GINGER SNAPS: UNLEASHED (2004) Needed to snap a little harder Your appreciation of this sequel to the 2000 menstrual-werewolf hit will probably depend on which sibling you found more interesting: the sexy werewolf, or the younger sister who had to contend with having to live with a sexy werewolf. Me, well, you know me, always a sucker for a pretty girl who can tear off my limbs. That pretty girl (Katherine Isabelle) does have a few guest appearances in this sequel, but seeing as she died at the end of the first movie, it's in the capacity of a ghost of sorts - like the dad in Six Feet Under, she turns up occasionally to offer advice and/or ridicule, as filtered through the memories and personality of the people who remember her (and some of the worst dialogue looping I've ever heard). Which, in this case, is her sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins). Brigitte is staving off her lycanthropy infection with injections of wolvesbane, which is only effective up to a point. She's found having sort-of overdosed on the stuff, and is put into one of those hospitals for troubled teens where every patient is a young woman and every orderly is a young man - the rest of the movie isn't too tough to figure out from here. Brigitte cuts herself a lot, sometimes while shaving her back, sometimes not - self-mutilating goth chicks are gonna eat this movie up. The heavy-handed lycanthropy-as-menstruation theme of the first movie is absent here; with its crumbling-hospital scenery, this is more of a straight-up horror flick and it's acceptable as that - nothing more, but adequate. You see a bit less of this werewolf (a word which, ugh, is conspicuously avoided) than you did of the one in the first movie, which is a bit of a blessing since the effects on it aren't good enough to justify long and revealing looks. Still, the introduction of a second werewolf makes for one werewolf too many in this movie, which posed enough possibilities by placing a werewolf in a clinic for troubled teenaged girls. It's disappointing but not at all unexpected that the male werewolf wouldn't have anywhere near as many issues (i.e. as much depth) as Brigitte, and is more of a primal lust predator type figure, because men are so easy to figure out, right? Also, Tatiana Maslany as another patient, Ghost, put me off with just one word. She looks to be about twelve and at one point is instructed by the screenplay to use the word "cunt", as a punch line of sorts, as if to shock us, or make us laugh. But this fails because she does not use it as one familiar and skilled with the word would use it. If she'd said "cuntrag", or "cuntscrape", or some other compound variant of "cunt"...maybe I could've bought that, and been accordingly shocked, or amused. Instead, all I heard was a screenplay's contrivance, a cheap stab at provoking a cheap result, and it's so unnecessary and irrelevant she lost me entirely for the rest of the movie, and by association, Perkins became a little hard to take seriously too though no fault of her own, in their scenes together anyway. I know, it's just one word, not even one I'm uncomfortable with (you want one of those? Try "clitoridectomy"). A lot of movies have survived worse dialogue decisions than that, but not movies which depend so much on the credibility of their characters. Some Canadian movies showily demonstrate their Canadianness at every turn, with frequent shots of flags, colored money, and Can-Con-required inclusion of songs by the likes of Anne Murray, Stompin' Tom Connors, and other people our government pretends are representative of our talent. Other movies (often horror movies) just as showily avoid drawing attention to Canadiana, presumably for fear of scaring off American audiences. Ginger Snaps: Unleashed occupies the nice and comfy in-between which is neither ashamed nor disproportionately Molson-commercial boisterous of its country of origin. There isn't any yap about it, but we do occasionally see the appropriate bumper stickers, coins, and best of all, a brutal beating with a curling rock. Shot back-to-back with another sequel, actually a prequel I think, since when I was at this fort in Edmonton I was told it was shot there so it probably had to be set in the Old West. Just how Brigitte and her sister get there, I look forward to finding out. Sort of. BACK TO THE G's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE