Director Brett Sullivan continues the saga of the Fitzgerald sisters in Ginger Snaps: Unleashed, picking up where his predecessor left off: the infection of the surviving sister, Brigitte. Screenwriter Megan Martin wisely retains the original premises and themes while presenting her own, however inconclusive, interpretations. Though not as polished as the first and rather vindictive at times, Ginger Snaps: Unleashed is a darker, bleaker attempt at pure lycanthropic horror.
Brigitte Fitzgerald (Emily Perkins) is alone after killing her werewolf sibling, Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), but not before being infected in an effort to save her sister’s life. Believing she’d found a cure via Monkshood, an herb also known as Wolfs bane, Brigitte discovers that the plant is only a preventative and, in order to thwart the “curse of the werewolf,” she must inject the herb regularly. She accidentally overdoes and is sent to a rehabilitation clinic named The Happier Times Care Center. Once there, cut off from her supply of Wolfs bane, Brigitte’s anxiety grows as she anticipates her ensuing transformation. Not only does Brigitte need to escape in order to procure more Monkshood but another werewolf has located her whereabouts with the intention of mating. Luckily, another patient, a young girl referred to as Ghost (Tatiana Maslany), befriends Brigitte and they escape. However, aside from Brigitte’s unwanted suitor continuing to pursue his courtship, Ghost is not what she seems.
Martin maintains the metaphor found in the original of the animalistic urge of sex to be presented in the form of the werewolf. However, she issues her own feminist perspective in that Brigitte is attempting to stave her biological desires yet never makes clear her reasons for so doing. For instance, Martin presents males in a very misandric light in that the male werewolf is viciously, at any and all costs, pursuing Brigitte in order to mate (as opposed to Karen Walton’s original script, which restrains from lapsing into sexism while presenting a feminist perspective of the subject matter). This image is paralleled by a hospital attendant named Tyler (Eric Johnson), who preys upon the Happier Time’s females patients by offering them their drug of choice in exchange for various sexual favors (sensing this criticism, Martin attempts to rectify her characterization of the male by later absolving Tyler of the crime of raping Ghost but not his aforementioned offenses). Thus, from a heterosexual perspective, Brigitte is justly protecting herself from becoming victim to the sadistic male libido. Yet, inconsistently, Martin also posits the possibility that Brigitte is a lesbian in that she willfully sleeps beside Ghost when the two are alone in the house of Ghost’s deceased grandmother atop the hospital staff’s initial assessment that Brigitte is a homosexual during her first group therapy session. To this effect, we are witness to a group masturbation nightmare/fantasy sequence where the female patients of Happier Times hedonistically participate in a sexual collective without the external impediment of the males outside the hospital’s walls.
A more radically divergent aspect from the original is that any instances of sardonic humor have been abandoned atop the fact that Sullivan creates a work of pure horror instead of continuing John Fawcett’s mode of domestic, familial drama. Michele Conroy’s quick cuts, especially during nightmare/hallucination sequences, contribute to the overall haunting, persistently threatening, atmosphere which never offers the refuge of hope. The viewer anticipates that, having sat through over an hour-and-a-half of horrific struggle, that the film will end on a redeeming note. However, consistent with what came before, Sullivan logistically closes with a psychologically plausible plot twist, reminiscent in tone of Rob Reiner’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery, leaving his audience aghast.
The climax is based upon a surrogate sister bond between Brigitte and Ghost, the latter going to great lengths in order to secure herself a companion in the world. Admirably, Ghost’s otherwise arbitrary character trait of an overactive imagination due to her infatuation with comic books arrives at a conducive resolution by the final frame. Again, Martin took the plot element of the female bond from the original and integrated it into her own work, with highly deviating results.
Aside from the ambiguity of Brigitte’s metaphorical motivation for avoiding the curse of the werewolf, the film never validates the existence of the literal werewolf in the sequel. By introducing the loophole that Monkshood doesn’t cure lycanthropy, mindful viewers may speculate that the character of Ben, whom Brigitte tested the herb upon in the original and, unaware of what he’d been injected with and that he must maintain continual use in order for the drug to be effective, has since completed his transformation and is the antagonist now in question. However, this possibility is never proposed or even hinted at as the viewer is left unrequited at the movie’s finale.
As a work of unrelenting horror, Brett Sullivan succeeds admirably, presenting Megan Martin’s conflicting script in a riveting, tension-filled format. Though not as polished or controlled as its predecessor, Ginger Snaps: Unleashed does offer a barrage of ideas, many of which are derived from the original but conclude in vastly differing manners.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
