The third and final instalment of the GINGER SNAPS trilogy and also by far the best of the three films. Eschewing the teen angst and modern-day ponderings of the first two movies, GINGER SNAPS BACK posits itself as a sort-of prequel, telling virtually the same story but setting it in the 19th century and in a remote area of the Canadian wilderness.The plot involves a remote outpost under siege, not dissimilar to THE ALAMO. The besiegers are werewolves. If that's not enough to whet your appetite, then I don't know what is, but I was hooked from the outset. There's still plenty of mileage to be had in the sisterly relationship between Ginger and Brigitte, and as in the first film their bond holds everything together.Let's get this straight: this is a B-movie made on a low budget, although for the most part that budget is well hidden. The settings, from the wooden mini-fortress to the snowbound woodlands, are well shot and atmospheric, and the creature effects are the best of the whole series. The characters are all stereotypes, but fun with it: there's the fire-and-brimstone preacher, the grieving captain, the friendly Native American tracker, the elderly doctor, the hard-ass soldier. Guessing which of them is going to be the next to be bumped off is half of the fun.The story plays out as you'd expect, building to an impressive and grisly climax in which the full horror of the situation becomes apparent. Yet it's that sweet, poignant central relationship that makes this film stand out above other similar fare. Katharine Isabelle may bag the more obvious role of the two sisters, but it's Emily Perkins who ends up as the most bewitching. Director Grant Harvey, a newcomer to the trilogy at this late stage, handles the elements remarkably. It's just a shame more B-movies don't have the imagination and strength that this film displays.

Always seems strange and so amazing to me that cheap sequels which got shot back-to-back can be so totally different in style and tone, as well as quality. This movie got shot along with its other sequel "Ginger Snaps: Unleashed", which also wasn't a great movie but it at least was still one that took on the same approach as the first original movie, while this movie seems to be an entirely different one on its own, which just happen to feature the same two main characters of the other two movies.Yes, so I understand this movie is meant as a prequel to the first two movies but that doesn't really explain why it features the same two main characters, even though the movie is being set almost 200 years before the events of the first movie. Seemed to me that somebody had seen "Ravenous" and decided that their next Ginger Snaps movie should be just like it. Big difference however is that "Ravenous" is a great and also original movie, that works well, while "Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning" just isn't.The first two movies were still being somewhat 'clever' and original with its metaphors and approach to its themes, while this movie seems to be written as a straight-forward werewolf. And not even a very good or exciting one. The movie has a few too many slow moments and its story just really doesn't seem to head anywhere. After a while I wasn't even following anymore what it was all about since it got told in such a boring and uninteresting way. I just couldn't understand any of the character's motivations and it didn't helped very much that the dialog in this movie was incredibly bad and annoying, which also made the acting seem bad.I also just hated it how all of the characters were handling the whole situation. It was incredibly annoying how people in the fort were being dark and mysterious about the whole situation and talking without saying anything, while you as the viewer already know what is going on and quite frankly there is no real reason for the refugees to not just be straight-forward with the truth toward the Fitzgerald-sisters. It would had saved everybody so much trouble.The Fitzgerald-sisters always had been some strong female characters, while in this movie they are mostly just being girls. All they seem to do is looking big eyed, with their mouths open and breathing heavily, being scared all the time of everything and everyone. So suddenly they aren't the compelling strong female leads anymore, which I think, should be the most disappointing aspect for the fans of this movie-series.The movie is good looking, nevertheless and also has some nice make-up effects in it, though they get used far too little. It's because there is hardly anything ever happening in the movie and when it does, it's too dark or you have already started to loose interest in things, so it can't safe this movie from mediocrity.Not really worth watching in my opinion.5/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

I'm saddened. I really wanted to like this movie as I am the biggest fan of the original Ginger Snaps; and its leads, Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins for their work in the original, and Perkins even more so for almost single-handedly saving "Ginger Snaps: Unleashed." Alas, I am afraid that this series is like the original Highlander: "There can only be one."You know you're in for a long ride from the very beginning. It breaks a rule of cinema narration that no scriptwriter was dumb enough to break prior, a rule so dumb to break nobody thought previously to make it a rule: it has two introductions. The first introduction is in screen text, about a hunting party never returning in 1816. Stark, dark, and ominous. Except then they followed it with a narrated introduction by Isabelle. The latter, I am afraid, is an incoherent train-wreck about the curse of the red and black (checkers?) having a chance to be stopped . . . blighting the land . . . the white man bringing diseases . . . oaths higher than God or fate . . . or something. Even Ed Wood, Jr. would have been embarrassed enough to rewrite it. Unfortunately, Isabelle drew the short straw on reading the mess, and I felt sorry for her. This "has-it-begun-yet" effect starts the movie out at a leaden pace, from which it never recovers, and creates a half-assed horror-myth for the story to depend, which insults the audience, not to mention, perhaps, Native Americans.The story starts in 1816 as two orphaned teenage girls Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins) come to a fort in the wilderness that has been under siege for months by some kind of diabolical creatures (I think they might be werewolves). The remaining men in the fort are just a little suspicious since the sisters were able to reach it untouched when nobody else could reach it or set foot outside it without getting ripped to shreds. Except an Indian called Hunter.It is apparent that the entire production was in over its head at attempting a period piece like this, from the producer, the scriptwriter, to the director and crew, to the actors. The dialog sounds anachronistic, and isn't very good anyway. The characters do not act 21st century, but neither do they act in a way that's believably 19th century. Isabelle and Perkins, and the other actors, are given no historical point of reference and no dialog coaching to be able to pull this off. I could forgive the dialects being inconsistent; if anything, I think dialects were far more diverse in that area then, but they sounded too commonplace. At this budget, they could have aimed for a squalid, scaled down, timeless feeling, but they did not. I could not believe that Isabelle and Perkins' characters fit into the early 19th century at all. The movie tries to joke about this. Ginger (Isabelle) occasionally pipes in with modern swear words that so lilted her dialog in GS1, but given that this movie never sounded 19th century anyway, the comical contrast never works. Music was a plus in both the original and "Unleashed." In this movie it is just awful. It sounds like they hired a single cellist to play four notes and then looped them repeatedly. Then there was Ginger's transformation: at least they should have made it somewhat consistent with what occurred in GS1, instead of making her feverish and dizzy. Please. To see a young woman in that time period misbehaving Ginger did. THAT would have been exciting. What we got was boring. The rest of the cast tries with varying degrees of success. J. R. Bourne does well as the second-in-command, but his character is just two-dimensional, the a—hole dimension and the d—chebag dimension. Hugh Dillon as the Reverend, also a villain, is allowed to overplay his part, and his accent sounds jarringly anachronistic. In writing his role, however, it's apparent that the screenwriter took care to consult neither the Bible, nor sermons written at the time. The Reverend's preaching sounds almost as nonsensical as the werewolf myth given at the beginning, and I don't think it was deliberate. Matthew Walker as the doctor and Brendan Fletcher as Finn give very good performances, and Fletcher's was so good I was surprised and saddened he did not have a larger part. Tom McCamus does a fair job as the fort commander, or would have done one had the makeup department not given him such a silly wig. He almost makes it look dignified, but his gravitas was one false move away from side-splitting comedy. I think I'm the wrong gender and sexual orientation to judge Nathanial Arcand playing hunter. Moreover, he reminded me too much of David Carradine in Kung Fu, and that probably means I'm the wrong generation, too. It makes me want to recuse myself from reviewing him. The movie never rises above its leaden pace and never becomes actually scary. Then there are the little things, like the aforementioned music, or that a werewolf makeup was an immobile mask that was a throwback to the 60s. The werewolves looked like neither wolves nor men, nor anything like the werewolf in GS1.The only good thing: the ending. No, I'm not being the droll critic talking about what a relief it was that the movie was over. It did have a good ending. You should decide fifteen minutes in if you think it's worth waiting for. Unfortunately, I think this was a desperate endeavor to try to cash in on a great movie's name while putting forward as little money and effort in as possible.(Upgraded one star from my original review. It is very good to see Perkins and Isabelle work together, and sisters' bond was still evocative and interesting.)

The original "Ginger Snaps" was a fun, affecting coming-of-age tale disguised as a werewolf movie that introduced us to Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins), two of the most endearing horror heroines in recent memory. "Ginger Snaps Back"--a prequel of sorts--takes a decidedly different route from its predecessor, transposing the Fitzgerald sisters from the present day to a 19th Century Civil War base, where it turns out The Curse is alive and well. I have to give the filmmakers credit--as opposed to slavishly sequelizing the first film for a quick buck, writers Christina Ray and Stephen Massicotte and director Grant Harvey have revamped the original "Ginger Snaps" mythos into a mostly successful period piece. "Back" is beautifully photographed, with excellent sets and costumes; the inhabitants of the base (including a general hiding a deformed son) are clichéd, yet ultimately well-drawn; and the undercurrent of themes--from serious Indian spiritualism to the importance of family to the dangers of fundamentalism (among others) are subtly incorporated. While the film's anachronistic feel threw me for a loop, the well-intentioned performances (sans any self-referential irony) kept me watching...above all, Isabelle and Perkins display the same sisterly devotion that gave the first "Ginger Snaps" its humor and heart--there is an undeniable power to their on-screen interaction that sustains "Back" for its duration.