Ginger Snaps 2 starts off with Brigitte landing herself in a rehab clinic after she is discovered overdosing on the poisonous drug that she has to take in order to prevent herself from turning into a werewolf like her sister. As is to be expected, the guy who finds her lapsing into unconsciousness immediately concludes that she's overdosing on heroin and takes her to a hospital. I really liked that twist from the original film. Brigitte infected herself with her sister's contaminated blood to prove her determination to help her find a cure, which they never found. Ginger was killed, and Brigitte was never cured. A nice premise that is used to segway into a thriller that takes place in the old hospital setting.
In a display of the level of help that is to be expected from the hospital where Brigitte is being kept, she is quickly diagnosed as a lesbian by one member of the hospital staff. Excellent work there, lady. Before too long, Brigitte learns that a young girl named Ghost (who apparently lives in the hospital) is her only friend, but who reads so many horror comics that evidently it's normal for her to say things like "When you close your eyes is it hell you see?" Here's an odd thing about this character - she looks to be about ten years old, but is played by 19-year-old Tatiana Maslany.
It seems that Ghosts grandmother was horribly burned in a fire at home, which landed her and her granddaughter in the rehab facility featured in the movie. Why an accidental fire landed her in a rehab facility is a mystery that is thinly explained later in the film. Most of the tension in the movie is derived from the fact that Brigitte is being held in this hospital to be rehabilitated from a drug that she needs in order to prevent herself from turning into a werewolf and killing everyone in sight. Needless to say, it is not taken very well when she explains that if she is kept there, people will die.
Ginger makes occasional appearances as a vision of her former self, usually showing up to give Brigitte some useful insights into the changes that are taking place in her body, reprising the satire on female adolescence covered so well in the first film. My favorite example of this in the first sequel was when Brigitte presumably falls asleep during one of her meetings and dreams that the instructor is telling her and the rest of the girls to masturbate. When she wakes up, she runs to the bathroom and taps on one of her eyeballs, which seems to have turned to glass, and notices thick skin and hair on her palms. I knew that masturbation gives you hairy palms and makes you go blind, but I didn't know that werewolves had glass eyes. At least the metaphor worked halfway though.
We gradually see Brigitte's transformation into a werewolf as she constantly tries to find ways to stop it (usually ways which include things like slicing off the new growths that she doesn't like, like her pointy ears). Pretty nasty, but at least it's logical, right? What other choice does she have? Where the movie makes serious lapses in logic is in the setup of the hospital. Ghost has no reason for being there (except for one big reason, which we find out later but which no one in the hospital knows about), and the residents are locked down at night but allowed to wander outside at other times. One patient sells her body to one of the orderlies, who does this regularly, so that he will give her some narcotics, and when Brigitte walks in just after it happened, the girl offers her some. You think coke addicts have sex for drugs and then offer to share them?
Given that so much stock is put into the character of Ghost, it's amazing how badly written her part is. They tried to get her to fit into what they wanted her character to ultimately mean to the story, but had no idea how to make it happen. That's why you have this little kid living in a hospital, evidently sleeping in a chair next to her all but mummified grandmother, doing things with comic books that no kid does, especially not a girl, and talking about them like she's a professor of philosophy. She also sees the world as though it were a comic book, which is in keeping with the fate of her character, she even narrates occasionally, describing situations as though she were reading them off the page. I actually liked the speech-bubble narration that she prattled off occasionally, although sometimes it goes over the top. What, for example, is a "reign of moral terror?" Does that mean, like, terrorizing people who believe that homosexuals should be allowed to marry?
The end of the film was fairly good, I especially loved what became of the orderly that made a habit of forcing the girls in the hospital into sex acts with him, a practice which he indulged in so regularly that it is astounding he was never caught. There is an odd scene near the end when a deer has to be put out of its misery despite being completely eviscerated and on FIRE, but overall the ending was one of the stronger parts of the film. I had a hard time getting through the first half, but probably mostly because I still wanted to watch Halloween IV, Jasper, Texas, and the original Time Machine before the end of the night. Fans of the original should enjoy this, but if you had enough with part 1 you can skip this one. It's not any better.
In a display of the level of help that is to be expected from the hospital where Brigitte is being kept, she is quickly diagnosed as a lesbian by one member of the hospital staff. Excellent work there, lady. Before too long, Brigitte learns that a young girl named Ghost (who apparently lives in the hospital) is her only friend, but who reads so many horror comics that evidently it's normal for her to say things like "When you close your eyes is it hell you see?" Here's an odd thing about this character - she looks to be about ten years old, but is played by 19-year-old Tatiana Maslany.
It seems that Ghosts grandmother was horribly burned in a fire at home, which landed her and her granddaughter in the rehab facility featured in the movie. Why an accidental fire landed her in a rehab facility is a mystery that is thinly explained later in the film. Most of the tension in the movie is derived from the fact that Brigitte is being held in this hospital to be rehabilitated from a drug that she needs in order to prevent herself from turning into a werewolf and killing everyone in sight. Needless to say, it is not taken very well when she explains that if she is kept there, people will die.
Ginger makes occasional appearances as a vision of her former self, usually showing up to give Brigitte some useful insights into the changes that are taking place in her body, reprising the satire on female adolescence covered so well in the first film. My favorite example of this in the first sequel was when Brigitte presumably falls asleep during one of her meetings and dreams that the instructor is telling her and the rest of the girls to masturbate. When she wakes up, she runs to the bathroom and taps on one of her eyeballs, which seems to have turned to glass, and notices thick skin and hair on her palms. I knew that masturbation gives you hairy palms and makes you go blind, but I didn't know that werewolves had glass eyes. At least the metaphor worked halfway though.
We gradually see Brigitte's transformation into a werewolf as she constantly tries to find ways to stop it (usually ways which include things like slicing off the new growths that she doesn't like, like her pointy ears). Pretty nasty, but at least it's logical, right? What other choice does she have? Where the movie makes serious lapses in logic is in the setup of the hospital. Ghost has no reason for being there (except for one big reason, which we find out later but which no one in the hospital knows about), and the residents are locked down at night but allowed to wander outside at other times. One patient sells her body to one of the orderlies, who does this regularly, so that he will give her some narcotics, and when Brigitte walks in just after it happened, the girl offers her some. You think coke addicts have sex for drugs and then offer to share them?
Given that so much stock is put into the character of Ghost, it's amazing how badly written her part is. They tried to get her to fit into what they wanted her character to ultimately mean to the story, but had no idea how to make it happen. That's why you have this little kid living in a hospital, evidently sleeping in a chair next to her all but mummified grandmother, doing things with comic books that no kid does, especially not a girl, and talking about them like she's a professor of philosophy. She also sees the world as though it were a comic book, which is in keeping with the fate of her character, she even narrates occasionally, describing situations as though she were reading them off the page. I actually liked the speech-bubble narration that she prattled off occasionally, although sometimes it goes over the top. What, for example, is a "reign of moral terror?" Does that mean, like, terrorizing people who believe that homosexuals should be allowed to marry?
The end of the film was fairly good, I especially loved what became of the orderly that made a habit of forcing the girls in the hospital into sex acts with him, a practice which he indulged in so regularly that it is astounding he was never caught. There is an odd scene near the end when a deer has to be put out of its misery despite being completely eviscerated and on FIRE, but overall the ending was one of the stronger parts of the film. I had a hard time getting through the first half, but probably mostly because I still wanted to watch Halloween IV, Jasper, Texas, and the original Time Machine before the end of the night. Fans of the original should enjoy this, but if you had enough with part 1 you can skip this one. It's not any better.