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GINGER SNAPS III: GINGER SNAPS BACK (2004)
Three's enough, don't you think? Supposedly a prequel, this third sisters-in-werewolf-danger movie is related to its predecessors only in having the same actors (Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins) come back and play sisters named Ginger and Bridget, and pretty much go through the same shit as before. Twist is, it's in the old west, in the dead of winter, at a remote Canadian outpost with supplies about two months overdue. That's a pretty cool twist actually, and they picked a great place to film it - at Fort Edmonton. This movie looks beautiful, and boasts a lot of chilly (temperature-wise, not scary-wise) atmosphere that one wishes was put into the service of a movie with less hippie prophecy shit. Bridget and Isabelle are more or less lost in the woods and come across a shredded, blood-spattered tepee. They encounter an old mystic woman (who speaks reverently of a prophecy that the movie's plot must now conform to) and are guided by a hunter (who knows English, but for some reason only starts speaking it much later) to the fort, whose diminishing staff is under the guard of two RCMP officers. I can't remember ever seeing a movie with a villainous RCMP officer, but JR Bourne doesn't even have to be bitten by a werewolf to spend most of the movie baring his teeth. There's something about werewolves (or vampires, or a lot of stuff) that just makes more sense in the old west than it does today. Part of it's the whole "age of science and reason" stuff, but also, who in the 19th century had even heard of a werewolf? That helps bring a little freshness to the concept, when its characters cannot be expected to know as much as we do. For once, the usually annoying decision never to use the word "werewolf" makes sense, even though it's frustrating to be so far ahead of all the other characters here. The "lycanthropy as menstruation" metaphor of the original is gone, and there's little of the cheeky hipness of either predecessor in evidence (Ginger's "These people are fucked!" line notwithstanding). GS3 is more of a conventional horror movie that way, and sometimes, it works. There's a great, The Thing-like litmus test for lycanthropy (my favorite part) and a creepily unwelcoming front gate at the fort, the werewolves don't revert to human form after death (good!), and no quarter is given to characters just because we might find them likeable (and there are only maybe two such characters in the fort). Still...kids aren't scary, even lycanthrope kids, and one shouldn't set too many of a movie's scares on shoulders that small. Considering the terrible secret locked up downstairs, you'd think the person keeping that secret would secure it with something more formidable than a slide-bolt (that doesn't lock) - this sets into motion the rest of the movie's plot and probably shouldn't have. Headstones singer Hugh Dillon is a curious disappointment as a hellfire-and-damnation preacher; for a guy whose rock n' roll voice is so commanding, he sounds pretty timid here, even while calling down the righteous judgment of god. I find it hard to believe his presence would've been welcome at the fort even before the girls arrived. Almost there, and a bit of an improvement on the sequel, but the trendy J-horror spaz-edit scene transitions pushed my impatience with the Prophecy Of The Two Sisters Who Will blah blah blah past tolerance. And since we're so far ahead of the characters just by knowing what we're renting, it couldn't have hurt to have toyed with the werewolf myth a little to keep us on our toes too. It's unfortunate that the characters have to suffer alone while we're shouting at them things they'd know if only they lived fifty years later and watched The Wolf Man. (c) Brian J. Wright 2006 BACK TO THE G's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |