Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004)

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

It's 1815, Brigette (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) are sisters wandering in the woods. Brigette steps on a bear trap, and they're rescued by Indian guide Hunter. He brings them into a Fort but finds the people there under siege by dark forces. They are surrounded by werewolves outside, and no one can truly be trusted inside.I like this premise for a straight horror movie which is a change from the quirky horror original. It works for a little while but then the pace grinds down. Ginger is bitten way too early. The other characters don't get much of a chance to be compelling. The tension is never as high as it should be. The direction isn't as good and the action isn't as exciting. The promising premise is wasted.

I have seen all Ginger Snaps films and aparrently this one is by far the worst.The ending of the second one reaches a point where I want to know "WHAT HAPPENS TO BRIDGETTE!!!" but instead what I get is some movie set a few hundred years before the first one even happened.As far as acting goes - Emily Perkins and Katherine Issabelle are very good - very underrated Canadian actresses, but the rest of the cast do decent jobs at best. (the worst performance being the person who played the old Indian woman - I am not even going to look her up).As far as Werewolf design goes this is very good, it is very believable - that is however as far as things go here.Watch #1 - Watch #2 then make up your own third entry - it will be better than this.

I'm saddened. I really wanted to like this movie as I am the biggest fan of the original Ginger Snaps; and its leads, Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins for their work in the original, and Perkins even more so for almost single-handedly saving "Ginger Snaps: Unleashed." Alas, I am afraid that this series is like the original Highlander: "There can only be one."You know you're in for a long ride from the very beginning. It breaks a rule of cinema narration that no scriptwriter was dumb enough to break prior, a rule so dumb to break nobody thought previously to make it a rule: it has two introductions. The first introduction is in screen text, about a hunting party never returning in 1816. Stark, dark, and ominous. Except then they followed it with a narrated introduction by Isabelle. The latter, I am afraid, is an incoherent train-wreck about the curse of the red and black (checkers?) having a chance to be stopped . . . blighting the land . . . the white man bringing diseases . . . oaths higher than God or fate . . . or something. Even Ed Wood, Jr. would have been embarrassed enough to rewrite it. Unfortunately, Isabelle drew the short straw on reading the mess, and I felt sorry for her. This "has-it-begun-yet" effect starts the movie out at a leaden pace, from which it never recovers, and creates a half-assed horror-myth for the story to depend, which insults the audience, not to mention, perhaps, Native Americans.The story starts in 1816 as two orphaned teenage girls Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins) come to a fort in the wilderness that has been under siege for months by some kind of diabolical creatures (I think they might be werewolves). The remaining men in the fort are just a little suspicious since the sisters were able to reach it untouched when nobody else could reach it or set foot outside it without getting ripped to shreds. Except an Indian called Hunter.It is apparent that the entire production was in over its head at attempting a period piece like this, from the producer, the scriptwriter, to the director and crew, to the actors. The dialog sounds anachronistic, and isn't very good anyway. The characters do not act 21st century, but neither do they act in a way that's believably 19th century. Isabelle and Perkins, and the other actors, are given no historical point of reference and no dialog coaching to be able to pull this off. I could forgive the dialects being inconsistent; if anything, I think dialects were far more diverse in that area then, but they sounded too commonplace. At this budget, they could have aimed for a squalid, scaled down, timeless feeling, but they did not. I could not believe that Isabelle and Perkins' characters fit into the early 19th century at all. The movie tries to joke about this. Ginger (Isabelle) occasionally pipes in with modern swear words that so lilted her dialog in GS1, but given that this movie never sounded 19th century anyway, the comical contrast never works. Music was a plus in both the original and "Unleashed." In this movie it is just awful. It sounds like they hired a single cellist to play four notes and then looped them repeatedly. Then there was Ginger's transformation: at least they should have made it somewhat consistent with what occurred in GS1, instead of making her feverish and dizzy. Please. To see a young woman in that time period misbehaving Ginger did. THAT would have been exciting. What we got was boring. The rest of the cast tries with varying degrees of success. J. R. Bourne does well as the second-in-command, but his character is just two-dimensional, the a—hole dimension and the d—chebag dimension. Hugh Dillon as the Reverend, also a villain, is allowed to overplay his part, and his accent sounds jarringly anachronistic. In writing his role, however, it's apparent that the screenwriter took care to consult neither the Bible, nor sermons written at the time. The Reverend's preaching sounds almost as nonsensical as the werewolf myth given at the beginning, and I don't think it was deliberate. Matthew Walker as the doctor and Brendan Fletcher as Finn give very good performances, and Fletcher's was so good I was surprised and saddened he did not have a larger part. Tom McCamus does a fair job as the fort commander, or would have done one had the makeup department not given him such a silly wig. He almost makes it look dignified, but his gravitas was one false move away from side-splitting comedy. I think I'm the wrong gender and sexual orientation to judge Nathanial Arcand playing hunter. Moreover, he reminded me too much of David Carradine in Kung Fu, and that probably means I'm the wrong generation, too. It makes me want to recuse myself from reviewing him. The movie never rises above its leaden pace and never becomes actually scary. Then there are the little things, like the aforementioned music, or that a werewolf makeup was an immobile mask that was a throwback to the 60s. The werewolves looked like neither wolves nor men, nor anything like the werewolf in GS1.The only good thing: the ending. No, I'm not being the droll critic talking about what a relief it was that the movie was over. It did have a good ending. You should decide fifteen minutes in if you think it's worth waiting for. Unfortunately, I think this was a desperate endeavor to try to cash in on a great movie's name while putting forward as little money and effort in as possible.(Upgraded one star from my original review. It is very good to see Perkins and Isabelle work together, and sisters' bond was still evocative and interesting.)

Do the makers of Ginger Snaps Back have any idea what they are doing?This movie is an utter mess. The script feels like a rehashing of fifty other horror movies, including some parts from the original Ginger Snaps. The story is paper thin, dull, and makes no sense. Even the title of the movie is stupid. To say Ginger Snaps Back, would have to mean that she has done it once already. But she hasn't, this movie is set in the 1810's in the region that would become Canada fifty years later, and almost two hundred years from Ginger Snaps. The historical setting does not enrich the story at all. Sisters Ginger and Bridgit end up re-enacting much of what they did in the first feature, only with ten times less character. It's almost impossible to care. Kathrine Isabelle was one of the driving forces behind Ginger Snaps. If she was given something new to do here it would've helped. As the movie progresses it gets less about her and more about Briget, as it did the first time. Problem is that Emily Perkins is not as interesting or as good an actress as Isabelle.The only time Ginger Sanps back did something for me was during the climax. I remember last year wanting to make a short werewolf movie, but I couldn't figure out how to make it convincing. If I'd gotten it to work, It' would have looked something like Ginger Snaps Back. The animatronic, muscular beast from the first (and also the second) is now nothing more that a guy in costume with a mask that it practically identical to the ten dollar item I bought in the Haloween store. The money which should've gone to the make up effects department ended up somewhere else.Ginger Snaps Back, wasn't even necessary in the first place. Considering how mediocre the second was, a third entry sounds even less promising and, all the idiotic decisions and miss judgements which went into designing the film, take the already silly idea and make it worse.