By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats
Director: Spike Lee
Country: united_states
Year: 2015
Running time: 123
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3104930
Kyle says: “I respectfully disagree with Spike Lee, who claims DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS is not a vampire movie. It may lack traditional traits such as fangs and claws, snarling and biting, garlic and mirrors, but Dr. Green subsists on blood, which he generates by killing women himself (who then join the ranks of the undead), or purloins from medical facilities by feigning a need for HIV testing, and stealing blood. He drinks this blood from elegant and expensive crystal goblets, a trait he shares with Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) in Jim Jarmusch’s elegant post-modern vampire movie ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE, one crucial difference being that Adam purchases blood from dishonest doctors with huge amounts of cash, because human blood has become too toxic for vampire consumption. Another difference is that Adam and Eve live in a dark and dismal deserted Detroit, whereas Dr. Green and his Renfield avatar Senechal live on a forty-acre Martha’s Vineyard compound filled with light and air, next to water.
“Funded by Kickstarter and shot in sixteen days with multiple cameras, DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS is a remake or rethinking of Bill Gunn’s 1973 GANJA & HESS (also a vampire movie), in which Dr. Hess Green (Stephen Tyrone Williams) is introduced by curatorial colleague Dr. Lafayette Hightower (Elvis Nolasco) to an ancient African knife with a curse, from a pre-Egyptian Ashanti Empire culture that had an uncontrollable addiction to blood. Needless to say, Dr. Green acquires his own ravenous desire for blood, and various women die horribly as a consequence, but also reawaken from the dead with a similar addiction to blood. One victim is a mother with a young child in a crib, leaving us to wonder what happens to the child when she ‘awakens’.
“Setting aside the usual signifiers of vampire lust and carnage, viewers will identify Spike Lee’s interest in African-American cultural assimilation, the subtleties of racial oppression, and the pervasiveness of religious idiocy. Almost overlooked is the origin of the vampire story (such as the most famous of all, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula) in the fears of Victorian men that women were becoming independent, and even expressing their sexual desires (Oh the horror!), until a scene of Dr. Green’s wife and former girlfriend commencing passionate lovemaking that concludes with Dr. and Mrs. Green licking up blood from the bathroom floor on their hands and knees. The best thing in the film is the main title sequence of Lil Buck (Charles Riley) performing ‘jookin’ dance moves in various Brooklyn locations. What this has to do with a vampire movie remains unclear, at least to me. 3 cats
“Thursday, August 20, 2015, on Netflix, New York.”