Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2015)
Starring Stephen Tyrone Williams, Zaraah Abrahams, Rami Malek
Directed by Spike Lee
I have to disclose something going into this review: I am a white man. Not only am I white, but I am exceptionally white. My mother’s side draws its lineage down to some of the first upperclassmen of New York (from before the Industrial Revolution allowed the peasantry to claim such a title), and I still have a newspaper article in my father’s chest of drawers emblazoned with the Hentschke family crest about the first time my paternal great-great-great grandfather made landfall from Germany. The only way I could be whiter is if I was writing this from my father’s summer home in the Hamptons. I basically already am the villain of a Spike Lee movie.
Now, I do not think this fact should matter, but it does to Spike Lee. Mr. Lee is known for making predominantly black films, and not in tone. One of the few directors who makes films from this perspective or about this ethnic group, he is respectable for not only creating media for a demographic, but also spotlighting it. With the endless stream of pretty white leads with pretty white girlfriends, it is nice to see a director who puts other ethnicities in a position of prominence. There’s a whole rabbit hole I could jump into about the subject, but since I don’t have the clout or wordspace to even break the tip of the iceberg on that, let’s just leave it at “Shit’s fucked up; good on you, Spike.”
The downside to this unique style is that he often gets away with things in his films by virtue of their blackness. Despite having a strong following and some decent films, he has never really risen above being a middling director. He isn’t Tyler Perry-level bad, and his work isn’t nearly as insular either. He has a good understanding of shot composition and mise-en-scène, and his stories generally link into some kind of social commentary in a way that isn’t just me reading too much into things. Yet, still, there’s usually something off or lazy about his films, with Da Sweet Blood of Jesus being an excellent example.
The movie starts off with a five-minute dance piece accompanied by a lightly played slow piano. While the dancing man will leave us behind for the movie his presence makes sense in, the piano shall be our loyal companion throughout. The soundtrack is actually quite varied, even jarringly so at times, but every time the music is blaring, you can bet your ass melancholy piano is just softly tinkling away. I don’t normally criticize things like that, but when I find myself thinking, “Jeez, enough with that ambient piano,” then maybe you used too much ambient piano.
After the dancing man leaves, we are introduced to the protagonist, a Dr. Hess Greene (Stephen Tyrone Williams), who for the world cannot be moved to recite a single one of his lines with any inflection. This is common throughout most of the movie. There are some emotionally driven scenes, but most of them come off incredibly flat. This is not people acting; this is people reading a script. It was filmed in all of 16 days according to Wikipedia, so maybe they were just doing a dry read and cut straight to print. They don’t sound coerced and angry, like a talented actor being contractually forced into a buddy cop film or Harrison Ford begrudgingly grunting out words. It is eerie, almost like they were directed to recite the lines in specifically a dead manner. This is never contrasted by later scenes of explosive emotion. What makes it even stranger is that there are a few scenes towards the end where Williams is forced to emote entirely visually, and he does a good job there. It all comes together like pubes and BBQ sauce, more uncomfortable than anything.
So Dr. Greene has this magic dagger, and his colleague, Mr. Hightower, stabs him with it in a fit of the babblespooks. This turns Dr. Greene into a vampire, who just immediately starts rolling with it. After stabbing Greene, Hightower shoots himself, but not before emerging naked from the bathroom for the sole purpose of showing us that not all black men have impressive penises. His body face down in a pool of blood, Greene starts lapping it up like a cat with milk. The very next scene is him robbing a blood bank. To contrast, the scene before him being a vampire was him listening to his disturbed colleague talking about how much the job means to him and how difficult it is for a mentally unstable black man to find work. There’s really no delineation of time in the movie, so there might have actually been several days in there, but it speaks to a larger problem.
So goes the rest of the movie. There will be a scene of Dr. Greene entertaining guests at his luxurious estate, followed by him introducing himself as “Dick Long” and killing a hooker. There isn’t enough inflection for this delivery. It comes off so flat that you aren’t sure if you are even supposed to be taking the whole thing seriously. Things also happen so fast that without proper emotional context, nothing makes sense. We are introduced to the late Mr. Hightower’s wife, Ganja, and in what seems to be the turnaround of a day he falls in love, marries her, and turns her into a vampire. Then they invite over Dr. Greene’s childhood friend, have a lesbian sex scene, kill her, and eat her. The next day Dr. Greene decides he wants to die and kills himself.
As a package the movie makes sense, but the presentation is so off that it is impossible to take seriously. Since the delivery is so flat, you would expect the passage of time to denote some kind of changes in the character’s actions or moods. But since everything is so fast, it just comes off as nonsense.
Therein lies the rub. The parts of Da Sweet Blood of Jesus add up to much more than its total. The movie is clearly rich with symbolism and exists to be analyzed for social commentary. The dialogue is so weighted that it feels almost written to be discussed in buzzwords, and the obvious vampirism vs. blood of Christ mirroring traditional Africanism vs. Christianity is as discussable as it is obvious. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is a remake of a 1973 film called Ganja and Hess, so there’s this separate layer of history and blaxploitation filmmaking that lends the film an almost inscrutable quality. If you criticize the jarring transitions, stiff acting, odd sequencing choices, or silly plot twists, you open yourself up to an eye roll and “just not getting it.”
However, none of that excuses bad filmmaking. Regardless of how deep the movie is, it is still confusing and hard to watch. I really don’t care about sex scenes, but when the previous shot is two people dancing to no music because “we don’t need music to dance,” it comes off as really forced. Or maybe that’s the point. See? It’s impossible to judge! But judge I will. Watching this movie was unbearable, uncomfortable, and tedious. It is two hours of poorly executed filmmaking.
There is a sequence towards the beginning where Dr. Greene kills a hooker, drinks her blood, and finds out she has AIDS. The hooker wakes up from death and gets mad at him; he goes to an AIDS clinic, gets tested, and is HIV negative. The angry undead hooker or his possible infection never come back up. The whole sequence takes about 15 minutes from start to finish and is a complete waste of time in the overall plot. As a representation for the larger film, it fits. The movie is a series of poorly executed and disjointed vignettes that loosely string together a plot.
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Film
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