Awesome Movie Review: Ginger Snaps

Although I once declared that The Onion Has Jumped The Shark, they redeemed themselves with Make-A-Wish Recipient Now Wishes Macho Man Randy Savage Would Go Away. “Snap into remission!” might be the cleverest phrase ever published online. And I’ll admit that I was intrigued by the capsule in this article describing Ginger Snaps:

Since Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the ultimate metaphor for the horrors of high-school life, missed an adequate big-screen adaptation, this clever, resourceful low-budget Canadian werewolf film will have to suffice. Owing much to Carrie, the film follows two sisters (Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle) who are a few years late to menstruation, though at least they’re spared the indignity of getting pelted with tampons. Instead, a late-night prank on one of the school’s “popular” girls goes awry when Isabelle has her first period and gets savagely mauled by a wild animal. Her transformation into a confident, insatiably aggressive sexual predator gives her the chance to exact some revenge on the vicious kids who wronged her.

Naturally, I was intrigued. Wait, did I just use “I was intrigued” in two consecutive sentences? Oh well, if any of you idiots want a blog that will astound you with a veritable variety of vocabularical voluminousness, I suggest you check out Herr Thesaurus and his Haus von Tausend Wörtern Anyway, my oft-mentioned intrigue stemmed from the references to both Buffy and revenge, but I would soon find out that my renewed faith in the Onion was sadly misplaced.

Now, as some of you probably know, I’m a Buffy fan. I have every episode on DVD and I love them all. (Except for Season Four (The “Felicity” Season) which would be compltely without merit were it not for the beginnings of Spike’s transformation from villain to robot-humping ally.) Ginger Snaps is no Buffy. All the great things about Buffy–the humour, the tragedy, the sexy ladies in leather pants kicking and grabbing each other–are absent in Ginger Snaps. If I were to pick something to compare with Ginger Snaps, I’d choose Heavenly Creatures. Both films feature two young female characters, one sexy and one homely. In both films these two characters are united by a strange bond. In Heavenly Creatures, it’s a fantasy world of make believe. In Ginger Snaps, it’s a suicide pact between two sisters. And in both films the drama comes from a series of events that drive a wedge into the bond formed between the two girls and the attempt to restore that bond.

In Heavenly Creatures the bond between Kate Winslet and the homely chick was broken by a force separation. In Ginger Snaps, things are a little more complicated. Well, not exactly complicated, but confusing. Actually, confusing is not quite it, either. Muddled. That’s the word I’m looking for. In Ginger Snaps, things are bit more muddled.

The makers of Ginger Snaps try to conflate lycanthropy with puberty, with mixed results. The sexy chick gets her first period and is promptly mauled by a werewolf. But it’s not a normal werewolf. Normal werewolves are peoples until the full moon, then they become werewolves. But in Ginger Snaps, since lycanthropy is the same thing as menstruation, the transformation is far more gradual, starting with minor changes (little tail, hair where there was no hair before) and evolving into claws and a full-on wolfman face. Some people might find this clever. I do not. It’s bad enough that I have to deal with guys like Spielberg spending over $100 million to take a bitchin’ story about aliens and turn it into a saccharine depiction of how Tom Cruise is a shitty father, I don’t need my low-budget Canadian horror films trying to make a werewolf story into a Salingeresque tale of crybaby suburban pubescent angst. Just make the chick a damn werewolf.

When the sexy chick starts her transformation into a werewolf, she begins to grow apart from her sister. Ginger Snaps follows the storied cinematic tradition of portraying werewolves as the most popular kid in school. The sexy chick starts to hang out with and hump people she never would have hung out with or humped before. This upsets the homely sister, who sees her sexy sister becoming both a werewolf and a typical teenage skank. So, with the help of the local drug dealer/historical botanist/dreamy hunk, the homely sister sets out to find a cure before the next full moon.

As the sexy sister develops more and more into a werewolf, she becomes more violent and randy. She even has unprotected sex, which passes on her lycanthopy to her partner. Because lycanthropy, in addition to being menstruation, is also a sexually transmitted disease that cause dudes to bleed out the wang. But contrary to what the Onion capsule would have you believe, her actions have nothing to do with, “revenge on the vicious kids who wronged her.” She kills a dog a janitor and her guidance counselor, all because they annoyed her or got in her way. The one girl the sisters sought revenge against dies accidentally. She kills people because she’s a damn werewolf. Revenge, like communism, is just a red herring.

Now I don’t want to divulge any more of the plot, because I don’t want to give away the somewhat Shakespearean in magnitude ending. Although I will reveal that a chick does get hit upside the head with a shovel, so I guess the comparison to Buffy isn’t completely off-base. Oh, if only Shakespeare had made use of the rutila ex machina in his works.

You might be reading this Awesome Movie Review and thinking to yourself, “Boy, Shawn didn’t care for that Ginger Snaps flick. Not true. It wasn’t what I expected, although that was due to the fact that I was intrigued by a misleading capsule. And I feel that a chick becoming a werewolf does not need to be embellished with comparisons to menstruation and AIDS. I also didn’t care for how the sisters are attempted to be portrayed as morbid and obsessed with death. They go around staging fake deaths and photographing them, which I guess is supposed to show how depressed and Goth they are. But faking your own death for photographic purposes is really no big deal. I’ve done it myself. But other than that, Ginger Snaps was a pretty decent flick.

It seems like many low-budget horror flicks go for the ridiculous gore angle. Ginger Snaps doesn’t go that route. It’s not about who or how the werewolf kills, it’s about one homely sister trying to save her sexier sister from becoming a common skank. That’s a worthy cause, I suppose. And although I might criticize Ginger Snaps for what I perceive as unnecessary additions to a decent werewolf story, I have nothing but praise for the way the filmmakers approached the story. This movie isn’t about gore or violence, it’s about people helping people to not become werewolves. It’s a story to which we all can relate. On my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, I give Ginger Snaps three tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein.