It’s an absolute crime that I didn’t go see this movie when it was first released. (And it was, in fact, widely released in theatres in Canada, thank you very much.) No matter what personal horrors were going on in my life at the time, I should’ve scraped together the pennies and found the time and gone. I’d heard it was good, and it was better than I’d heard.
Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald are the social outcasts of the school, and largely by choice, rejecting everything superficial that their parents and their school seem to stand for. But promises and pacts made to each other as children are hard to hold up at the onset of adulthood.
The film relies on a parallel between lycanthropy and the onset of menstruation, and a very solid one at that, keeping it’s focus on change — on the ways that the body and personality and social interactions change. Ginger, one year older than her sister Brigitte, is bitten by a beast that has been terrorizing her suburb and begins these changes all at once. Her body blossoms, her period starts, she develops a taste for tearing things apart and starts to grow a tail. Brigitte is left behind.
The parallels that are drawn are overt, but except on a few occasions don’t feel particularly heavy-handed. The film is a feminist film and does not make any effort to hide that fact, but it is also a genre horror film and succeeds on that level too. One scene that works particularly well in both arenas is when a boy who Ginger has slept with suddenly starts peeing blood — an unsettling sight, and certainly something that boys never see where girls have to deal with it for a good portion of their lives. He is, unsurprisingly, completely freaked out by this.
One of the strongest parts of the movie, beyond its basic construction, is the performance of the two leads, Emily Perkins and Katherine Isabelle, as Brigitte and Ginger respectively. They raise the film far above the standard teen horror fare that is so prevalent these days.
Also strong are Mimi Rogers and John Bourgeois as the girls’ out-of-touch parents, and Kris Lemche as the drug dealer/botanist/accomplice to Brigitte in helping to find a cure for Ginger’s disease. (I spent much of the film trying to remember where I’d seen him before, then had a truly duh moment when I looked it up and realized he plays Cute God on Joan of Arcadia.)
The ending, which has been derided by many people who otherwise enjoyed the movie, was to me one of the most powerful moments in it. Ginger has already killed at least four people, and is advancing on her sister who in one hand holds a knife and in the other holds a syringe with the cure. Ginger pounces, and it’s the knife that ends up in her side, not the syringe.
The film opened, in part, with a montage of the girls playing out death scenes for a class assignment, and ends in much the same way. There was no way to a happy ending here, no way to undo the trauma of everything that had happened. I didn’t see the ending coming, but I was very satisfied with it in a way that I’m not with the usual American-style happy ending.
Highly, highly recommended.