Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning

You know, as a huge bastion of movie knowledge, I get asked for recommendations ALL the time.  Especially around Halloween, where I really should just start charging for the sheer amount of lists I end up writing, and two movies I always, ALWAYS recommend are the 2001 cult film “Ginger Snaps” and its 2003 sequel “Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed”.  These are the epitome of great horror movies.  The first film centering around two sisters, one of whom is slowly turning into a werewolf in a not all that subtle, but still very well done, metaphor for puberty.  It was a solidly paced, well written horror movie with great performances and amazingly pulled off make up effects.   It was so good an idea that in 2009, “Jennifer’s Body” tried the exact same plot, and failed hilariously.  It came out and made some waves at festivals and did pretty well on DVD so a couple years later two sequels were made back to back.  “Ginger Snaps 2” was a sequel that I was actually not really looking forward to because, as I have come to learn, when a good horror film gets a sequel it’s rather redundant and underwhelming.  This was the exception, I recommend it just as much as the first one, actually I recommend watching both of them in one sitting, it’s quite interesting.  This time, Ginger’s (werewolf girl from movie one.) sister Brigitte is the one turning.  She’s taking steps however by injecting herself with monkshood which is delaying the transformation, but in hot pursuit is a male werewolf intent on mating with her.  Not helping matters is when she ends up in a rehab center and her injections are taken away.  This movie is how I’d love all horror sequels to be done.  It ups the stakes, it adds growth to the characters, it takes where the original started and keeps going replacing the puberty metaphor with drug addiction and withdrawal, not to mention this ending is just perfect, creepy and totally not going to be spoiled here.

            What is going to be talked about here is the third sequel, “Ginger Snaps Back:  The Beginning”, which as the rather dumb title suggests, is more of a prequel set during frontier times.  Shot right after “Ginger 2”, we find our two heroines Brigitte and Ginger wandering through a forest after the coach they were traveling in has crashed.  They come across a Fort where the men are constantly fighting werewolves and things are looking bleaker by the minute as the girls arrive and Ginger is once again bitten.

            So how is the movie?  *sigh* it’s really disappointing.  Don’t take that the wrong way, it’s not a terrible movie by any means, I’ve seen and reviewed far far worse, but following on the heels of two horror movies I would give either 5’s or at the very least 4.5’s to respectively?  This is really remarkably underwhelming.

Let’s start with the good, Katherine Isabelle and Emily Perkins are incredible as Ginger and Brigitte like always.  The movie has a very gothic, fairy tale-like atmosphere to it that kept giving me flashbacks to Neil Jordan’s excellent “The Company of Wolves” (WATCH THAT, NOW!) and ANYTHING that can make that claim is doing something right.  The make up effects are still great, many of the supporting bit characters are very well performed, and the film has a very interesting conclusion.

But, as I said this movie was not nearly as good as the other two.  I find it hard to really say why this is, since it had a lot of things that I liked about it.  Like the camera work and the costume and production designs, are all spot on, so what’s wrong with it?  The script, that’s what.  It’s just so lazy!
  This movie is sadly padded, not as padded as things like “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” but the movie really doesn’t go anywhere.  I kept waiting for the plot to start, but it just never seemed to happen until about the halfway point and even then the movie still drug like a sloth on the back of a turtle.  It was just a clichéd “group of sexist and superstitious men blaming all their ills and bad luck on the arrival of two women.” Type of story, even though that makes no sense as it was implied that the fort has been fighting off werewolf attacks for awhile before the girls were even lost in the woods! Not helping things are the stereotype priest character that is the main instigator of the whole deal.  This character is just ridiculous and has no right to exist other than to give this movie a cheap way to build tension, one that I might add, barely works.  Every single time the movie looked like it was going somewhere, the priest would do something or something else would happen that basically made this movie have the same five or six scene played on a loop!  It gets really old even faster than you'd think.    

There’s a lot of good elements here, but they’re going to waste because this script is just a badly written cliché that’s hoping its visual aesthetic will make up for its short comings.  It’s a lot like how I felt about Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” now that I think about it, only not QUITE as much of a train wreck.  This movie had a lot of potential but it never really rises to the occasion to take advantage of it.  It’s not a terrible watch, but as a big fan of the other movies it’s almost inexcusable how just plain old average it is.  I would recommend it, if only for the cinematography and performances, but I would much rather you go out and watch, or re-watch, the first two movies instead.

2.5 lycanthropes out of 5.

Next time:  Troll Hunter.