Blu-ray Review: THE GINGER SNAPS TRILOGY Is A Finely Honed Horror Franchise
I remember Ginger Snaps coming out 25 years ago and getting good reviews. For whatever reason, I never engaged with the film, I might have lumped it in with the many post-Scream, ironic horror films of the time, or maybe I found the title a little too cute. Anyway, it’s taken me a quarter of a century to watch John Fawcett’s film (and its two follow-ups) and I have to say that I was really impressed. At times we judge films sight unseen with a certain amount of prejudice – and sometimes we get it wrong.
The first film in the franchise follows Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins), two sisters who spend their spare time faking gruesome death scenes and photographing the results. When Ginger is attacked by a werewolf, she slowly starts to change into into a blood thirsty creature as her younger sister strives to find a cure before it’s too late.
Ginger Snaps: Unleashed picks up a short time after the events of the original, with Brigitte now infected with the werewolf virus and addicted to monkshood (the herb that keeps transformation at bay). She ends up in a rehab facility, but still can’t escape the curse of the full moon.
Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning envisions the Fitzgerald sisters (once again played by Isabelle and Perkins) traversing the wilds of early 1800s Canada. Coming across a trading outpost, the pair find themselves taking refuge from the hairy beasts stalking the woods.
What sets the Ginger Snaps trilogy apart from other werewolf films is their originality. Sure, they have many of the genre tropes, but they have a freshness to the storytelling that makes them engaging in their own right. Werewolf films are often told from the perspective of lone men, made outcasts from society by the curse of the full moon, or are framed as whodunnit murder mysteries. Building the narrative around two teenage sisters allows the filmmakers to pull in fresh elements, while the Canadian setting keeps it once removed from the standard high school setting of many U.S. films. That’s not say that they don’t pay homage to other genre films. The shadow of Carrie looms large over the first film (right down to Mimi Rogers’ overbearing mother) and the sequel has a nice nod to An American Werewolf In London. Meanwhile, Ginger Snaps Back uses Neil Jordan’s fairy tale focused, A Company of Wolves for a little inspiration.
From a genre perspective, the low budget effects are very well done, the films all present plenty of scares – and each instalment actually develops and builds on the mythos. Normally you expect some drop-off in quality in a franchise like this, but all three movies manage to maintain a strong standard. Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins also do good work on a performance level – which is not always the case when it comes to teen-focused horror movies.
The Ginger Snaps movies may not have set the box office alight when they were first released, but their quality resonates – and that’s why they still hold up a couple of decades later.
Special Features
Second Sight Films could very easily have skimped on the extras for this three disc Blu-ray release of the Ginger Snaps trilogy – but the set is absolutely stacked with goodies. The films come with…deep breath… commentaries, deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes material, interviews (new and archival), audition tapes, trailers, TV spots and more. There’s hours and hours and hours worth of material on hand here and it offers up a fascinating look at a trio of movies which really deserve to be seen.
This is once again stunning stuff from Second Sight – and you’d be howling mad to miss out on it!
