Ginger Snaps Back

The ‘Ginger Snaps’ sequel and prequel were apparently filmed back to back, albeit from scripts by different writers and with different directors at the helm. I’m not sure at which point during pre-production someone said, “Hey, let’s make ‘Unleashed’ a gritty, institutional movie and ‘Ginger Snaps Back’ a costume drama,” but I wish I’d been a fly on the wall. I’d love to know how that idea got sold.

‘Ginger Snaps Back’ is a prequel in the way that Neal Stephenson’s ‘System of the World’ trilogy is a prequel to ‘Cryptonomicon’. There’s a thematic connection, but the two works are set centuries apart.

It’s some time in the 19th century and a depleted retinue of traders and British troops, along with their native Indian guide, are holed up in a fort besieged by – you got it! – werewolves. They’re awaiting the non-return of a party dispatched to secure provisions. No prizes for guessing that these poor unfortunates became provisions for the lycanthropes. Into their midst, seeking shelter and confused by the ramblings of a shaman they meet en route, come Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins).

Retaining the character names from the original was pretty much a given (they had to get the words “ginger” and “snaps” into the title, after all); however, this saddles ‘Ginger Snaps Back’ from the off with the stigma of being little more than an historically transplanted remake. Maybe this is why it gets the least love out of the whole trilogy. I have read precious few good things about ‘Ginger Snaps Back’. The general consensus is that ‘Unleashed’ is a decent stab at a sequel, while ‘Back’ is all but superfluous.

Good job, then, that I’m not afraid to take a minority opinion. For my money, ‘Ginger Snaps Back’ is a terrific little movie. A couple of flaws, sure – mostly notably in the occasional slide into contemporary dialogue and attitudes that belie the period setting – but a definite improvement on ‘Unleashed’ and worthy to keep the company of the original.

What the period setting achieves is a negation of the suspension of disbelief required to introduce a werewolf into a suburban Canadian milieu in ‘Ginger Snaps’. Folklore and superstition are writ large here. Ginger, in particular, is presented as a Little Red Riding Hood figure. Although the innocence associated with that fairytale character is soon savagely subverted. Ginger and Brigitte are warned by a shaman they encounter in the wilds to “Kill the child, save the sister”. Their next encounter is with a tracker (Nathaniel Arcand) in the pay of the British; a man seemingly at one with the natural world.

At the fort, an atmosphere of mistrust and a knife-edge tension prevail. The commanding officer barely retains command, while his right-hand-man presents as a human time bomb already down to the last few seconds. The surgeon, Murphy (Matthew Walker) devises a test to determine whether outsiders are infected with lycanthropy (which makes for a couple of tense moments reminiscent of the infected blood/heat experiment in ‘The Thing’), whereas the Reverend Gilbert (Hugh Dillon) revels in each new attack or loss of life, giving it some “judgement of the Lord” hyperbole with the hellfire and brimstone turned up to 11 at every available opportunity.

The Murphy/Gilbert science/religion schism recalls the science/animalism angle of the first movie (Brigitte painstakingly attempting to find a cure/Ginger embracing her newfound feral instincts), while the confined locale compares with the clinic setting of ‘Unleashed’. It’s pushing it a bit to suggest that ‘Ginger Snaps Back’ offers a synthesis of the two preceding films, but it certainly has a lot going on for a low-budget 90-minute horror film.

It also looks good for a low-budget production. Director Grant Harvey exploits the claustrophobic setting effectively, the slow-burn establishing of conflict in the traders’ and soldiers’ interrelationships makes for a powder-keg atmosphere, and the inevitable lupine attack is tensely built up to and impressively staged. Perkins’ characterization is much more interesting and watchable than the sullen, grungy anti-heroine that slouched through ‘Unleashed’ and it pretty much goes without saying that having Isabelle back in the spotlight helps things immeasurably.

As with ‘Unleashed’, the major sin that ‘Ginger Snaps Back’ commits is simply following on from such an accomplished and ballsy film as the original. Naturally it’s not as good as ‘Ginger Snaps’. How many sequels better the originals? Precious few once you’ve got ‘The Godfather Part II’ and ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ out of the way. How many third instalments manage to keep the material interesting and seem essential in their own right rather than just part of a franchise? Precious few once you’ve got ‘Toy Story 3’ out of the way.

‘Ginger Snaps Back’ is a sadly overlooked and underrated movie. It’s ripe for rediscovery.

Ginger Snaps Unleashed

When I reviewed ‘Ginger Snaps’ as part of the “13 for Halloween” project back in October, my buddy Aaron – formerly of The Death Rattle, now happily raising hell again at The Bone Throne, and a contributor to Italian Film Review and The Gentleman’s Blog To Midnight Cinema – asked if I’d be reviewing the sequel and prequel. I said I probably would. I had the chance to watch them recently, pretty much back-to-back. I’ll be reviewing ‘Ginger Snaps Unleashed’ tonight and ‘Ginger Snaps Back’ tomorrow.

(Elements of both films contain SPOILERS if you’ve never seen the original. And if you haven’t, stop reading now and go rent it – it’s a belter!)

‘Ginger Snaps Unleashed’ is, on paper at least, about as linear as sequels get, continuing the story very shortly after ‘Ginger Snaps’ left off: Ginger (Katherine Isabelle) is dead and Brigitte (Emily Perkins), having deliberately infected herself at the end of the first movie, is using the serum with which she hoped to save her sister. Only it’s keeping the lycanthropy in check rather than actually curing it. Added to this, having left the parental home and living a low-key existence in the big city, Brigitte is plagued with visions of Ginger – a mocking, accusatory, spiteful version of her sister who is either a ghost or a projection of Brigitte’s guilt complex.



Oh yeah, and there’s another werewolf hunting her down. Just in case the girl didn’t have enough problems.

When said werewolf attacks a sympathetic student who tries to help her, Brigitte is wounded. The serum is found on her person. There are track marks on her arm. Brigitte is put under custody at an addict’s clinic. Operating at near bankruptcy, the clinic also treats private long-term patients, such as the elderly woman mummified in bandages after suffering extreme burn injuries, whose precocious granddaughter (Tatiana Maslany) – nicknamed Ghost by the staff – keeps a comic-book reading vigil and enjoys free run of the clinic.

Brigitte doesn’t respond well to life here. The bitchy cliques of the other girls (most of whom seem to have wandered in from the casting call for ‘Sorority Row’), the ministrations of the male orderly who trades narcotics for blow-jobs, and the whiny self-aggrandizement of the therapy sessions doesn’t go down well with her.



When the werewolf shows up, finds a way into the building and starts decimating all and sundry, it’s the final straw and Brigitte reluctantly enlists Ghost’s help in an all-or-nothing escape attempt.

‘Ginger Snaps Unleashed’ is a strange but eminently watchable piece of work. The opening credits are a headfuck in the vein of ‘Seven’. Early scenes suggest a character piece: Brigitte alone. The extended clinic sequence, occupying the middle third, edges into ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ territory by way of ‘Girl, Interrupted’, and offers us a lycanthropy-as-metaphor-for-addiction scenario that serves as a counterpoint to, and development of, its predecessor’s lycanthropy-as-metaphor-for-sexual-development subtext. The constant threat of Brigitte’s lupine nemesis brings the horror genre requirements.

Then things start going off the scale. The turning point is a therapy session that jolts Brigitte back to the erstwhile sex/lycanthropy subtext; while thematically valid, the scene plays out like an irony-free remake of the Eric Prydz ‘Call on Me’ video. Later, Brigitte and Ghost escape the clinic and hole up at Ghost’s grandmother’s place where it quickly becomes apparent that Brigitte’s young benefactress has a few skeletons of her own in the family closet.



As much as I enjoyed ‘Ginger Snaps Unleashed’, it felt as if the filmmakers were congenitally unsure what kind of film they wanted to make, what aspect of the admittedly interesting cluster of ideas sprinkled throughout the script they wanted to focus on, and what they wanted to achieve in the tense but stylistically schizophrenic finale. The closing shot, in particular, seems to belong to another film entirely. It’s inspired and darkly satirical, but things have deviated so far at this point from the carefully constructed and socially/geographically grounded world of ‘Ginger Snaps’ that it’s hard not to feel a tinge of disappointment.

The other problem with ‘Unleashed’ is that it relegates Katharine Isabelle to a glorified cameo and puts the entire film on Emily Perkins’s shoulders. ‘Ginger Snaps’ worked so brilliantly because it focused on the sisters’ relationship; the chemistry between Isabelle and Perkins was natural and immediate. ‘Unleashed’ suffers from the (necessary) sidelining of Isabelle.

‘Ginger Snaps Back’ restores the filial dynamic. But is it the better movie? Find out tomorrow …

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #4: Ginger Snaps

Sisters Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins) are two normal teenage girls living in a Canadian suburb when –

Nah, scratch that. Ginger and Brigitte are maladjusted 16 and 15 year old sisters whose idea of an art project at school is to present a sequence of photographs depicting themselves as suicide victims. They’re permanently disaffected and uncommunicative. They make goths look joyous and emos seem effervescent.

Kind of understandable really. They live in a dull, washed-out suburbia and have the embarrassment of the world’s perkiest mom (Mimi Rogers) who wears horrible sweaters, incessantly enquires as to whether they’ve had their period yet and sports pumpkin earrings at Halloween.

School’s not much better than home, populated as it is by asshole jocks like Jason (Jesse Moss) and bitch teen princess Trina (Danielle Hampton). It sucks, too, that going out at night is strictly verboten given the spate of vicious attacks on neighbourhood dogs. When an eviscerated canine turns up on the hockey field, Trina vengefully trips Brigitte so she falls face-first into the decomposing mess. (The catalyst for this act is Brigitte referring to Trina as a “cum bucket”.)

Planning retribution, Ginger and Brigitte sneak out at night with the intent of kidnapping Trina’s dog and leaving some of the fake blood and viscera from their “suicide” photographs outside its kennel. They never get there. Ginger, who has finally started her period, is attacked by a werewolf. Brigitte tries to fend the beast off and it’s only dispatched when passing drug pusher Sam (Kris Lemche) runs over it with his van.

In your average werewolf movie, this would be the point at which Ginger develops a tendency to sprout hair (which she does), howl at the moon (which she doesn’t) and randomly devour people (the movie has “snaps” in the title; take a guess). Director John Fawcett, working from a gem of a script by Karen Walton, does a hell of a lot more with the material. Allaying Ginger’s late menstruation with a different and more feral change – the tagline “they don’t call it the curse for nothing” sums up the concept pithily – the film becomes a metaphor for sexual awakening, female empowerment and the dangers of heightened self-awareness.

In short order, Ginger transforms from dowdy to foxy to downright fucking scary but still kinda sexy with it …

… and promptly starts smoking weed, arguing with Brigitte, pissing her mother off even more than usual, and hanging out with Jason the asshole jock. Initially Jason can’t believe his luck, particularly when Ginger comes on all hot and heavy during a back-seat make out. He soon gets scared, though. It’s bad enough when she takes the lead and starts treating him like a girl. Worse is Ginger’s extreme version of a love bite. The final straw is when Jason pisses blood. At this point, he rounds on Brigitte, wanting to know what the deal is with her sister.

Brigitte, still idolizing her big sis despite all the nasty shit that’s going down (this sentence perhaps explains why Sight and Sound are still reluctant to engage my services), has already put it together and, in league with Sam, is working towards a cure. However, thanks to Jason’s impeccable sense of bad timing and Mrs Fitzgerald interfering for all the right reasons at totally the wrong moment, Brigitte and Sam find themselves playing beat-the-clock as Ginger’s transformation reaches completion and they only have one shot at curing her.

‘Ginger Snaps’ is not only the best werewolf opus since ‘An American Werewolf in London’, it’s also an inspired black comedy, a razor-sharp and black-heartedly accurate high school movie, and a celebration of individuality, feminism and sisterhood. They say that blood is thicker than water. For Ginger and Brigitte, the question is whether blood is thicker than blood-lust.