Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning

What made the original Ginger Snaps a classic horror movie is the way it used the genre to explore universal themes. It offered a unique take on sibling rivalry, death, suicide, puberty, feminism, sexuality and love. Most poignantly, it gave us Ginger, a complex character with a genuine hatred of herself and everything around her.

Ginger Snaps also introduced Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins, two talented, beautiful and utterly believable actresses. So while I was a bit put off by the premise of Ginger Snaps Back, I was excited for the chance to watch the girls reprise their roles.

Ginger Snaps Back is a very watchable movie. It re-imagines the sisters in a different era, which is interesting. It's creepy. The special effects are much better than in the original. The climax is very cool. And the sisters are both perfectly portrayed. Unfortunately, when it was over, I wasn't thinking about my own mortality. I was just thinking, "Hey, cool werewolves."

I was also irritated by the dialog. Most of the time, the characters speak in stilted sentences appropriate to the era. But occasionally, Ginger drops a pithy one liner or a curse word which seems completely out of place.

The supporting cast was filled with stereotypes. The harsh minister and the sage native American hunter were especially flat.

Ginger Snaps Back gives you two things. An entertaining werewolf movie. And an excuse to watch two talented actresses portray Ginger and Brigitte. But it doesn't give you anything beyond that.

This prequel concerns the sisters, Ginger and Brigitte, making their way through 19th century Canada in what one can assume to be a previous incarnation.

Having lost their parents, the orphaned girls trek alone through the wilderness during a cold, harsh winter. They stumble upon the remains of an Indian village, which looks to have been ripped apart by some great beast. One of the few survivors, an old wise woman, warns them that they must "kill the boy" or "one sister will kill the other." When Brigitte accidentally steps into a bear trap a short time later, the two girls are rescued and assisted by a handsome Indian man known only as The Hunter, who leads the girls to nearby Bailey Fort...perhaps the very fort around which the future suburban community of Bailey Downs will spring. The fort is in poor shape. The men are suspicious, the atmosphere is bleak and the supplies are running low. It seems that the men who were sent for winter provisions several months before never returned...at least, not in human form. Indeed, several strange and vicious beasts seem to be stalking the woods just beyond the fort...and there may be one within as well!

This 3rd installment in the imaginative and intelligent Ginger Snaps series lacks the black humor and witty script of the previous two. The girls are lovely and convincing, the setting of a snowbound fort is both creepy and beautiful, and the new character of The Hunter is intriguing and nice to look at, but this film takes itself far too seriously. I also had a hard time accepting the fact that a young girl in the 19th century would utter a phrase like: "These people are f-cked." Such instances of modern dialogue inserted into a setting of 100+ years past is disconcerting at best...but maybe I'm the only one it would bother.

The beasts are highly visible in the final scenes of the film, and are pretty impressive looking. Other than that, the films gets a little weighted down by the gloomy atmosphere, with nary a joke to be found. The religious metaphors and Native American mysticism seem to have been pulled right out of "The Crucible," "The Scarlet Letter" and "Thunderheart" and seem to have been used for set dressing rather than as crucial plot devices. Still, there's a good amount of blood and gore to please most splatter enthusiasts, and an open ending which seems both to resolve the second film and bring us right back around to the first.

It's not a terrible movie by any means, but since I'd come to expect a certain amount of smart black comedy and found none here, it was just a little disappointing. The girls do a great job with their characters, as they always do, but they had far less to work with this time around. I give this a 6 on a scale of 10, whereas the first two each get a 9.

Ginger Snaps and Ginger Snaps II: Unleashed were very clever movies. This one, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning however lacks the dark humor and brains that the first two had. Although it is interesting to see this situation, as Ginger and Brigitte face the whole werewolf problem in the 19th century, without the benefits of the time ahead of them.

Ginger Fitzgerald (Katherine Isabelle) doesn't have the full attitude the Ginger from the first movie had. The sisters don't have that mysterious darkness that they had before, which is quite disappointing as it is what attracts you to the movie in the first place. The speech is strange... they will talk in a sort of old fashioned way, then start talking more modernly, and sometimes will swear, which makes it slightly less believable.

Although there are some great scenes this film, its only good if you are a fan of the Ginger Snaps series really. Otherwise this may seem just a long and boring hour and a half of snow, blood and one big fort. *6*

The first Ginger Snaps sequel—Unleashed—didn't feature much of Ginger (the lovely Katherine Isabelle) but made up for her absence somewhat by being wonderfully weird, with an off-beat atmosphere, bizarre characters, surprising hallucinatory scenes, and an unusual industrial soundtrack.

Isabelle fans will be happy to hear that Ginger plays a much bigger part in Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning; unfortunately, the film itself is far less entertaining—a dark, somber, and ultimately rather boring tale set in the wild west, where two sisters, Ginger and Brigitte (Isabelle and Emily Perkins), survivors of a ship wreck, stumble across a woodland fort inhabited by a group of men under regular siege by werewolves.

The majority of the film revolves around the distrust and mounting tension between characters, and Ginger's gradual transformation after she is bitten by a wolf-boy, the afflicted son of one of the fort's occupants. This is told in a dreary, lifeless fashion by director Grant Harvey—who is clearly more interested in presenting artistic images than in telling a riveting story.

While the use of the same characters in a different time period and setting is undeniably unique, it is inadequately explained, which proves frustrating, and although the film does deliver some decent werewolf action in the final act, it's not nearly enough to compensate for the drab nonsense that has gone before, which is complete with trite mystical Native American mumbo jumbo for good measure. On the plus side, Perkins, who has spent the last two films being sullen, is finally allowed to show us how attractive she can be.

Ginger Snaps Back the Beginning: 5/10: The original Ginger Snaps truly deserves its cult classic label. Leads Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins created original characters that transcended both the teen angst genre as well as werewolf films needless to say. The second sequel transports both characters to the 19th century Canadian wilderness. The good news is that the girls and their relationship is exactly the same as the first film. The bad news is that the first film took place in modern suburbia and the girls' characterization simply couldn't feel more out of place. It's like coming across a valley girl in a WWI Drama.

Anachronisms aside what they really don't have from the first film is the witty banter and subtext of the story. The script is a true bare bones affair with that old Assault on Precinct 13, Rio Bravo plot. But instead of gang members our antagonists are werewolves. Now this plot can work mind you (See Dog Soldiers for a perfect werewolves trapping people movie) but with the first two Snaps films about puberty and addiction a trapped with crazy people plot line is quite a let down.

The script is lazy in other ways as well. We have a ridiculous preacher character that would have been thrown out of 17th century Salem for being too fundamentalist and we also have endless Native American (okay Native Canadian) mumbo jumbo.

There are very very few things that grate on my nerves faster in a movie than the wise Indian character with the endless intelligible incantations and feathered dream catchers. And of course they predict the future and give warnings of bad tidings and initially scare our girls but turn out to be the real good guys that everyone treats badly. Pretty generic and lazy screen writing.

Needless to say the movie is all over the map. The end is good, the werewolves look good and honestly I can watch Katharine Isabelle all day long. The plot however is a really a mess and Snaps really doesn't make much sense if you haven't seen the other two Ginger Snaps films and even less sense if you have.