Did you know that the werewolf is a metaphor for puberty.
They're I just saved you having to watch a 20 minute long YouTube video where somebody over analyses a film on what are pretty obvious themes.
Ginger Snaps a sister film revolving around high school that just happens to involve a lycanthrope.
This is another one of those rambling reviews I make where I kind of go off the beaten Trail and lose sight of what I'm supposed to be talking about.
So I'll just leave with this paragraph and say that Ginger Snaps is really freaking good and is worth your time if you've never seen it. Even if you don't care for the subject matter; its unique perspective into werewolf movies should be enough to keep you interested.
If nothing else you'll remember it.
Our story revolves around two young girls who are for all intensive purposes outcasts.
Despite being fairly attractive and incredibly talented at video production.
To such an extent that most the guys enjoy their work and people seem to talk to him well enough.
(with the exception of bratty stuck up teenage girls. But they don't tend to like anybody and nobody tends to like them.
Ironically we don't get any of the stuck-up guy in this movie. We get some jerks and some typical teenage idiots but none of them seem to be up their own butt.)
The girls are unpopular manily by choose.
First 20 minutes of the film is a fairly typical sister story of just two girls dealing with ''the worst parents ever'' and annoying high school Antiques.
The film does open with it Slaughter Dog who was killed by some sort of creature and is single-handedly the most disturbing thing in the entire movie.
So nothing else it has a strong introduction.
And then later on the older girl was attacked by the same creature and becomes herself a kind of werewolf who gradually changes over time and Alters her personality in the process. Or at least we think it has the personality when in reality she might have been clamouring to be a more socially accepting kind of promiscuous girl to begin with.
There's a whole lot of good character interaction here and it's really refreshing to see in the horrour genre given how lacking that tends to be.
One of the things I like so much about this movie is that it somehow is able to have high school kids that actually act like high school kids but are simultaneously interesting to watch.
Usually real life teenagers are just a bunch of boring jerk-offs who couldn't possibly maintain any decent screen presence.
But they're able to work with that here and in a solid and convincing manner.
Pushing the kids angst and stupidity just enough to make to convince you that they're teenagers without going so over-the-top that it turned into some crappy High School melodrama where everybody is eerily annoying just for the sake of being annoying.
We have a pretty solid secondary cast of characters too. The parents and faculty are shown to be antagonist to what the girls are trying to get up too but aren't in any way shown as being stupid annoying or moronic in their actions.
They act like actual adults and are for the most part trying to help the kids out with their problems or at least when they know that there is a problem.
That might be the most refreshing thing about the whole movie. You watch something like 'Nightmare on Elm Street' and the parents are not only stupid but they become more antagonistic to the children than the actual murderer.
I like how a lot of the mythology around werewolves is incorporated into the movie too. Some of it is shown to work; others are shown to be irrelevant and they even try to look at it through a more modern lens by incorporating Modern Biology and common household plants that can be easily acquired as makeshift cures for the werewolf problem.
It's a surprisingly good movie with phenomenal acting from our two main lead. Some pretty decent special effects and Gore scenes.
The camera work is a flip-flop between well done cinematic shots especially at night time and some surprisingly cheap looking low budget angle shots you'd expect to see out of one of those Asylum movies.
Mixing them together is kind of practical given the film's budget but it also gives the movie this kind of odd surreal look.
Originally I was going to make fun of my first statement about how people over analyse films and the Werewolf is just a metaphor for menstruation in this movie but I found watching it that wasn't really a point in doing that given that the puberty angle isn't really a subtext. It's the main plot of the entire movie.
It's less metaphor and more direct plot. Or at least it is for the most part as the werewolf virus (for lack of a better word) does actually cause several problems within the human body that resembles menstrual cycle.
Which becomes extremely problematic for one of the guys that ends up with the werewolf virus as he starts sees blood in his urine.
So the girl's mother is this kind of overbearing lady who feels like she belongs in 1980s Reagan's America with a very Pro 1950s aesthetic to her and originally I didn't care for as I don't like 50s Americana but I kind of felt sorry for her afterwards as she's just trying to be a nice person who wants to connect with my children and they want nothing to do with her.
Fairly typical for most parents with teenage kids but it becomes extremely problematic for her as her kids get involved in. Well.. Literal murder.
Escalating at one point to such a degree that she even considers faking her death with her kids by blowing up their house and then skipping town which would have left her poor husband a victim of their escapades.
It's one of those weird films that you don't expect to go anywhere give it its obscurity and low-budget but somehow was able to pull off a really good story end maintain a pretty solid following throughout the years. It also helps that it just feels like its own unique project that doesn't get a lot of attention compared to all the other basic and lackluster. Horror movies that come out every year. And I still maintain that it's one of the better horror films to watch.
Comments
Post a Comment