Review: ‘Da Sweet Blood of Jesus,’ Spike Lee’s Vampire Movie

’s new film, is a grisly and ghoulish vampire story. It is also an evident labor of love. The opening images — a solitary dancer undulating on the Red Hook waterfront, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and other Kings County spots — offer a reminder that no filmmaker has shot this borough as beautifully and fondly as Mr. Lee. Martha’s Vineyard, where much of the action takes place, looks pretty good too. And though there are episodes of bloody mayhem and steamy sex, the mood is contemplative, at times almost serene. Mr. Lee has earned a reputation as a polemicist and provocateur, but he has also been, from the beginning, a sensualist and a visual stylist.

He is also a student of film history and African-American culture, interests that explicitly converge in “Da Sweet Blood,� which is an affectionate remake of

’s “Ganja and Hess .� That movie. first released in 1973 and currently part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center ’s revelatory series on black independent cinema of the 1970s and ’80s, is a horror movie suffused with an experimental spirit, intellectual energy and a sly political sensibility. A product of the blaxploitation era, it is much more of a philosophical love story than an exercise in genre sensationalism.

Mr. Lee, who financed this project partly through a Kickstarter campaign. updates the tale while staying true to its ideas and (mostly) to its plot. Early and late, “Da Sweet Blood� visits a Brooklyn church where the minister (Thomas Jefferson Byrd) seems especially interested in the vampiric subtext of certain New Testament verses. These implications spring to the surface when Hess Green (Stephen Tyrone Williams), an aristocratic scholar and art collector, has a mishap with an Ashanti ritual dagger.

The weapon is wielded by Lafayette Hightower (Elvis Nolasco), an unstable, suicidal house guest. After being stabbed, Hess awakens with an addiction to blood. He tries at first to feed his new habit nonviolently — snatching plasma from a clinic — but soon settles into more traditional methods. The fact that he preys on prostitutes and other poor, single women allows Mr. Lee to revisit one of his perennial themes, the class divisions among African-Americans. Hess, with his mansion on the Vineyard and his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, is a prince and a demon, a lonely, disconnected man even before he becomes a literal monster.

But then he meets Ganja (Zaraah Abrahams), Hightower’s former wife, and, before long, Hess’s partner in thirst. Their romance doesn’t always go smoothly, but “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus� doesn’t delve too deeply into their emotions. Mr. Williams is a quiet, recessive screen presence, without the brooding charisma that Duane Jones brought to the character in “Ganja and Hess,� and while Ms. Abrahams is more theatrical, the passion between them rarely rises above room temperature. Felicia Pearson and Rami Malek, in smaller roles, provide a crackle of humor, and Jeni Perillo shows up near the end to add some extra sexual heat.

This is, all in all, one of Mr. Lee’s cooler joints, meaning both that it is suavely stylish and feels detached from its own emotions and motivations. It’s not especially horrifying, or even very thought-provoking. It is touching, however, because it represents one frequently misunderstood, intermittently great filmmaker’s tribute to another.

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus

Director Spike Lee

Writers Spike Lee. Bill Gunn

Stars Stephen Tyrone Williams. Zaraah Abrahams. Rami Malek. Elvis Nolasco. Thomas Jefferson Byrd