Review: Ginger Snaps: Unleased

After finally catching Ginger Snaps and immediately loving it for its morbid humour, its well-handled puberty metaphors and for being the film to truly introduce me to Katharine Isabelle, I'm surprised it took me this long to look into the first sequel, Ginger Snaps Unleashed, but now that I have I’m happy to say that it’s a solid follow-up to the original that takes a darker path than I was expecting.

Following on from the first film, Bridgette is on her own trying to cope with the growing effects of lycanthropy that her sister infected her with through the injection of monkshood, as well as coming to terms with Ginger’s death. After she and a friend are attacked by another werewolf and her friend killed, Bridgette is sent to a rehab clinic under the belief that she’s a junkie who was involved in a car crash. With her supply of monkshood cut off and the growing danger of her turning becoming more and more likely, Bridgette makes an uneasy alliance with Ghost, the granddaughter of one of the patients who agrees to help Bridgette out of her own curiosity for her condition. With wolves inside and outside trying to kill them and Ginger’s voice taunting her every step of the way, escape is not an easy option for Bridgett.

While lacking the morbid humour and the clever writing of the first film, this is still a worthy continuation of the story, moving the focus to Bridgette is the most logical choice and it allows her to take on the same affliction her sister did, only now without her sister to help her through it. It’s a much darker tale with Bridgette suffering from some very real demons including self-harm, horny attendees and the last remnants of her humanity slowly melting away, its rough viewing especially when you’ve followed Bridgette for so long and seen her endure so much.

I’m interested to hear what people think of the ending, while I wasn’t expecting a happy ending this definitely took things in a very different direction than what I was expecting, fitting for the tone of the film but very much a downer.

Acting is where the film suffers the most, aside from Bridgette and Ghost a lot of the characters feel underutilised, the clinic is filled with a group of bitchy inmates who mock anyone they don’t like and fuck anyone they do. Attendant Tyler is looking to stick his dick into anything that moves and could’ve been a good secondary villain or even an anti-hero but the film dumps him before he can do anything interesting and clinic director Anne is forced into becoming important to the plot far too late to mean anything. The film’s biggest problem is that we never find out who the new werewolf actually is, there was more than a couple of occasions where I thought it would end up being one of the supporting cast but it never followed through and aside from the missed opportunity it would’ve allowed at least one of them to matter more to the story.

Katharine Isabelle did show up on occasion as Ginger but as a figment of Bridgette’s imagination, it’s nice to see her again and Isabelle did the most with the little screentime she had but I’m glad she wasn’t a huge part of the film because she might have taken the spotlight away from Perkins and her storyline, plus the imaginary voice trope could’ve very easily been overdone but they held back and I liked that.

Taking the role of Ghost was a pre-Clone Club Tatiana Maslany – or maybe it could be post, there’s nothing saying that all her roles aren’t connected to Orphan Black – who manages to play one of her most demented roles yet. Ghost is an enigma of a character and you’re never quite sure what to think of her, she’s nonchalant about serious crimes, she tells bad jokes that shouldn’t be jokes at all, and she had a bad habit of telling lies and half-truths. Bridgette sticks with her out of desperation but you’re never exactly sure what Ghost is getting out of this, her motivations are greyer and it makes for a more interesting character.

Finally of course we have Bridgette once again played by Elizabeth Perkins and I’m happy to see her take the lead because the first movie definitely felt like Isabelle’s film but now she has the chance to prove her own talents. And she does so quite amicably, there’s a depressive note to Bridgette’s character that she nails spot-on, this feeling of being utterly and truly alone and she feels the last of humanity slipping away, the result is a much angrier and more violent Bridgette than we last saw but fitting for the turn her character takes here. There are some similarities between the two films with Bridgette suffering the same hunger for sex and violence as Ginger but the main difference here is Bridgette has no outlet for that hunger resulting in even more frustration and fear as she tries to hold back on her own desires. It’s a very persona; performance and she carries the film for the most part.

Direction is somewhat of a mixed bag, there are a lot of elements that work, particularly in the final act, but a lot of it feels a little too safe, too unoriginal to really stand out, the first half of the film takes place almost entirely in a rehab clinic and it looks exactly like you’d expect it would, lots of dark corners, rotten walls, broken windows that are hard to see through, I almost expected the film to turn into an out-right slasher movie at some point. There’s nothing really wrong with the clinic setting and for atmosphere it does exactly what it needs to but it’s nothing you haven’t seen before and they don’t do enough with the concept to make it worthwhile.

Once we leave the clinic in the second half and move to a cabin in the woods the film takes on a much more engaging note, the sheer isolation with a constant threat of a wolf attack narrowed in on the horror aspect a lot better and watching Bridgette and Ghost booby-trap the house in preparation was fun, especially with Bridgette’s worsening condition causing trouble for them - the growing make-up work on her is particularly impressive with how it grows across her. The effect is sullied slightly by a couple of characters somehow joining them without encountering the wolf but it doesn’t take away from how chilling the film could get at times.

Ginger Snaps Unleashed is what a good sequel should be, taking a basis from the original but without aping it, we’ve already seen one Fitzgerald sister tackle the puberty metaphor, now we see the other go through her own changes but without anyone to fall back on and help her. It does miss the morbid humour but the darker path makes sense and Perkins is more than up to the task of taking the film down that road, the first is still the best but for a continuation of the story it’s a solid entry.

7.5/10