France, 1983
Review:
JA Kerswell
With production values barely higher than a home movie, your appreciation - or otherwise - for this film will depend on your tolerance for zero-budgeted, albeit enthusiastic, trash. Supposedly made by a video shop owner who wanted to make a few Francs renting this out to his horrified customers. It features a war veteran lumberjack in a mask who roams the woods and kills picnickers with an axe for no discernible reason. Very much rinse and repeat until zombies and a vampire turn up in the last reel. Featuring post-looped sound; music that sounds like a fog horn and a Bontempi organ getting it on in a wind tunnel and an axe masturbation scene that gives a whole new meaning to big chopper. Not to mention a little girl having her head sawn off and, well, you have OGROFF. France’s answer to the Golden Age of the slasher. I will say one thing in its defence: it is inarguably the best film ever made by someone called Norbert.
It opens with a father stopping his car for a piss - which is naturally catnip for backwoods madman Ogroff. Barely before the poor schmuck has a chance to zip up his flies, the killer lumberjack chops off his head with an axe before kicking it around like a soccer ball. Although not before killing his pre-teen daughter with the very same axe. The mother reacts to the death of her husband and daughter with all the terror of someone who forgot to pick up a baguette at the hypermarket that morning. After a passing car fails to stop, she is captured by Ogroff and taken back to his shack in the woods. His home is very much a dimestore variation of the Sawyer Family lair from THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974); it is adorned with plastic Halloween tat pretending to be body parts. After tiring of the poor woman - but not before sawing off her dead daughter’s head in front of her - Ogroff cuts off her tongue and throws it to his dog. He then chops at her tied-up and prone body with his axe and throws her entrails through a trap door in his cellar.
If all this sounds unspeakably gory, and perhaps even transgressive, it’s worth noting that the plentiful gore effects don’t extend much beyond fake blood and offal - with the worst excesses usually happening off-screen. Even so, the body count description alone would have given British politicians the vapours had it even been released on video across the channel in 1983.
Undoubtedly, it was probably more fun to make than it is to watch. The film is, to put it charitably, a high-spirited but utterly amateurish affair. It is out-of-focus more often than not. Largely plotless and obviously shot without sound, there is barely any dialogue - and what there is is unconvincingly dubbed back in. However, despite its shortcomings, OGROFF doesn’t take itself too seriously and pokes fun at its Gallic provenance - with the killer not only riding his bicycle to his mass killings but also a protracted scene where he attacks a Citroën 2CV - that most French of cars - with an axe. Not to mention poking fun at slasher movie conventions. Someone being killed by being lightly singed with with kindling is especially ludicrous.
The first half of the film is more-or-less a series of vignettes, where a variety of people head into the woods and are hacked, chopped and chainsawed by Ogroff. It’s both a pastiche and a love letter to the North American slasher movie so popular at the time. In a bold move, it inexplicably switches from slasher to zombie movie at its halfway point - when Ogroff’s victim-turned-girlfriend (!) accidentally lets his collection of the living dead free from his basement and then makes a split decision to break up with him and hotfoot it out of there. This lumbering undead action - and I use the word action advisedly - makes Jean Rollin’s fellow French horror ZOMBIE LAKE (1981) look like Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978).
Although not as proficient, nor as well known as their Italian cousins, French film-makers had ploughed an increasingly bloody farrow in the late 70s and early 80s. The lyrical and often whimsical French horror of the late 60s and early 70s had given way to something much more visceral with the likes of Rollin’s THE GRAPES OF DEATH (1978) and THE LIVING DEAD GIRL (1982). OGROFF was made very much in that vein; albeit very much a dimestore - or centimestore if you like - version.
The film features a special cameo appearance from Howard Vernon as a vampire to try and cover pretty much all horror bases - only the werewolf and mummy get short shrift. Vernon was a popular actor in French and Spanish horror around the time - and was a favourite of furtive Spanish auteur Jess Franco. It is a mystery quite how he got roped into a project which was little more than a group of friends larking around with a Super 8 camera on weekends.
It is difficult to really recommend OGROFF apart from those most dedicated to unearthing every no-budget genre film from the past 40 years, or so. It does, however, have some merit as a time capsule of a time very much gone past.
BODY COUNT 11:
Female 4 / Male 7
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