Ginger Snaps is a werewolf horror movie starring Katherine Isabelle, Emily Perkins, Kris Lemche, Mimi Rodgers, Danielle Hampton, Jesse Moss, and Peter Keleghan.
Ginger (Isabelle) and Brigitte (Perkins) are two teenagers - Irish twins, really - living somewhere in Canada. They are both somewhat late bloomers, both highly morbid. Their school project for "Living in Bailey Downs" is to take a series of elaborate photos depicting them as gruesomely dead, and it's good work, though it gets them sent to the counselor's office (Keleghan; the counselor, not the office). They're deep into the "this sucks we should die" aesthetic, their mother (Rodgers) is trying desperately to connect and be the cool mom, and their dad (John Bourgeois) is pretty checked out.
And then one night, Ginger finally gets her first period (this is, I promise, relevant), they go out looking to kidnap the dog of the girl bullying Brigitte at school (Hampton; the girl, not the dog - the dog was uncredited, I did check). They don't get the dog, but they do get attacked by a werewolf. Ginger gets bitten and subsequently begins to change. Brigitte recruits the local drug dealer Sam (Lemche) to help (he killed the first werewolf with his car, and knows a lycanthrope when he sees one) and they try to cure Ginger, but she isn't making it easy what with all the new cravings (meat, sex, murder). It all ends really badly, with multiple people dead (including Ginger), and Brigitte alive but infected.
So, right off the bat, the movie uses lycanthropy as a metaphor for menstruation pretty much all the way through. It's not a perfect metaphor - the werewolf curse is also treated as a disease, and it's communicable by sex as well as bite - but Ginger's transformation in a werewolf is treated as by turns intriguing, horrifying, empowering, and just flat-out gross (sound familiar?). That's probably about as far as I'm gonna go into that metaphor, so let's think about Ginger Snaps as a werewolf movie, I'm better qualified to talk about that.
One thing that the movie underlines is how being a werewolf makes you a monster. I've seen werewolves becoming hungry in movies and wind up killing and eating people, but the werewolves here just want to kill. The curse takes effect almost immediately and is notable even without a full transformation; Ginger (and later, Jason (Moss), whom she infects) grow sharp canines and long fingernails. Jason also gets a nasty case of acne and starts pissing blood, which is neither here nor there.
The effects are entirely practical, which means that Ginger's fully transformed self bears some resemblance to the dog-ish form of The Thing (as in John Carpenter's, not Ben Grimm), but it's shot in a such a way that it looks pretty effective. The werewolves here aren't sleek and furry and mostly lupine, they're nearly hairless, moist, and asymmetrical, and that neatly plays into the theme of lycanthropy-as-puberty.
The girls' performances work perfectly. Emily Perkins retreats into her oversized clothes as Brigitte, but is clearly the smarter of the two and throws herself into trying to protect and cure Ginger. Ginger, for her part, doesn't go fully evil until closer to the end; she has moments where she knows what she's doing and tries to stop, but she can't fight the murder-urge for long.
I really like that their mother goes a little around the bend towards the end and we can kind of see where the sisters get their dark edge; mom clearly had some formative experiences growing up. Actually the acting and writing is pretty solid across the board.
I am less fond of how many dogs die in this movie, but none of it happens on-screen, so that's a small mercy. I think it's safe to say that it's a pretty good argument for crate-training, though.
My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Medium
Next Up: House on Willow Street
No comments:
Post a Comment