Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning, the third film in the Ginger Snaps teenage girl/werewolf horror franchise, teleports sisters Ginger (Katherine Isabelle) and Brigette (Emily Perkins) Fitzgerald featured in the first two films to a 19th-century, wilderness trading post at the edge of civilization. Ostensibly a prequel, the female leads in Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning share the same names as their presumed descendants or relatives. Ginger Snaps and Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed were original, creative variations on the werewolf subgenre, using horror film conventions as a metaphor for the often-disturbing transformations from prepubescence into female adulthood via the other, more common monthly cycle, menstruation.
In Ginger Snaps, blood, gore, but more importantly, mordant wit dark satire, can be found in abundant supply as Ginger's physical and internal transformation, from an introspective death-obsessed goth girl into sexually voracious seductress, leads to a series of violent attacks against rivals and locals alike, with Brigette dutifully attempting to hide her sister's increasingly eccentric behavior from her parents and the authorities, while also searching for a cure for her sister's increasingly noticeable affliction (e.g., leg shaving is taken to stomach-turning extremes). Ginger Snaps' success, however, lay less in the horror element (jump scares were minimal, given awkward staging in the major set pieces, due primarily to budget limitations) than in the black humor and satire derived from its teen angst and dislocation formula (e.g., Winona Ryder in Heathers). Oddly, the second film in the series, Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed also borrows tropes from a Winona Ryder film, this time Girl, Interrupted. In Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed, Brigette, hoping to prevent her own transformation into a werewolf through frequent injections of wolfsbane/monkshood is institutionalized for drug addiction (the track marks on both her arms are no help in arguing her case). There, Brigette encounters a cross-section of teenage and college-age girls with serious emotional problems, a sympathetic, if clueless administrator, and a predatory orderly who trades sexual favors for drugs. Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed ends bleakly, if not violently, for most of the characters.
Due to limitations inherent in the 19th-century setting, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning scales back the verbal wordplay that made the earlier films innovative genre entries. Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning also dispenses with backstories for the principal characters, opening with Ginger and Brigette, presumably orphaned, on horseback wandering through a snow-misted forest. With echoes of a Brothers Grimm fairytale, the sisters encounter an old Native-American woman, a seer who makes a prophetic statement before disappearing into the mist. After being abandoned by their now jittery horse, Brigette walks into a bear trap, seriously injuring her ankle. Saved by a mysterious, leather-clad Native-American simply referred to as the Hunter (Nathaniel Arcand), the sisters are guided into the care of the Northern Legion Trading Company, whose trading fort, located at the edge of the encroaching wilderness (echoes of Antonia Bird's Ravenous) has been besieged nightly by ferocious creatures.
The all-male trading fort is a cross-section of disgruntled traders, a sadistic military officer (J.R. Rourke), a chloroform-addicted doctor (Matthew Walker), a bible-thumping preacher, Rev. Gilbert (Hugh Dillon) and the sympathetic chief administrator, William Rowlands (Tom McCamus), whose poor judgment threatens the entire trading fort and anyone seeking refuge there. At the fort, the sisters encounter and witness a series of escalating clashes between and among the men that highlight intra-group rivalries, inter-ethnic conflict (between the Hunter and the military officer, and between the officer and Rowlands, who married a Native-American woman), as well as the requisite sexual tensions between Ginger and the Hunter (along with the minister's constant imprecations about sex and sinfulness). Ginger, of course, becomes infected through a werewolf bite, and the remainder of the film unfolds around several, increasingly fatal attacks on the trading fort by the werewolves (with echoes of Neil Marshall's recent Dog Soldiers or John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13), and the sisters' determination to unknot the curse before Ginger becomes fully transformed into a werewolf, with the help of the Native-American seer and the enigmatic Hunter, whose destiny seems bound up with the sisters. As expected, escalating confrontations follow, with most of the secondary characters eliminated by the werewolves or through personal conflict and Brigette, following the pattern set in the first film in the series, with Brigette confronted with an intractable, moral dilemma, her sister's lives for her own. A suitably twisted plot turn follows.
Although Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning has its share of longueurs, its principal problems are four-fold: first, the attempt at archaic, 19th-century English fails more often than it succeeds, with the occasional anachronistic remark betraying a lack of seriousness in the writing; second, given the relatively large cast of characters, most remain undermotivated and one-dimensional, with relationships hinted at, but left undefined by the script; third, the sisters seem, at times, to be superfluous to the main plotline, the escalating attacks on the trading post by the werewolves and the deteriorating relationships between the men at the fort; fourth, the connections or relationship between the Fitzgerald sisters here and the sisters from the first two films seems ambiguous at best, confusing at worst, with no clear interpretation offered by the film, even in the closing voice-over narration by one of the characters.
The production design (a period trading post turned historical park cleverly redressed for the film), the costume design (with nods to the sisters penchant for gothic dress in the first film, as well as hooded cloaks that echo Little Red Riding Hood), and cinematography by Michael Marshall marked by painterly compositions dependent on natural light sources and fluid, inventive camerawork, all belie the limited budget available to the director, Grant Harvey and his production crew. As the third film in the series, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning may be missing the first film's dark humor or the innovation inherent in upending and combining tropes from different, distinct genres, but with suitably lowered expectations, genre fans are not likely to be disappointed with Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning. Whether space remains for another film in the Ginger Snaps universe, however, seems unlikely.
© Mel Valentin, 4th November, 2004
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