Ginger Snaps (2000)

Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and her sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins) are outcasts at their high school and constantly obsess over death and photographing each other dying in various ways.  This often brings them into conflict with the more popular kids, including Trina (Danielle Hampton), who targets Brigitte during field hockey practice.

In revenge, the sisters decide to kidnap Trina's dog and make it look like it fell victim to the Beast of Bailey Downs, an animal which has been responsible for the death of a number of pets in the area.  While out they find its latest victim and, while preparing to photograph it, Ginger begins her first menstruation.  Not only is it inconvenient, but the smell of blood attracts the beast, which happens to be a werewolf.  It attacks Ginger and drags her off, but she escapes and the werewolf is inadvertently killed when local drug dealer Sam (Kris Lemche) hits it with his van.

The girls quickly find out that everything they ever learned about werewolves is a lie.  Silver has no effect, and the transformation doesn't wait for the full moon; well, at least not the full transformation.  Ginger becomes increasingly aggressive, both physically and sexually, grows claws, sharp teeth and a tail.  It also seems that she can spread the disease in more ways than just scratching or biting.

Brigitte becomes more and more concerned as the Ginger's affliction causes a rift between the sisters.  Seeking Sam's help, she finds a cure.  However, Ginger is graduating from dogs to bigger prey, and the bodies begin to pile up as the final transformation looms.

As you can probably tell by the fact that menstruation is involved early on, lycanthropy in Ginger Snaps is a stand-in for puberty.  And not a subtle one, either.  Both girls are late in starting, and it is obvious that Brigitte is jealous of her sister growing up first, while Ginger is quickly abandoning many of her childhood fantasies.  There are hints that this is happening even prior to the attack.

What the movie does right is not to make Ginger a sympathetic victim.  She is about as unbearable as any teenage girl, wolf or not.  It also does not try to turn things into a Twilight-style romance.  I know this came out before those books were truly popular, but a lot of juvenile fiction even prior to that series made the mistake of adding in idealized love interests for the female reader.  Happily, Brigitte stays herself throughout, not coming out of her shell.  The whole situation is handled about as realistically as one could expect.  It also does have plenty of humor.

I know there are two sequels to this, and I'm kind of curious to see how, since this one pretty much wraps itself up at the end.  I know some people thought the werewolf was a bit dodgy, but I'm just happy to see practical effects being used, and I thought it was rather effective.

Ginger Snaps (2000)
Time: 108 minutes
Starring: Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle
Director: John Fawcett


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's...
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in...
Read more