identity. Does every story about a lost soul need to end with a definitive moment of self-discovery? Clues regarding the answer to that question may be found in the picture’s bold final shot, which won’t be spoiled here. Among other things, Stop! is a descent into the unknowable—so for some viewers, the final shot might seem like a cop-out, while for others, the image could be the perfect grace note. Perhaps the highest compliment one can offer Gunn’s little-seen debut is to call it a mosaic that reveals as much about the beholder as it does about itself.

Stop!: GROOVY

Lord Shango (1975)

          Some practitioners of the horror genre argue that logic has no place in spooky stories. Fair enough. After all, one would never argue that the events of, say, The Shining (1980) could take place in reality. Still, there are limits. In the offbeat blaxploitation horror picture Lord Shango, murders happen in plain view of witnesses but authorities never seem to get involved. And that’s just one affront to common sense. Lord Shango is moderately interesting because of the way it forefronts a clash between two belief systems, but the movie is a frustrating mess. In the wild opening sequence, young man Femi (Bill Overton) rushes to rescue his girlfriend, Billie (Avis McCarther), from baptism by a group of overzealous Christians. They respond by drowning him in full view of an entire congregation. This enrages Billie’s mother, Jenny (Marlene Clark), who turns to a local voodoo cult for help exacting revenge. Enter Jabo (Lawrence Cook), a ne’er-do-well who may or may not have mystical powers. He compels Jenny to make sacrifices to “Lord Shango” in order to reincarnate Femi. And if you’re wondering how all this stuff meshes into a coherent storyline, don’t bother, because it doesn’t.

          Lord Shango unspools as a random assortment of moments, some of which are creepy and some of which are merely confounding. In the picture’s best scene, Jabo strolls onto the dancefloor of a nightclub and shimmies toward a pregnant Billie, who’s grooving to one of the movie’s hot Afro-fusion beats. Jabo moves closer and closer to Billie until her movements slow down to match his, and he stares into her eyes, triggering some sort of hypnosis/possession/trance state. Afterward, Jabo frets that he failed to achieve a supernatural task: “It’s always a struggle when a restless soul tries to enter a body not yet born.” Built solely on acting and mood and music, this scene has all the clarity and weirdness Lord Shango seeks elsewhere but usually fails to find. Incidentally, many of the same problems plague the 1973 blaxploitation vampire picture Ganja & Hess, which also stars Marlene Clark.

Lord Shango: FUNKY

The Beast Must Die (1974)

          Made by the UK production company Amicus, a second-rate competitor/imitator of Hammer Films, The Beast Must Die is a truly strange amalgam of pulpy story elements—it’s a monster movie presented in the narrative mode of an Agatha Christie tale, and it features both blaxploitation flourishes and a ridiculous gimmick straight out of the William Castle playbook. Plus, the whole thing’s slathered with that noxious brand of pseudo-funk music that appeared in the worst UK horror pictures of the period, representing a failed attempt to make decidedly un-hip movies sound hip. To say that The Beast Must Die tries to be everything to everyone is an understatement.

          Bahamanian actor Calvin Lockhart stars as Tom, the owner of a gigantic country estate in the UK, which he’s rigged with an elaborate network of hidden cameras and microphones. Turns out Tom is a big-game hunter preparing for his most dangerous prey yet—a werewolf. Toward that end, he recruits six acquaintances for a weekend visit, knowing that one of them is the lycanthrope. (Never mind the unanswerable logic questions raised by his convenient possession of this knowledge.) Upon their arrival, Tom tells his guests that over the next three nights, when the moon is full, he will identify and kill the werewolf. During hunting scenes, Tom, who is black, gets duded up like he’s auditioning for a sequel to Shaft (1971), wearing a tight leather jumpsuit and a gun belt while he races through the woods aided, via radio, by his security technician, Pavel (Anton Diffing). During non-hunting scenes, Tom struts around dinner tables and smoking rooms repeatedly announcing, with absurd theatricality, “One of you—is a werewolf!”

          The actors playing Tom’s guests, including respectable UK performers Peter Cushing, Michael Gambon, and Charles Gray, try not to embarrass themselves when delivering the movie’s goofy dialogue. Alas, any hope of retaining dignity disappears when the picture reaches the “Werewolf Break,” a 30-second onscreen countdown giving viewers one last chance to ID the monster’s human guise. The Beast Must Die is outrageously stupid, but it boasts solid production values and a quick pace, while lovely costars Marlene Clark and Ciaran Madden provide eye candy by wearing low-cut dinner gowns in most of their scenes. And, to be fair, a couple of the werewolf attacks generate half-decent jolts, so it would be ungallant to deny that The Beast Must Die generates at least a few moments of cartoonish entertainment. Overall, though, what holds the attention here is the (morbid) curiosity factor of watching a laughably misguided film self-immolate.

The Beast Must Die: FUNKY

Night of the Cobra Woman (1972)

Never mind that the title is deceptive because the accompanying storyline sprawls over a lengthy period of time—dubious naming is the least of this movie’s problems. A painfully dull horror movie with zero scares and even less narrative interest, this schlocky shocker concerns a woman in the Philippines who flees from creepy Japanese soldiers during World War II, hides in a cave, and gets bitten by a supernatural cobra that imbues the woman with its serpentine spirit. Or something like that. This is one of this poorly conceived were-monster flicks that’s supposed to have a tragic element—in this case, the woman eventually becomes more cobra than person, so she longs to slip her human skin for a life inside scales—but every element is executed so incompetently that nothing connects. The acting is, no surprise, the only aspect of the picture that’s worse than the direction and screenplay; lifeless performers amble through scenes as if they just received their dialogue an instant before the cameras rolled. The movie also gets caught in a quagmire of supporting characters, from the cobra woman’s deformed accomplice to the young researcher whom she indoctrinates (once the story cuts ahead to the present day) as her lover/successor/whatever. And let’s not even talk about all the boring scenes of the researcher’s girlfriend searching for him and/or writhing as snakes crawl over her body but never bite. Leading lady Marlene Clark, as the cobra woman, is a statuesque African-American beauty who’s not shy about nude scenes, so the picture provides a measure of sleazy eye candy. Furthermore, the old-fashioned effects scenes (think dissolves to simulate the passage of time during transformations) provide kitsch value. Plus, as you might expect, there are snakes. Lots of snakes. Nonetheless, good luck finding even five moderately interesting minutes amid the 85-minute sprawl of this low-budget junk.

Night of the Cobra Woman: LAME

Ganja & Hess (1973)

          A cult-fave movie whose enviable reputation might have more to do with novelty and obscurity than actual cinematic merit, Ganja & Hess is almost certainly the most experimental of all black-vampire movies; it’s closer in spirit to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1931 surrealistic epic Vampyr than to the campy blaxploitation joint Blacula. Written and directed by theater-trained artiste Bill Gunn, who apparently was hired to make a straight monster movie but took the production down a different path, Ganja & Hess is a strange meditation on the anguish of addiction and the difficulties African-Americans face in retaining their cultural identity.

          The movie is as formless and languid as a dream, so even though Ganja & Hess delivers many standard horror elements, such as bloody knife attacks and gruesome scenes of characters lapping up plasma, it’s clear from the first frames that Gunn is trying to create an artistic experience instead of a horror show. Whether he achieves his goal is up to each viewer; some cinephiles consider this picture an unsung masterpiece, but there’s no way to overlook the ineptitude of the film’s technical execution. The cinematography is grainy and erratic, with some shots artfully composed and others seemingly rushed; the sound recording is abysmal; and the acting is all over the place.

          Leading man Duane Jones, best known for his starring role in Night of the Living Dead (1968), cuts a striking figure with his expressive face and lean build, but he’s not particularly charismatic. Leading lady Marlene Clark has mesmerizing eyes, but some of her line readings are so amateurish they shatter whatever illusion Gunn is trying to create.

          As for the story, it’s the usual bloodsucker lore, but with a multicultural twist. The tale begins when a scientist (Jones) gets stabbed with a knife bearing the ancient curse of an African tribe. Even though the word “vampire” is never used in the movie, the curse gives the scientist an insatiable thirst for blood. Despite his affliction, he falls for and marries the wife (Clark) of his assailant, leading to her inevitable indoctrination into the world of vampirism. Since the story is rather trite, what makes Ganja & Hess noteworthy is the way Gunn weaves cultural, psychological, and sexual symbolism into the narrative.

          Montages feature characters writhing in pain or pleasure while Gunn dissolves to shots of African tribal rituals or other such visuals; these scenes are fused by a fevered soundtrack blending atonal music, driving rhythmic patterns, and weird utterances like grunts and screams. Gunn also uses awkward jump cuts within scenes, perhaps because he’s trying to simulate the strange sense of time that someone who cannot die might experience. The sum effect of Gunn’s art-house flourishes is that Ganja & Hess feels like a bizarre hybrid of intellectualized style and lame-brained content. Some may find this thrilling, and some (like me) may find it dull and pretentious, but Ganja & Hess is inarguably unique.

Ganja & Hess: FREAKY