Ginger Snaps : Aux origines du mal

After the success of the superior werewolf thriller "Ginger Snaps", it seems Lions Gate rushed to churn out two sequels in the shortest amount of time possible, those being the frightening "Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed" and the disappointing "Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning". Where "Unleashed" was a bit of letdown compared to its predecessor, it made sense and it followed the storyline well and even managed to wrangle up a boatload of genuine scares. Then there's "Ginger Snaps Back", the weakest and wholly unnecessary entry into the series. It should have stopped with "Unleashed" but the writers have decided to give our doomed heroines Brigitte and Ginger one last go around.

This time Ginger and Brigitte (a major plus is that Katharine Isabelle reprises her role as Ginger whereas she was missing in the second film save for a few scenes) are wandering around in the Canadian wilderness after being stranded in the early 1800's. For some reason it's a prequel that has nothing to do with the story that was developed in the first two films, so what's the point besides some cheap werewolf scares? When they come across a wrecked Indian camp that depicts carnage and brutal murder, they hastily make way to find shelter. That's when they find a strange fort in the middle of nowhere that some soldiers reside in, and that's where the nightmare begins. At night, a pack of vicious werewolves continually attacks the fort outside the thick log walls, and by day things take a nasty turn for Ginger when she is bitten... again. It's all apparently a foreshadowing of the events in the first film but none of it is needed. There's no tension or intrigue where there was in the first and second, plus any trace of black humor that made the first film so ingenious is not apparent anywhere. The editing and cinematography seem rushed and at times I found the film almost incoherent. A huge disappointment that further ruins the integrity of the first. They should leave Ginger and Brigitte alone now.

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*

Nothing special. And that's a shame.

Ginger Snaps Back is a retelling of the storyline used in the original, with a few changes here and there. I got this movie the day it came out and couldn't wait to watch it. However...

This is a period piece and while I respect the fact that the director didn't want the sisters to speak with phony accents, the dialogue really didn't match up with the time. Lines like "These people are f***ed" really took me out of the story. It actually started to remind me of watching a high school play put on by jaded teenagers.

But being the fan and overall geek that I am, I still watched the movie again with the director's commentary track. I expected it to be boring. I didn't expect it to make me angry. The running theme for the commentary was "not enough time". I really angered when I found out that the script wasn't done until there was only ten days until the first shooting day. That along with the director and writer talking about how they came up with the idea for the film was infuriating. You see, they thought it would be a "treat for the fans" to do this movie. Maybe I'm just cynical, but that sounds like a lame attempt to make some money off of a title many horror fans have come to love.

But I'm getting off topic.

Overall, I liked this film. It's good to see Canada's finest (Katharine and Emily) on screen together once again. The dream sequence felt very abstract and Argento-like, which was cool. The only real complaints that I have are the dialogue and certain subplots that didn't belong. They should've gotten Karen Walton to write this one (she wrote the original).

I give it 6/10.

Oh yeah, one more thing...

This might be nitpicking, but where was the original song? It only appeared once in Unleashed and is completely absent from this one. This is disappointing to me because I always thought of that song as the theme for the films.

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.

Neither sequel has been nearly as good as the original, but considering how brilliant "Ginger Snaps" was, no one could reasonably expect that. Actually, my main disappointment with both sequels is that I wanted what GS had--horror, humor, hipness, irony. But anytime there's a sequel that tries to be the original, it fails because it tried to emulate the first installment. Both sequels have completely different story lines and character. The only real continuity is in the characterization and the themes. And that's a brilliant decision. I probably liked "The Beginning" better than "Unleashed," but I just finished watching the former, so I can't be objective. It is, in its own right, a really terrific film. All of the films have had their fair share of visual panache, but this one is so beautiful it reminded me of "Sleepy Hollow" at times. I almost wish they'd been released under completely different titles--I can't help but compare the sequels to the original, and they're not really sequels. They all feature the same two leading actress; they're all about werewolves; "Unleashed" even picks up after the first left off. But you could watch "Unleashed" without having seen "Ginger Snaps" and still know what's going on, and since the third starts close to 200 years before the first, you obviously don't have to see the others. They're separate films connected by actresses and themes, as I see it. Speaking of the actresses--Emily Perkins and Isabelle Katherine are, of course, beyond reproach. Their direction is wrong; they don't fit in to the milieu they're put in, but I think that's a director error. Or the director's way of maintaining the integrity of the characters we know from the first two movies. Ginger and Bridget can't exactly be Puritans, can they? Next to the drop-dead brilliant score Mike Shields composed for the original, this soundtrack doesn't stand a chance. But it works very, very well with the setting and the action. I had to watch one scene towards the end (the fire) twice only because of the music. One thing I absolutely loved, though found a bit campy--Ginger spends half the movie dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, though her hood, and the rest of her clothes, are black...It makes for some stunning cinematography, though. So basically, after "Ginger Snaps," it's a bit of a letdown. But not taking the original into account, it's an incredible film that you shouldn't miss.