Ginger Snaps Unleashed
Ginger Snaps (to which this is a sequel) was a pretty decent indie horror film which drew comparisons between the sexual maturing of its female lead and the process of changing into a werewolf. The slightly more obvious link between the lunar cycle of lycanthropy and the monthly cycle of menstruation wasn't actually focused on too heavily, though you wonder why no-one else thought of it before.
Ginger Snaps Unleashed turned out to be a better sequel than we really had a right to expect. The usual routine with horror films is that even the inspired ones will produce sequels which do little more than repeat the original (as with any number of Halloween type sequels). Either that or they simply reduce an interesting villain to a hack'n'slash machine (as with the Candyman sequels).
Therefore you'd expect Ginger Snaps Unleashed to have its main character (who survived the first film having killed off her werewolf sister) turning into a voluptuous harpy as she slowly morphed into a werewolf while killing various people on the way. Or, simply, to go around killing people.
Instead there's another werewolf lurking around who wants nothing more than to mate with Brigitte (for 'tis her name), and it's this male beast which does the killing wherever killing is necessary. Instead of repeating comparisons between the changes wrought by the onset of sexual maturity and the process of turning into a wolf, Ginger Snaps Unleashed instead introduces a neat addiction sub-plot with Brigitte relying on the poison Monkshood to hold off the transformation and ending up locked in a rehab clinic. The people running the place believe she's an addict, and to a degree she is: she *needs* the Monkshood to keep her normal, otherwise she'll turn into a tortured monster.
There are also a couple of pretty decent twists involving one of the supporting characters, but I won't spoil those here. Suffice to say that the film ended up in a slightly different place than I was really expecting.
I wouldn't go so far as to lavish the same praise on this sequel that various critics lavished on Ginger Snaps, but in a lot of ways it's a better film than the original. It's also made with some imagination (both in the script and the direction). Horror fans might be disappointed, but as an indie drama with gore it delivers.
