Thursday, October 31, 2013

The Fourth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series - Movie #9: Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning

Happy Halloween, everyone!  As this is, in fact, October 31st, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning is officially the last scary movie of this year's movie series.  I may have to do one more, however, since this is hardly a fantastic movie to end things on.  It's too bad, really, since I like Ginger Snaps so much.

This time we're in 1815, out in the West somewhere (filmed in Alberta), and the sisters are back, Ginger and Bridgette.  They're out wandering in the woods, for reasons that are never made clear, and they find an abandoned Native American camp that is shredded and liberally doused with blood.  A little further on, Bridgette steps in a bear trap.  Ginger is unable to free her but luckily a handsome young Native American man stops by with his pet wolf.  He gets the trap off the dark sister and leads both girls to a nearby fort.  The soldiers at the fort are pretty strung out; they've barricaded themselves in but are running out of food since their supplies are late.  Some of the soldiers are nice to the girls, some leer at them, some are just this side of psychotically violent.  That night, Ginger gets up for some water, hears a noise and investigates.  She finds a deformed boy locked in a room and the boy bites her.  Of course, this is how Ginger becomes infected by the werewolf virus.  The girls decide to leave the fort but before they can, werewolves surround the enclosure and attack; the deformed boy is also attacking people from the inside.  Blah blah blah, various 19th century fighting against practical effects werewolves, lots of people die.  The sisters manage to get out and barricade the remaining soldiers in the fort.

Here's the thing.  This movie is slow.  The acting and effects are fine but the dialogue is weak and there's not much of a plot.  Hell, Ginger doesn't even go full-wolf so the stakes never seem that high.  I guess this is supposed to be a story of how the "curse of the red and the black" got started and passed down, but that doesn't make sense and doesn't sync up with the first movie.  Is this supposed to be a standalone, but using the same actors and characters as the first one?  Both Ginger and Bridgette are anachronisms, spouting very non-1800s dialogue.  I dunno.  I give it a meh.

Possibly next up: An American Haunting

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