**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle, Kris Lemche, Mimi Rogers
screenplay by Karen Walton
directed by John Fawcett
by Bill Chambers Ginger Snaps is so eager to have its double meanings understood, like a kid with a secret, that the text upon its subtext becomes transparent–and when you can see through a film, it's just not as much fun. About a month ago, I watched John Landis's An American Werewolf in London for the first time in years and gradually came to understand how and why I'd identified with it as an adolescent: After being inflicted with the werewolf's curse, David, the hero, goes through a second adolescence. Ginger Snaps makes David into a literal teenager–and a girl, a Carrie White-esque late-bloomer named Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) who survives a werewolf attack only to misinterpret the next 30 days as a particularly harsh growth spurt.
Ginger's younger sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins), bound to her by circumstance, a mutual fixation with death imagery, and a blood oath forged when they were little (one which has led to isolation from third parties–especially, it seems, boys), thinks she has proof in a Polaroid that Ginger is not "becoming a woman" at all, but something lupine. When an increasingly hairy and fangy Ginger remodels herself as–there's no delicate way to say this–a slut, Brigitte must for the first time in her life seek an ally from the outside. That would be Sam (Kris Lemche), who knew something was rotten in the town of Bailey Downs as soon as he struck an unidentifiable animal–Ginger's assailant–with his van. As the school's resident drug peddler who grows his own marijuana, Brigitte hopes he can help her concoct a cure for Ginger's werewolf cancer–though she pretends that she's the afflicted one, to protect her sister's secret.
This is a more-than-noble effort. As screenwriter Karen Walton points out in her DVD commentary, unless you're David Cronenberg, getting a horror film financed in The Great White North is toilsome. When we see the Telefilm Canada logo in Ginger Snaps' closing credits, it's an indication that their CanCon stipulations have broadened some. Canada used to be a thriving market for genre cinema, but the dismantling of tax shelters for wealthy investors took the decision about what gets made out of the hands of the people and placed it in the hands of the government. You've scarcely seen a Scanners since, and although Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan are so inextricably linked to Canada that they've enjoyed creative freedom while remaining in their mother country, two is not an industry.
Perhaps Cronenberg references now qualify as Canadian content. Cronenberg's influence on Ginger Snaps is palpable, especially in Ginger's gradual succumbing to her werewolf bite: a slow-dawning, Brundlefly-like fusion of wolf and girl. In An American Werewolf in London, David is plagued by nightmares in the build-up to his transformation, but he remains outwardly human until the first full moon, when the change is sudden albeit painfully protracted. Ginger also shares Brundlefly's penchant to wax rhapsodic about her current state, although it comes across as a gift for stating the obvious. Walton mentions that a mentor friend helped her realize Ginger's change as a potent metaphor for the menstrual cycle–what's the old-fashioned term for that, after all, but "the curse"–and the self-consciousness that accompanies puberty, but the milieu makes it thuddingly obvious, as do the image-conscious women's magazines with such names as SLEEK that surround Ginger as she hides in the bathroom, shaving her legs and taping down her new tail. Essentially, Ginger's change is a metaphor for Ginger's, er, change.
I'm sure teenage girls since time immemorial have felt like they're becoming a monster, but for the film to work as allegory I think it would need to be a lot more ambiguous than it is. There is a moving story in here of an ugly-duckling named Brigitte who shimmies out from under the thumb of her pretty older sister Ginger and catches the eye of a boy for the first time in her life, provoking jealousy towards both parties from Ginger, yet I wonder if these aren't two wildly incompatible fairy tales. What I do know is that Ginger gets laid but Brigitte does not (ostensibly due to Sam's discomfort with their minor age difference), and that having the smouldering bad boy fall for the ugly duckling would probably send a better message than the usual reproach of fashion periodicals. Perkins is magnificent, for what it's worth, and every time Ginger steps into her corner of the film it feels like an interruption. I do predict a major cult following for Ginger Snaps, however: hot goth girls and practical werewolf effects are irresistible enticements as evergreen as the genre itself.
THE DVD
Available exclusively in Canada as a Collector's Edition DVD on the TVA/Columbia TriStar Home Video label, Ginger Snaps looks impeccable, the 1.85:1, 16×9-enhanced transfer almost unnervingly free of flaws. Colours tend towards the aggressively autumnal on purpose; whether in broad daylight or claustrophobic darkness, the image maintains a striking clarity. Once or twice, the exposure appears unnatural and even clips, but this is early on and easy to set aside. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix (available in English and French) is front-centric–I would've expected more directional and LFE effects, mostly in the climax. Voices are clean and Mike Shields's sombrous score is well represented.
True fans of Ginger Snaps will love this platter as its supplements cater to the converted. In addition to Walton's yak-track, there is one by self-professed "straitlaced" director John Fawcett in which he confides a fetish for goth girls and that he wouldn't allow Brigitte and Ginger to reference popular culture, giving the film its own sense of time and place. (This extends to the placement of fictitious products, including Victory cigarettes and Old Goose whiskey, available for your viewing posterity in a gallery under Bonus Materials along with prototypes of the Bailey Downs emblem and a scant three ersatz magazine covers.) These commentaries are full of good old-fashioned Canadian humility and dry enthusiasm, and are the most enjoyable extra(s).
Onto the Special Features menu. First, we have a block of fifteen "Deleted Scenes" (25 mins.) with separate optional commentaries again by Fawcett and Walton. Many of these excised passages are just more of the same. Quite helpful is one that would've established the geography of Ginger and Brigitte's house (nooks and crannies in the final showdown seem to materialize from nowhere), and Mimi Rogers, as the sisters' Mom, delivers a smashing monologue that, according to pace-obsessed Fawcett, the actress knew would get cut and was therefore reluctant to shoot. (Fawcett gives her a belated apology for proving her correct.) The most fascinating thing about this section is the difference in Fawcett and Walton's perspectives, how their justifications are usually a couple of degrees apart.
"Auditions" runs nine minutes and features three read-throughs with Isabelle and two with an androgynous Perkins. Ginger's va-va-va-voom transformation here is represented by subtle alterations to Isabelle's hair and make-up. (Aside: every script sounds awful to an outsider during the audition process. Mine for my thesis short sure did; you can bet that Mamet's do.) "Rehearsals" runs another nine minutes, with actors Isabelle, Perkins, and Jesse Moss test-driving their lines in barely-dressed sets using limited props. Note: one of the scenes they practise here would later land on the cutting-room floor.
A "Trailers" heading is misleading, since only one is included, in English 5.1 or French 2.0 audio. "T.V. spots" offers a pair of commercials with the same Dolby configurations. The Ginger Snaps "Featurette" (5 mins.), distorted sound aside, is charming for a lack of American gloss, and who can resist Isabelle when she calls Ginger "not much of a stretch"? Rounding out the Special Features, and thus the DVD, are "Brigitte & Ginger's School Project" (their demented slideshow presented for dissection–clicking on a still enlarges it) and "Creation of the Beast" (5 mins.), a tour of the F/X workshop that ends with a camera test of Gingerwolf (a guy in a rubber suit). A preferable package, the rather shameful omission of captions and/or subtitles aside.
108 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround, French DD 5.1, French Dolby Surround; DVD-9; Region One; TVA/Columbia TriStar
