Ginger Snaps is so eager to let you know that it's a metaphor, like a kid with a secret, that the text upon its subtext becomes transparent--and when you can see through a film, it's not as much fun. About a month ago I watched John Landis' An American Werewolf in London for the first time in years and gradually came to understand how and why I'd identified with it as an adolescent: after being inflicted with the werewolf's curse, David, the hero, goes through a second puberty. Ginger Snaps makes David into a literal teenager, and a girl, a Carrie White-esque late-bloomer named Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) who survives a lycanthropy attack only to misinterpret the next thirty days as a particularly harsh growth spurt.

Ginger's younger sister Brigitte (Emily Perkins), bound to her by circumstance, a mutual fixation with death imagery, and a blood oath taken when they were little (one which has led to isolation from third parties, especially, it seems, boys), thinks she has proof in a Polaroid that Ginger is not "becoming a woman" at all, but something lupine. When an increasingly hairy and fangy Ginger remodels herself as--there's no delicate way to say this--a slut, Brigitte feels emboldened to take on an ally in finding a cure for Ginger's werewolf cancer (though she pretends that she's the afflicted one): Sam (Kris Lemche), the school's resident stoner without a cause, who knew something was rotten in the town of Bailey Downs as soon as he struck an unidentifiable animal--Ginger's assailant--with his van.

The effort of the Canadian-made Ginger Snaps is honourable; as screenwriter Karen Walton points out in her DVD commentary, unless you're David Cronenberg, getting a horror film financed up in The Great White North is toilsome. When we see the Telefilm Canada logo in Ginger Snaps' closing credits, it is an indicator that their home-grown-content stipulations are veering away from the ultra-patriotic variety, if not consciously. The current goal of Canadian cinema, if I may be so bold, is to re-establish an international marketplace for it now that the tax shelter era is long dead and many of our biggest talents have flown south. Torontonians Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan are great, world-renowned filmmakers who've stayed, for all intents and purposes, in their mother country, but two is not an industry.

(Let it go said that nobody, least of all me, is pining for a return of tax shelter-quality cinema, nor for Canada to turn into Hollywood, although the occasional injection of genre fare is absolutely necessary.)

Cronenberg's influence on Ginger Snaps, intentional (that is, conscious) or otherwise, is felt in Ginger's protracted, prosthetically-assisted transformation: in An American Werewolf in London, one day David is man, the next day, not, while Ginger's body goes through a period of adaptation, like Cronenberg's Brundlefly, to the infection that will finally consume her. Ginger also shares Brundlefly's tendencies to spout endless theories, yet coming out of her mouth, they sound overwritten; Walton mentions that a mentor friend helped her realize Ginger's change as a potent metaphor for the menstrual cycle, and she wound up tipping that valuable hand to us too soon in. (Dialogue isn't the only culprit: as Ginger shaves her legs of patchy fur, the bathtub is surrounded by women's magazines with such names as "Sleek".)

Ginger doesn't become a werewolf, or a woman; she becomes a theme, as does Brigitte, whose verbiage hastily betray her role as the little sis shadowing big sis. Ginger Snaps' ending is undercut by the film's immediately apparent motives, though the final shot is certainly poetic and somewhat augmented by Perkins' sincerity. Perkins, by the way, is less traditionally beautiful than Isabelle, and Walton's objective to deny the sisters romantic lives tastes bitter because of the physical discrepancy between the two actresses: Ginger gets laid while Sam rejects Brigitte, ostensibly due to a minor age difference; the hunk falling for the ugly duckling would send a better message than the usual reproach of fashion periodicals. I do predict a major cult following for Ginger Snaps: Hottie Develops Insatiable Sexual Appetite, Kills is a pitch that any fanboy would hear out, and not one of the werewolf shots is CGI-enhanced, an enticement few gorehounds could resist.

Available exclusively in Canada as a Collector's Edition DVD on the TVA/Columbia Tri-Star Home Video label, Ginger Snaps looks impeccable, the 1.85:1, 16x9-enhanced transfer almost unnervingly free of aberrations. Colours tend towards the aggressively autumnal on purpose; whether in daylight or claustrophobic darkness, the image maintains a striking clarity. Once or twice, the exposure appears unnatural, hot, but this is early on and easy to put aside. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix (available in English and French) is front-centric--I would've expected more directional and LFE effects, mostly in the climax. Voices are clean and Mike Shields' sombrous score well represented.

True fans of Ginger Snaps will love this disc--its supplements cater to the converted. In addition to Walton's yak-track, there is one by self-professed "straight-laced" director John Fawcett in which he confides a fetish for Goth girls and that he wouldn't allow Brigitte and Ginger to reference the popular culture, giving the film its own sense of time and place. (This extends to the placement of fictitious products, including Victory cigarettes and Old Goose whiskey, available for your viewing posterity in a gallery under Bonus Materials, along with prototypes of the Bailey Downs emblem and a scant three faked magazine covers.) These commentaries are full of good old-fashioned Canadian humility and dry enthusiasm, and are the most enjoyable extra(s).

Onto the Special Features menu. First, we have a block of fifteen "Deleted Scenes" (25 mins.) with separate optional commentaries again by Fawcett and Walton. Many of these excised passages are just more of the same; quite helpful is one that would've established the geography of Ginger and Brigitte's house (nooks and crannies in the final showdown seem to materialize from nowhere), and Mimi Rogers, as the sisters' Mom, delivers a smashing monologue that, according to pace-obsessed Fawcett, the actress knew would get cut and was therefore reluctant to shoot. (Fawcett gives her a belated apology for proving her correct.) The most fascinating thing about this section is the difference in Fawcett and Walton's perspectives, how their justifications are usually a couple of degrees apart.

"Auditions" runs nine minutes and features three read-throughs with Isabelle and two with an exceptionally androgynous Perkins. Ginger's va va va voom transformation here is represented by subtle alterations to Isabelle's hair and make-up. (Aside: every script sounds awful to an outsider during the audition process. Mine for my thesis short sure did; you can bet that Mamet's do.) "Rehearsals" runs another nine minutes, with actors Isabelle, Perkins, and Jesse Moss test-driving their lines in barely-dressed sets using limited props. (Note: one of the scenes they practise here would land on the cutting room floor.)

A "Trailers" heading is misleading, as only one is included, in English 5.1 or French 2.0 audio; "T.V. spots" offers a pair of commercials with the same Dolby configurations. The Ginger Snaps "Featurette" (5 mins.), distorted sound aside, is charming for a lack of American gloss, and who can resist Isabelle when she calls Ginger "not much of a stretch"? Rounding out the Special Features, and thus the DVD, are "Brigitte & Ginger's School Project" (their demented slideshow presented for dissection--clicking on a still enlarges it) and "Creation of the Beast" (5 mins.), a tour of the F/X workshop that ends with a camera test of Gingerwolf (a guy in a rubber suit). A preferable package, the rather shameful omission of captions and/or subtitles aside.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day