Ginger Snaps Back:The Beginning Movie Review 418

Ginger Snaps Back:The Beginning is a 2004 horror movie prequel directed by Grant Harvey and starring Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins.

The movie begins with a prologue which states that men go to Hudson Bay in boats to get provisions for the winter for their people. The year is 1815 and this time, the men do not come back. Cut to Ginger(Isabelle) and her sister Brigitte(Perkins). They are lost in the wilderness. They look around but cannot see where they are. They stumble upon a campsite at which there is a Native Canadian old lady who tells them that they need to kill the boy or they will kill each other. They don't understand this at all. She gives them pendants. Their horse runs off and then Brigitte gets her leg caught in a trap. Ginger goes back to the camp for help, but the woman has gone. A wolf arrives and behind it is a Native Canadian man called The Hunter(Nathaniel Arcand). Brigitte is scared at first, but he takes her leg out of the trap and puts some herbs on it. He leads Ginger and Brigitte to Fort Bailey where they are allowed in. It is a strange place. There is something very wrong there.

Brigitte is taken to Doc Murphy(Matthew Walker) who puts a leech on her wound. They are assigned a room. They go down to dinner and meet everyone. There is the horrible James(J.R. Bourne), Wallace Rowlands(Tom McCamus) who is in charge at the fort, Reverend Gilbert(Hugh Dillon), who is very pious and irritating, Claude(David La Haye) and a couple of others. The Reverend seems to think that they are sinners and he treats them with suspicion. James treats them with contempt. Wallace is somewhat friendly. At night, Ginger wakes up and she hears crying. She wanders around and finds a boy locked into a room. He bites her. The next morning, she wants to get out of the place. They get caught by James who hits Ginger. Suddenly a werewolf is at the gates trying to get in.
All hell breaks loose and the Reverend leads the two girls into a room where the werewolf is. He heads off, leaving them to their fate.

They are trapped but the Hunter helps them. They survive, but Ginger isn't well. She is having visions. She wakes up covered in blood. Brigitte insists on getting her to the doctor. They arrive there and see that one of the group has been bitten and the doctor blows his head off. They decide not to tell him about Ginger's bite. The group of men realise that the men in the boat were killed by werewolves. Ginger is turning into one of them. Wallace finds Ginger's pendant in his son's cell and realises that she has been bitten. He tells Brigitte that his son was also bitten and that he is changing every day. Ginger needs to kill the boy if she is to stop the werewolves. When one of the men is killed, he is holding a lock of Ginger's hair in his hands so the men go to Ginger and take her away. Brigitte talks to Wallace and tells him that if he doesn't save Ginger, she will tell the men about his son. He saves her from death by shooting the doctor.

Ginger looks for Geoffrey and wants to kill him but she softens when she sees him at his mother's grave. The other men find him and they are going to  kill him when Wallace decides to do it himself. Ginger and Brigitte have to get out. They go into the woods and find the Hunter and the old woman from earlier on. The woman offers her a chance to see into the future and she accepts. The Hunter tells her that the coming of two sisters had been foreseen. Brigitte has a vision of her killing her own sister. When she awakes from her vision, she finds that the old woman has been killed by Ginger and the Hunter brings her back to the fort.

When Brigitte arrives back, she is captured and she realises that it is a trap to catch Ginger who will come for her. The Reverend is going to burn her as a witch but Wallace stops him and kills him and sets him on fire. Ginger arrives and she is not alone. She has a posse of werewolves with her. She kills the awful James and then unleashes her pals on the fort. The Hunter takes a few of them down but Wallace ends up getting bitten and he kill himself in the house and sets it on fire.The Hunter hands Brigitte his knife and tells her that she has to kill Ginger to end the curse. It looks as if she is going to do it, but then she kills him instead and escapes with Ginger. The movie ends with the two sisters in the woods. They mingle their blood and Brigitte becomes like Ginger.

This movie was entertaining. I liked it more that the second movie in the series. It could have been a stand alone film.The wild setting fit in really well with the story line in that it was bleak and there was a sense of doom as the werewolves were coming closer all of the time. I had an inkling that the ending was going to be as it was and it suited the movie. The cast were good and I liked the Hunter guy in it. This is a fitting end to the Ginger Snaps series. The theme of sisterly love runs throughout these movies and it is touching. This movie and the first one are better than the second one in my opinion. All in all, I recommend this to anyone who likes a good werewolf movie. I will give this one a 6/10.