Ginger Snaps Unleashed

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Rating 3½


Directed by Brett Sullivan

Written by Karen Walton and Megan Martin

Starring Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle, Janet Kidder, Tatiana Maslany and Eric Johnson


This is the second of the three ‘Ginger Snaps’ films, the Canadian horror franchise that began with one of the most original (if perhaps flawed) horror films of recent years.

‘Ginger Snaps Unleashed’ picks up the story virtually at the point the first film ended, although this time it concentrates on the younger sister Brigitte, played by the excellent Emily Perkins. Ginger is more of a peripheral character, coming to her in a series of waking dreams and hallucinations.

Brigitte is sent to a drug rehabilitation hospital for teenage girls, where she forms a bond with a strange younger girl called Ghost (rather wonderfully played by Tatiana Maslany, who features in the forthcoming George A Romero film ‘Diary Of The Dead’).

Whereas the first film was a metaphor for puberty and menstruation and the physical and psychological complexities that go with it, this time around drug addiction and attitudes towards teenage girls who do not conform to the required norms of patriarchal society is the subtext behind the werewolf horror plot.

There are a couple of scenes I can’t work out the purpose of. The first involves group masturbation as a form of therapy and the second sees an orderly injecting Brigitte’s drug of choice apparently into her vagina. Those rather odd scenes aside, I think this is a great sequel. It doesn’t have the same impact as the original film, but it retains a degree of originality.



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