OK, so, maybe I found Lisa Frankenstein a tad bit underwhelming. But that just means maybe I can make up for it with another teenage girl horror movie sort of thing, one that looks like it was set in a different time period–or maybe more accurately just filmed in one–and go from there. I’ve had Ginger Snaps on my radar for a while now. It’s leaving The Criterion Channel at the end of the month. Why not go with that? I have always had a general affection for werewolves, truth be told, but unlike vampires or zombies, there aren’t quite so many well-known movies focused solely on that mythological creature.
Granted, I don’t think Ginger Snaps is supposed to be all that funny, but here we are.
Sisters Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle) are outcasts at their local high school, and both seem to like it that way. They basically have each other, and their tastes tend more towards the morbid considering the movie opens with the two of them putting together a photo montage for some sort of art class presentation. There’s also been a rash of brutal dog murders in the neighborhood, chalked up to some unseen beast that leaves behind really gruesome corpses, making this so not a movie for dog lovers. However, when the sisters decide to prank a bully by kidnapping the bully’s dog, two things happen: Ginger has her first period and the Beast attacks Ginger. Brigitte fights the monster off long enough for the two to make a run for it, and the monster is killed when the local drug dealer (Kris Lemche) runs it over with his van.
However, things start to get very strange after that. Ginger’s wounds heal up very quickly, but she also seems to pick up a new, more aggressive attitude. She takes a liking to boys for the first time, getting very assertive in the backseat of one guy’s van while he’s saying he wants to put a condom on (he never quite does). She’s dressing more provocatively, and that’s before she starts growing a tail. Brigitte is concerned that her sister, her longtime confidante and only really friend, is growing distant and even violent, something made worse since Ginger seems to be much, much stronger than she used to be. It’s not long before Ginger is off stalking neighborhood dogs herself, and then she moves up to more human prey. Can Brigitte bring her sister back from whatever has afflicted her?
Let’s get the basic thing out of the way first: the movie is in part a puberty metaphor. Ginger is bleeding in new places, growing hair where she didn’t have them before, and suddenly wants to flaunt her body in ways she never would have before. She’s also subject to really extreme bouts of rage, and unlike other girls her age, she is more than capable of taking it out on anyone she feels has been eyeing her (or for that matter Brigitte) up in ways she doesn’t appreciate. Or in the case of one victim, she claims to be. Ginger could just as easily be trying to keep things covered up. Meanwhile, her younger sister Brigitte is mostly confused and wants to take things back the way they were. Besides, the puberty metaphor works in other ways in that Ginger’s similarly afflicted boyfriend’s transformation appears to have given the guy some bad acne.
What sells this movie, aside from the puberty metaphor and the way the script defies genre conventions at key moments, is the performances of both Perkins and Isabelle. Isabelle obviously has the flashier role. Her personality shifts quite a bit over the course of the runtime, and she sells it well. I’ll even give props to the way the movie makes her gradual transformation through small physical changes apparent too, something that I picked up when I noticed Ginger’s teeth started to look a bit sharper after a certain point. But Perkins is also excellent as the incredibly concerned Brigitte. A movie like this works as well as it does by playing off the initially close relationship of the two sisters, and I wouldn’t necessarily think it something of a stretch that one of the reasons Ginger starts to push herself away from Brigitte is to protect her sister from what Ginger knows is coming. Yes, the full-body werewolf could look better, but all things being equal and given the budget this movie probably had, I think they did a damn good job with a fairly unconventional teenage girl coming-of-age story. Or perhaps, a coming-of-rage story.
Grade: A-
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