- Directed by Grant Harvey
- Written by Christina Ray, Stephen Massicotte
- Stars Katherine Isabelle, Emily Perkins, Nathaniel Arcand, JR Bourne
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 34 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clmJQwTJ5fY
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
A couple hundred years ago there were a couple of sisters named Ginger and Brigitte who look exactly like the two sisters in the modern movies with the same names. As the title implies, this is an origin story of the werewolf curse in the previous two Ginger Snaps movies. It’s a bit drawn out, but the Horror Guys have split opinions with one thumbs up and one thumbs down.
Synopsis
In 1815, a group of soldiers from the fort went to pick up supplies, and they never returned. We get glimpses of them being eaten by werewolves as credits roll.
Two sisters, Ginger and Brigitte, ride through the snow on a horse. They get off their horse and walk into an empty camp. There’s blood and wreckage everywhere, but no people. There’s one old woman who talks about her sister. She gives them weird necklaces before saying, “Kill the boy or one sister kills the other.”
The horse runs away and Brigitte gets her foot stuck in a metal spring trap. An Indian hunter and his pet wolf stop to help her. He leads them to the fort. The Commander, Wallace, interrogates them, and the Reverend thinks they need to throw them out, since their story cannot be verified. The doctor uses leeches on Brigitte’s injured leg and talks about the monsters in the woods.
Everyone comes to a big dinner, and the women are the center of attention. There’s a lot of conflict between the men for reasons we don’t understand yet. When there’s howling heard from outside, the dinner breaks up. The Reverend accuses the girls of being evil.
Late that night, Ginger hears crying and tracks it down. It’s a deformed little boy who attacks and bites her. She wants to leave, but the guard catches them as they open the front gate. Before that can escalate, a werewolf attacks the gate from outside. The Reverend locks the girls inside a building with another one of the monsters that breached the wall, but the Indian guy shoots it with an arrow. They go back to their room as the battle continues outside.
The following day, Ginger gets friendly with the Indian hunter and has a vision of death. There’s a confrontation between the doctor and Finn, and it looks like Finn has been bitten. The doctor orders Finn to put a leech on his chest as a test. The leech swells up instantly, so the doctor shoots Finn. The monster that attacked the girls and was killed has the tattoo of the brother of one of the men, and a glass eye like the brother had.
There’s lots of arguing and angst. Ginger gets sicker and sicker from her bite. The commander’s son, Geoffrey, has been bitten and is slowly turning into a monster; he’s the one who bit Ginger. The men grab the women in the middle of the night and take Ginger prisoner. Doc wants to give Ginger the leech test, but the commander orders him not to.
The commander says Ginger has to leave; according to the old woman’s prophecy, the only way for them to survive is to kill Geoffrey. Ginger tracks down Geoffrey, but can’t kill him. Commander Rowland ends up having to shoot his own son.
The girls leave the fort and head off through the woods. They find the old woman with the prophecy, and she says it’s too late. The Indian does a ritual for Brigitte, and she has a vision of herself stabbing Ginger to death. When she wakes up, the old Indian woman is dead. The Hunter eventually ends up taking Brigitte back to the fort.
The Reverend wants to burn Brigitte on the fire, but she says Ginger will be coming for her. Ginger fights with James, the worst of the humans, and she claws his throat out before opening the gates to let her “friends” inside.
There’s a big battle, and by the end, only Brigitte, Ginger, and the Indian Hunter remain. Brigitte stabs the hunter in loyalty to her sister. The fort burns to the ground.
Not long after, Brigitte starts to freeze to death, but Ginger says she’s not cold in her condition. Ginger infects her sister.
Commentary
The two main actresses play characters with the same names and relationships as in the first two movies, but this takes place nearly two hundred years before that, and the sisters have no connection to the modern versions of themselves. What’s up with that?
It’s really slow. There’s an awful lot of talking and arguing. I was eager for it to end. Yawn.