GINGER SNAPS (2000) Title of the year! Any year! Lycanthropy as a metaphor for menstruation/menarche. That's the thematic metaphor which kept me from seeing this in the theatres - yeesh, hasn't this been done like a million times or something? Not that I can name even a single instance off of the top of my head, but this is NOT a new idea. Maybe there are subtleties here which only women can pick up on. New idea or not, for most of its running length, Ginger Snaps is a really involving little movie and probably the best movie about werewolves made in...a really long time, anyway. (I'm having trouble thinking of any good ones since The Howling) Emily Perkins and Katherine Isabelle star as Brigitte and Ginger, two sisters in the same class (Brigitte skipped a grade) who have that uniquely teenaged romantic notion of death and suicide, of course without the faintest clue as to what being suicidal actually feels like. Their suicide pact is more about showbiz than anything else, as is further suggested in a class project in which they present a slide show of pictures of each other as having killed themselves in variously nasty ways. Then Ginger gets mauled by a werewolf (suddenly, every day's a heavy flow day!), and predictably, once they get close to some "real" blood and guts, they're all "Eew! Gross!". "The Beast Of Bailey Downs" is what this werewolf (which until now, just mauled dogs) is called, and the people of Bailey Downs must have an odd mix of concern and indifference if they go so far as to give it a scary name, but don't actually make any efforts to hunt down or just avoid it. Just a part of life in Ontario, I suppose. They do keep voting for Chretien, after all. While playing too much with obvious metaphors (lycanthropy as menstruation, later, lycanthropy as a sexually-transmitted disease) Ginger Snaps, for the most part, doesn't cheese it up with too much overly-faithful werewolf lore. A silver bullet might kill a werewolf, but hitting one with a van and reducing it to a long, chunky smear does the job too. It's not going to re-assemble itself from that. For the most part, the plot is fun but not so lighthearted that it starts fitting in too comfortably with the post-Scream crowd. An unforeseen danger of disposing of a corpse in the freezer is clever and amusing, even if the issue comes up remarkably quickly. The starring girls are both good; Perkins always looks like she's expecting a giant foot to descend out of the sky and squash her, and Isabelle obviously only needs a small push to turn her into one of the midriff-baring yuppie larva she despises. Mimi Rogers (gah! That hair!) and some guy I don't recognize as their parents, however, get pretty thankless roles as parents who are so clueless that they don't even hear their girls screaming right there in their own house. The dialogue's a little inconsistent ("Now there's something you can sink your teeth into...so to speak."), which I suppose is to be expected from any movie which wears its metaphors with such blinding obviousness. Now, I said, it's good for most of its running length. I don't know if anyone else came away with this impression, but once we get to the scene in the teacher's office, for some reason, things just stopped dead and never restarted for the rest of the film. It doesn't exactly run out of steam like a lot of overlong horror movies do - the pedal's to the metal, but the machine isn't in gear. Sure, it's never boring, but it abandons its interesting characters to run through some well-travelled paths (like the inevitable gruesome transformation, or the girl going batshit and killing everybody) and logic has now gone out the window (werewolf-girl has now about tripled her body mass in a couple of minutes, not to mention the fact that the werewolf just doesn't look very good and we see way too much of it). Mimi Rogers just kind of disappears after the scene at the greenhouse party (where the local pot grower keeps his plants unattended behind an unlocked door - smaaart). And while I know it might be maybe more than just a little tightassed of me to complain about "silver bullet" solutions to these problems in even a werewolf movie, I still sure as hell don't like the fast-acting consequence-free cure for lycanthropy cooked up late in the film. While Ginger Snaps doesn't completely putz out at the end like, say, Near Dark did, one senses that screenwriters (Karen Walton and director John Fawcett) worked a lot harder on the first two thirds than on the last. Still, there's a lot to love here, and it's never boring, and that's so much more than I can say about most movies of this genre in this day n' age, it'd depress me if I was still up to my neck in it the way I was a couple of years ago. BACK TO THE R's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE