Grant Harvey, producer of Ginger Snaps: Unleashed, fails to successfully add to the mythology of the Fitzgerald sister’s legacy. It is not that Harvey isn’t a sound director, but as a critical appraiser of scripts, he was unsuccessful at selecting a screenplay that was engaging or even relevant. Co-screenwriters Stephen Massicotte and Christina Ray, like their predecessor, Megan Martin and her script for Ginger Snaps: Unleased, revisit the themes posited in Ginger Snaps. However, unlike Martin, Massicotte and Ray do not offer any new perspectives aside from arbitrarily setting the film a century before the original atop filling the film with rote, stock characters.
Sometime during the early 19th Century, Ginger and Brigitte Gitzgerald find themselves lost in the woods after washing up on the Canadian shore. Orphaned after their parents drowned when the ship the family was traveling upon sank, the girls come upon a Native American woman (Edna Rain), who prophesizes their fate. Upon departing from the sage, Brigitte triggers a bear trap and is quickly rescued by an Indian hunter (Nathaniel Arcand) from the leering noises as something begins moving around them. He takes them back to the Northern Legion Trading Company, led by Wallace Rowlands (Tom McCamus), as the frontier settlement awaits desperately for their supplies, which are two weeks delinquent. Aside from potential starvation, the colonists are threatened by “Wendigos,” amid civil hostilities within the outpost, prompted by a belligerent preacher named Reverend Gilbert (Hugh Dillon). Shortly after being reluctantly accepted into the settlement, Ginger is bitten by someone or something within the gates of the Legion.
The major flaw with Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning is that the audience becomes unnecessarily preoccupied as it anticipates the third installment in the trilogy to align itself chronologically with the previous two films. By setting the prequel a century before the events in the original, the screenwriters inadvertently present the idea that the history of the lycanthrope in relation to the Fitzgerald bloodline is of epic proportions. Yet, even by the climax of the film, no reason is given for the sisters appearing at this time nor does it even offer the idea that the present characters of Ginger and Brigitte are ancestor’s to their modern-day counterparts.
Also, instead of progressing the ideas found within Ginger Snaps as Martin attempted to do, Massicotte and Ray’s story merely retells the original in colonial Canada, though without the narrative girth of Karen Walton’s original. Yes, we have the metaphor that the plight of the werewolf is symbolic of the disease brought over by the settlers, but this notion is only briefly uttered and never explored or addressed later in the film. Thematically, in order to remain consistent with its precursors, the symptoms of the “disease” would need to be portrayed as rampant hedonism. The film does offer the potential for conflict as such in the figure of Reverend Gilbert but sadly, the preacher is only implemented as a stress-inducing antagonist in an otherwise functional microcosm.
We do have the theme of the red and the black introduced early into the film, thus literally representing the Fitzgerald sisters by their hair color. Historically, the “Red and the Black” refers to the antagonism between the clergy and the military in 19th Century France. However, though we do have both factions represented in Ginger Snaps Back, little is made of this polarity. It seems as if Massicotte and Ray merely stumbled upon the phrase and thought that it would work for the film without bothering to question its relevance or if they would be able to integrate the idiom to any meaningful ends.
In all actuality, the film fails at most every turn but two: Michael Marshall’s cinematography is phenomenal as the snow-laden colony brings out the stalwart browns of the settlement’s walls alongside the crimsons and royal blues of the cast’s wardrobe. Alex Khaskin’s Gorecki-eque compositions also serenely compliment the arid white wilderness. However, cinematography and soundtracks do not make a film. There is no character development and the characters themselves are clichéd, stock cutouts with the exception of the two female leads, which the screenwriters rely more upon what their forerunners accomplished than attempting to have the Fitzgerald sisters stand on their own two feet, as well as the figure of the Indian hunter. This said, for whatever reason, the screenwriters deemed it necessary to unjustly kill their one accessible character by none other than Brigitte. The acting is complacent at best, leaving the viewer with the impression that the actors didn’t care for their roles as they apathetically utter their lines. Even the special effects (in lieu of the fact this film was shot back-to-back with Ginger Snaps: Unleashed) are lukewarm, epitomized by the blood within the film glowing a distracting, campy Dawn of the Dead candy red throughout. Though, I will state that Wallace’s son, Geoffrey (Stevie Mitchell), who is a child werewolf, is impressive but, as expected, this strength was quickly eliminated shortly after being introduced.
If someone deems it necessary for the Ginger Snaps saga to continue with a fourth production, we can only hope that the filmmakers choose to follow with the loose end in Ginger Snaps: Unleashed and not with Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning. Whereas the original engaged its audience on most every level and its sequel presented us with a vision of pure horror, Ginger Snaps Back fails at most every turn.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
