I first heard about Ginger Snaps during the commentary for Freddy vs. Jason when Robert Englund mentioned it while talking about Katherine Isabelle. I didn't think any more about it until I heard about it again on IMDB and that's when I learned that it was a werewolf movie that treated it as a metaphor for puberty. I'm a big fan of werewolf movies anyway but that sounded like an interesting new take on the mythology. The guys at Deadpit.com said good things about it and when I saw some clips of on one Bravo's Scariest Movie Moments specials, I knew I had to see this film. And when I did, I wished I hadn't. This movie is considered a cult classic so it has an audience but I don't see what enjoyment anyone could get out of this plodding, ugly, and downright unpleasant bullshit movie. This flick pissed me off to no end.
Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald are two death-obsessed Goth girls who love staging and photographing fake death scenes. They're generally disliked at their school and when a certain cheerleader irritates them, they decide to kidnap her dog. However, when they go out to do so, Ginger is attacked and nearly killed by a violent creature that's been killing a lot of dogs in and around the town. The creature is killed when it's hit by a vehicle while pursuing the girls but shortly thereafter, Ginger begins to go through bizarre changes. Her hair starts turning silver, unusual fur starts appearing in the wounds left by the beast, and she develops a violent sexual appetite. Ginger believes that this is just a bad period but Brigitte thinks her sister is becoming a werewolf after being attacked by one. As Ginger's violent behavior and anger increases along with the physical change, Brigitte must find a way to cure the werewolfism before it's too late.
The idea of drawing a parallel between becoming a woman and becoming a werewolf is, as I said, an interesting idea and kind of a logical one. The werewolf has often been seen as a metaphor for the id, that wild part of ourselves that we're told to keep a leash in the civilized world. Naturally, since most werewolf movies involve men being the monster, the werewolf is viewed as the sex-hungry beast that lives within every man, ready to come out at a moment's notice. Take for example An American Werewolf in London. After the main character's first transformation, despite his initial confusion of having no memory of the night before and waking up naked at the London Zoo, there's a moment where he crawls onto the bed with his lover while she's on the phone and begins kissing her a lot, even making growling-like noises while doing so. Basically, he's becoming a wolf in every sense of the word. In the Hammer film The Curse of the Werewolf, it is said that the vices of man can weaken the soul and allow the werewolf to come to the front. One of these is described as lust and the main character does kill a woman who tries to shack up with him. For God's sake, the movie The Howling has a scene of two people turning into werewolves while having sex, so you can't get more literal than that! Bottom line, since the werewolf is seen as such when it comes to the usual men, it's only natural that it would be used as a metaphor for the sexual awakening of a woman and exploring that was an interesting an idea for a movie. Unfortunately, for me anyway, this deeper meaning becomes completely pointless due to a major flaw in the film that I will now discuss in length.
Katherine Isabelle and Emily Perkins play the two leads, Ginger and Brigitte, and these two characters are the reason why I despise this film. What's a common theme among werewolf movies? You care about the person who becomes afflicted with this horrible curse and feel bad for them becoming a bloodthirsty monster every full moon or so. There are exceptions like Silver Bullet but that was a movie where the man who was the werewolf wasn't the main character and was an out and out villain. These girls are two of the most selfish, hateful, despicable characters I have ever seen in any movie. I'll admit that Goths genuinely turn me off because I just don't understand their life style of dressing all in black and being preoccupied with death but it's their life. However, these girls are complete assholes to everyone around them: their parents, their classmates, even each other most of the time. While they're standing on their school's playing field, they play a game they call "Search and Destroy" where they pick out someone they don't like and talk about how they think that person would die. What they say about a cheerleader is so loathsome that it's unbelievable and this movie tries to make me feel bad for them when this girl spends the rest of the movie picking on them but they were complete bitches to her. If she'd been mean to them before for no reason, I may been a little more forgiving but that makes them look like bullies more than anything else and Ginger's subsequent attacking and ultimately killing this girl made me hate her even more as a result. Later at the dinner table, their mom asks Ginger about the backaches she's been having lately and she acts like a complete smart-ass about it, describing how nerves send pain messages to the brain. She was just asking, you bitch! You don't have to be so condescending about it.
Ginger's the bigger asshole of the two but Brigitte isn't much better. What really gets me is a scene where this drug dealer who's been trying to help her calls her over to the side of the playing field so he can tell her what he's come up with. What's her reaction? She gives him shit about talking to her in public and tells him to meet her privately. His reaction is, "Excuse me for giving a shit", which would have been my reaction. He's trying to help you and you bitch him out? I would have just told her to go to hell and not tried to help her ever again. And when Ginger later attacks the cheerleader they insulted, she says something like, "She's an asshole, she's not worth it." No, you and your sister are the assholes!
I've heard some people say they identify with these girls, which kind of scares me to be honest. I don't know, maybe I was just clueless but when I was in high school, while there were some jerks, none were as loathsome as these two. I just don't see how anyone could identify with these two downright mean skanks. As a result, their attitudes make me not care about what happens to them. I don't care about the horrific transformation Ginger goes through or the emotional toll it takes on them because there's no reason for me to. It's the same problem I had with Rob Zombie's Halloween movies. Almost everyone in those movies were so hateful that I wanted Michael Myers to butcher them. No matter how deep or fascinating the metaphor is, if I don't care about the ones I'm supposed to, I'm not going to be interested. By the end of this movie when Ginger becomes a full-blown werewolf and attacks Brigitte, I was wishing this ugly piece of trash would just end already.
Speaking of which, these two sisters made some sort of blood pact that they would die together by sixteen and yet it seems like they hate each other most of the time. I know siblings fight but these two have just enormous amounts of contempt for each other. It doesn't make it any easier to accept when they keep going back and forth between hating and loving each other. Near the end, one moment Brigitte curses Ginger for destroying everything that's important to her and then, she suddenly wants to cure her, saying, "She needs me." That was a complete turn of emotions in a few minutes! And while we're on the subject, Ginger spends the majority of this movie demoralizing and making her sister feel like garbage whenever she even gets the hint that a boy likes her. The stuff she says is just such vile venom that it's disgusting. Some try to argue that it's probably the werewolfism getting to her but since she was a horrible person to begin with, I'm willing to bet that being turned into a werewolf just magnified that personality. Even when she becomes a full werewolf, Ginger kills Brigitte's supposed love interest out of spite when she refuses to join her. I'm supposed to care about her again because...?
This movie's metaphorical look at puberty would have been easier for me to enjoy and explore had the two main characters been likable and normal, for that matter. Someone who's a Goth is already an outcast and considered weird to begin with so it's hard for me to see them becoming a monster as horrific. If the two girls had been normal, everyday high school students who are going about their lives when this happens, it would have been a lot more powerful to me. They don't have to be overly bubbly but making them likable enough girls with friends and a lack of sexual experience who go through this would have been more potent. Seeing a fairly nice girl who's sexually repressed become a sexy, violent woman with a blood-lust and ultimately a werewolf would have hit a stronger cord with me. That said, Katherine Isabelle is sexy, I'll give her that. However, I'm not sure how to critique her and Perkins' performances. If that was how they were supposed to play it, mission accomplished but they fail in making me care about them.
The other characters are hit and miss. Kris Lemche is the most likable person as Sam, who tries to help Brigitte find a cure for the werewolfism... and yet, he's a drug-dealer, so I don't know how to feel about that. I'm guessing Danielle Hampton as Trina Sinclair, the cheerleader who was insulted by and ultimately killed by Ginger, is meant to be a snobby person but, again, I saw her as someone who was treated like crap by those two jerks and identified with her being bitchy back at them. I even kind of liked Jesse Moss as Jason, a jock who gets infected by the lycanthropy after having sex with Ginger, mainly because I just thought he was a goofy dumb jock. Mimi Rogers as the girls' mother Pamela was a little too over the top for my taste in how she was a stereotypical mom who's out of touch with her kids and when she decides to help the girls get away with murder at the end, I was thinking, "Give me a break!" And John Bourgeois as their father Henry just acted like a hen-pecked husband who did nothing whatsoever.
The werewolf transformation is much different in this film than the typical one. Instead of transforming into a full blown monster every full moon, Ginger gradually metamorphoses into a werewolf over time, similar to Seth Brundle's transformation in David Cronenberg's version of The Fly. It starts with her wounds healing not long after she's attacked and escalates to her growing a violent sexual appetite, her hair slowly becoming silver, her fingernails becoming claws, a tail appearing above her buttocks, all leading up to the final wolf that she becomes. I'll give credit where credit is due: the makeup effects are very well done. They're appropriately disgusting and what's even more striking than the ultimate werewolf is the stage before that, where Ginger is still human but her face is very canine in appearance. The ultimate werewolf is impressive in its full animatronic glory. Curious thing about it, though, as well as the werewolf that attacked Ginger: they have no hair. Ginger has a bit of a mane in her final form but other than that, none whatsoever. It doesn't kill it for me but I thought that was strange. Her final transformation in the back of Sam's van is also well done, similar to the great latex transformations in the werewolf flicks of the 80's. I've heard some comments as well that the puberty metaphor is way too obvious and it really is. Granted, I wouldn't care if it was better done because of the characters but let's face it, it's about as obvious as a brick to the head. It could have been done classier is all I'm saying.
I see Ginger Snaps as a huge missed opportunity when all is said and done. What could have been an interesting exploration of puberty as told through a werewolf transformation is ruined by the two lead characters being absolutely unlikable. Some may be able to look past that to enjoy the metaphor and others have said they can identify with the girls but I just don't get that. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned but I need likable characters to be horrified at what's happening to them. Even the most hateful slasher movie teens (and there are some really terrible ones, don't get me wrong) don't offend me as much as these two sluts did. If you're one of the fans of this movie, power to you but to me, it's a huge example of a movie that sucks and I will never watch this unabashedly ugly piece of trash ever again.
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