Tag: katharine isabelle

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Ginger Snaps Back – The Beginning (2004)

gingers snaps back

For the third (and final) film in the Ginger Snaps series, they went back to the beginning. Or rather the beginning of the beginning. Or something. What I’m saying is they made a prequel. 

Set in 1815, this film follows two sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabel), as they battle werewolves and try to keep Ginger from turning into one after she’s been bitten. 

If you’ll remember, that is exactly the plot of the original film, even down to the same actresses playing characters with the same names and (more or less) the same personalities.

Instead of being two modern girls living through the hell of high school and being obsessed with death, these sisters have survived a terrible accident that killed their parents and everyone else in their party while exploring the great wilderness.  

They come upon a nearly abandoned fort filled with suspicious characters. The people inside have been waiting for a party to return with food and supplies, but they are two months late.  Wolf-like creatures have been attacking the fort regularly.

One night Ginger discovers a strange, deformed boy hidden in a room. The boy bites her. It will come as no surprise to learn the boy was bitten by a werewolf and is starting to turn. Soon enough Ginger will start to turn as well.

To keep that from happening, she needs to kill the boy. But her father is none too keen on that happening, and killing a child proves a bit difficult for her as well.

The original Ginger Snaps was a terrific little horror film that blended the smart high school satire of Heathers with a good dash of bloody horror. This third entry feels like they just took the same concept and threw it into a different time period. The sisters act just like they do in the original film, down to the way they talk (which is rather off-putting since it takes place in the 1800s). There also isn’t much satire to it.  It really doesn’t feel like they took the time to think through the earlier time period but needed it to be a sequel since (spoilers for the previous films) Ginger is dead and Brigitte is a full-fledged werewolf. 

The end result isn’t terrible. It is a perfectly serviceable horror film. It just pales in comparison with the first one.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004)

ginger snaps 2 poster

Ginger Snaps (2000) is a wonderful coming-of-age horror film about two angst-filled, sarcastic teenagers who form a death pact before one of them gets bitten by a werewolf and begins to change.

Its sequel finds one of the girls, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) stuck in a rehab clinic after she overdoses on the wolfsbane she’s been injecting to keep her own transformation at bay.

At the clinic, she meets Tyler (Eric Johnson) who trades whatever the girls are addicted to for sexual favors, and Ghost (Tatiana Maslany) a young ward of the clinic who quickly realizes that Brigitte is a werewolf and becomes her only friend.

The film loses a lot of what made the original so great – mainly the bond between the two sisters and their withering takes on suburban life in high school. Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) does appear in the film, but only as a hallucination and she’s more foreboding than fun). Ghost doesn’t provide nearly the same punch.

Yet, it is still an enjoyable film. It relies more on the drama of whether or not Brigitte will escape the clinic and stop her full transformation into a werewolf than horror tropes. Though there is a werewolf stalking her, looking for a mate.

The first film used the werewolf transformation as a commentary on puberty, this film critiques the ways in which men tend to prey on young women.

When the horror does come it is appropriately violent, and gory. Overall it isn’t quite as great as the first one, but it’s still carries quite a bite.