Ginger Snaps

Paralleling the transformation of human into werewolf and teenage girl into woman is a good idea, especially considering that a girl's entrance into womanhood involves blood. Ginger Snaps, a Canadian film from 2000, directed by John Fawcett and written by Karen Walton, takes this premise and runs with it, but it is so saturated with blood and gore and so ineptly shot that I found it to be a crashing bore.

Ginger and Brigitte are sisters obsessed with death. They make morbid videos staging their own demises, and are outcasts in their school. The town they live in has had several dog mutilations, and when they go out one night Ginger is attacked by some kind of werewolf. This also happens to be on the night she gets her first period. She starts to turn into a werewolf. Lots of people die.

Once they had the idea, Fawcett and Walton don't seem to have known what to do with it, other than spill a lot of fake blood. The effects aren't very good, especially at the ending, when Ginger fully turns into a wolf. The lighting is always dim and bathed in ted, which is fine for effect but makes it difficult to see what is happening, and the editing is chaotic.

The two young women playing the sisters are okay--Emily Perkins is Brigitte, the younger sister, who works feverishly to find a cure for her sister, who is played by Katherine Isabelle. Mimi Rogers turns up as the girls' mother. I think my favorite moment is when she says, "Christ on a cracker!"

Werewolf metaphors make sense, especially in this context, but Ginger Snaps just doesn't accomplish what it sets out to do. Surprisingly, the film was well received and actually won some awards, and there were two sequels made, neither of which I will go out of my way to see.