Review: Ginger Snaps Back

As happy as I was to learn that Ginger Snaps was a trilogy after the sublime first entry, in hindsight I probably should’ve caught onto the fact that a black comedy horror featuring lycanthropy as a metaphor for menstruation didn’t have enough steam to carry three movies. While Unleashed managed to build itself a place as a solid follow-on story with a much darker streak, Ginger Snaps Back just feels out of place with an unrelated prequel narrative and a lack of any substance that made the first two films work.

Set in 19th Century Canada, the film finds the Fitzgerald sisters, Ginger and Bridgette – both identical to their modern day counterparts – struggling to find shelter in the frozen lands having lost their horse and a bear trap wounding Bridgette’s leg. The bear trap’s owner, an Indian Hunter, takes the sisters to Fort Bailey, a small abandoned town populated entirely by men who have been struggling themselves since their supply caravan is two months overdue.

The Fort’s leader, Wallace Rowlands, gives the girl’s a place to stay in his late son Geoffrey’s room, much to the annoyance of Reverend Gilbert who sees them as sinful temptation, that night the girls realise why Gilbert is so against the arrival of sin, the Fort has been besieged by monstrous beasts. Ginger is bitten by an alive and werewolf-turned Geoffrey and quickly starts to show signs of turning herself, with no way of surviving outside the Fort, and the townsfolk willing and ready to kill anyone bitten in a heartbeat, the sisters have to try and find a cure before it’s too late, or die trying.

On the surface there’s a good story here, a werewolf attack in a time when werewolves weren’t culturally significant has potential but sadly it factors very little into the actual storyline, the main plot of the film is just Ginger and Bridgette trying to deal with Ginger’s time of the month before she gets found out and it’s essentially the exact same plot as the first film just with less overt sexuality and not as funny. There is a side-plot involving a growing mutiny against Wallace but even that isn’t enough to make the story all that interesting, it’s just too familiar while at the same time removing everything that made the first storyline stand out.

Another big problem is the characters and it’s same problem I had with Unleashed, there’s too many of them and none of them are any good. The town consisted of a handful of boring white blokes with beards, everyone of them indistinguishable from the other to the point where I don’t even know how many people were actually in the camp, the only standouts were guard James, who was an absolute dickhead, Reverend Gilbert, who was an even bigger dickhead, and the Indian Hunter who felt like he was suppose to have a bigger impact on the plot than he did.

I did like Wallace, or at the very least I liked the potential of Wallace, here we had a guy who was suppose to lead these men but now they have monsters at their door, their food supply running out and everyone questioning his ability to lead following the death of his wife and son. I can’t remember if Wallace every openly said he knew about the approaching mutiny but I have to imagine he knew it was coming and still tried to play the leader to keep the men from falling too far into savagery. There was interesting elements to Wallace, not least some of the selfish but necessary choices he makes in the second half of the film, I would’ve liked to have gone more in-depth with him but for what he brought to the table I liked what I saw.

Sadly for as much as I liked the Fitzgerald sisters I feel there was too much regression with their characters here, that should’ve been obvious given the prequel nature of the film but considering we’ve just went through two films watching the characters grow, having them fall back just feels lazy. Don’t get me wrong, both girls are still great in their roles, Isabelle is still as boisterous as Ginger as ever and the fear she has of the unknown change inside her is still palpable while Perkins still pulls off the introversion of Bridgette that slowly gives way to the reservation that she’s losing her sister and the choice she has to make about her. But we’ve already seen that whole story, we’ve seen these two make those same ebbs and flows, the differences brought on by the time period are relatively minor and the ones that are noticeable don’t do the film any favours, it’s a shame that it’s fallen to this after how great the sisters were initially and even in Unleashed the character growth was befitting of the series.

Direction is also lacking, I was surprised to see this had a different director to Unleashed considering both films were filmed back-to-back and released within months of each other but I guess we can’t all be Lord Of The Rings when it comes to franchise handling. Credit where its due, the 19th Century location is well utilised, the abandoned Fort and surrounding Winter wasteland with no chance of help lends itself well to a horror movie and the limitations add more of a survival horror aspect to the whole thing. Sadly very little of the rest of the film was all that notable, it’s difficult to really put into words why this instalment didn’t work without just saying ‘It’s not the other two’ but that’s basically the problem, it’s not and it stands out as the red-headed step-child as a result. It spends too long treading old ground and any attempt to try something new was just dull, whether it was the townsfolk themselves who didn’t get enough screen-time to be of any interest or the actual bloody pack of werewolves who are entirely forgotten about until the final ten minutes.

I fear lack of focus might have factored in because a town besieged by werewolves has a lot of potential for tension but other than the initial attack the werewolves don’t play into the film, instead the focus seems to be on the growing divide between Wallace and his men with the Fitzgerald sisters stuck in the middle but since they’re the main character the film puts the focus on the two of them dealing with Ginger’s sickness again. Without a clear main story the film comes off as less than the sum of its parts, there’s potential for 2 or 3 good movies in this one but trying to do all of them and the whole thing is just too fractured to bring anything interesting to the table.

I was tempted to give Ginger Snaps Back a 6 but now I’m wondering if I should lower that to a 5. I’ll give it the 6 but part of that is simply Legacy Points, I like the franchise too much to give this a failing grade. It’s not so much bad as just pointless, what could’ve been a nice ‘What if’ story is bogged down by covering the same topics but without that extra kick that made the first two stand out, be in the first movie’s pitch-black humour or the second’s more depressive outlook. There are elements that work, the Fitzgerald sisters, Wallace’s attempt to control his men, the werewolf siege, but it’s too all-over-the-place and as a whole the execution is lacking, if you’ve enjoyed the first two movies then there’s a decent watch here to see more of Ginger and Bridgette but if you weren’t keen of them then this isn’t gonna change your mind.

6/10