This prequel concerns the sisters, Ginger and Brigitte, making their way through 19th century Canada in what one can assume to be a previous incarnation.
Having lost their parents, the orphaned girls trek alone through the wilderness during a cold, harsh winter. They stumble upon the remains of an Indian village, which looks to have been ripped apart by some great beast. One of the few survivors, an old wise woman, warns them that they must "kill the boy" or "one sister will kill the other." When Brigitte accidentally steps into a bear trap a short time later, the two girls are rescued and assisted by a handsome Indian man known only as The Hunter, who leads the girls to nearby Bailey Fort...perhaps the very fort around which the future suburban community of Bailey Downs will spring. The fort is in poor shape. The men are suspicious, the atmosphere is bleak and the supplies are running low. It seems that the men who were sent for winter provisions several months before never returned...at least, not in human form. Indeed, several strange and vicious beasts seem to be stalking the woods just beyond the fort...and there may be one within as well!
This 3rd installment in the imaginative and intelligent Ginger Snaps series lacks the black humor and witty script of the previous two. The girls are lovely and convincing, the setting of a snowbound fort is both creepy and beautiful, and the new character of The Hunter is intriguing and nice to look at, but this film takes itself far too seriously. I also had a hard time accepting the fact that a young girl in the 19th century would utter a phrase like: "These people are f-cked." Such instances of modern dialogue inserted into a setting of 100+ years past is disconcerting at best...but maybe I'm the only one it would bother.
The beasts are highly visible in the final scenes of the film, and are pretty impressive looking. Other than that, the films gets a little weighted down by the gloomy atmosphere, with nary a joke to be found. The religious metaphors and Native American mysticism seem to have been pulled right out of "The Crucible," "The Scarlet Letter" and "Thunderheart" and seem to have been used for set dressing rather than as crucial plot devices. Still, there's a good amount of blood and gore to please most splatter enthusiasts, and an open ending which seems both to resolve the second film and bring us right back around to the first.
It's not a terrible movie by any means, but since I'd come to expect a certain amount of smart black comedy and found none here, it was just a little disappointing. The girls do a great job with their characters, as they always do, but they had far less to work with this time around. I give this a 6 on a scale of 10, whereas the first two each get a 9.
