Worth Mentioning - Maybe It's the Moonlight

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Werewolves, Dexter, and dystopia.

GINGER SNAPS 2: UNLEASHED (2004)

Filmmakers have proven many times over the years that it’s very difficult to make a truly great addition to the werewolf sub-genre of horror. Director John Fawcett and writer Karen Walton succeeded at doing just that with their 2000 film Ginger Snaps, which happens to be my all-time favorite werewolf movie. Once a great werewolf movie has been made, it becomes even more difficult to make a great follow-up to that movie – as the makers of the sequels to The Howling could tell you. Directeor Brett Sullivan and writer Megan Martin could probably back them up – because, while their movie Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed was fairly positively received and has its share of fans, it’s not often said to be on the level of the first movie. For this Ginger Snaps fan, Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed has always been regarded as a disappointment.

Ernest Mathijs, who wrote a book on Ginger Snaps and happens to be married to franchise star Emily Perkins, described the sequel as being more radical and nihilistic than its predecessor, and I found it to be a bummer from the start. The first movie had a beautifully heartbreaking ending, with Brigitte Fitzgerald (Perkins) having to kill her werewolf sister Ginger (Katharine Isabelle). She was infected in the process, but that shouldn’t be an issue. Brigitte and a friend had come up with a cure for lycanthropy, a monkshood extract, and while it was too late for Ginger to be cured, the monkshood (a.k.a. wolfsbane) should have been able to keep Brigitte from becoming a werewolf. But Sullivan and Martin backtrack from the idea of a cure. It’s said that monkshood will only slow the transformation, and now Brigitte, who lives in hiding from a male werewolf that’s tracking her, has to regularly inject herself with the monkshood extract to keep herself from transforming into a werewolf... and the longer she has this infection, the less effective the monkshood is becoming.

After witnessing the male werewolf attack someone, Brigitte goes into anaphylactic shock from a monkshood overdose and wakes up in the Happier Times Care Center, which is a rehab center that also houses chronic care patients. Among those patients is a burn victim whose young granddaughter, called Ghost (Tatiana Maslany), is also staying at the care center while waiting to be assigned to a foster home. A comic book enthusiast who reads werewolf stories, Ghost is fascinated when she hears that Brigitte was shooting up wolfsbane and becomes even more interested in her when Brigitte has a run-in with one of the bullies Ghost has at the center.

While Ghost worms her way into her life, Brigitte is getting closer and closer to her werewolf transformation, with body parts changing and hair growing in new places. While this goes on, Brigitte has taunting visions of her dead sister Ginger, allowing Katharine Isabelle to have some scenes in the film. The transformation and the presence of Ghost aren’t the only unpleasant things Brigitte has to deal with, as there’s also a sleazy clinic employee named Tyler (Eric Johnson), who gives drugs to the girls in rehab in exchange for sex and that aforementioned bully Beth-Ann (Pascale Hutton). Not to mention the werewolf that’s still following her.

There’s not much that’s pleasant about Ginger Snaps 2, which is dark and off-putting, largely devoid of the entertainment and humor that can be found in the first movie. Perkins is still delivering a great performance as Brigitte and the same can be said for Maslany, even though Ghost is an incredibly irritating character. Following in the footsteps of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (but much less fun), Ginger Snaps 2 is largely set within the confines of the care center – but thankfully, Brigitte and Ghost do eventually get to move on to other places as they try to get away from that male werewolf. That puts someone else on their trail: Alice Severson (Janet Kidder), the head of Happier Times.

It's a relief when the movie gets away from the clinic... but unfortunately, this is all building up to one of the most soul-crushing endings a horror sequel has ever had. Ginger Snaps didn’t really need a sequel, it worked perfectly as a standalone film with a sad but solid ending. Ginger Snaps 2, however is desperately crying out for a sequel. It ends with a situation that needs to be resolved in a follow-up. So it’s a shame that we have never gotten a sequel in the twenty years since the movie was released. (There was a prequel, but that doesn’t fix things.) The ending of Ginger Snaps 2 is such an annoying disappointment, it has caused me to largely ignore this movie’s existence for the last twenty years. I’ll watch Ginger Snaps again and again, but I rarely continue on to Ginger Snaps 2 because I hate where the movie leaves Brigitte. I don’t enjoy the movie that much on the way to the ending, then the ending completely kills it.

DEXTER SEASON TWO (2007)

The Showtime series Dexter starred Michael C. Hall as Dexter Morgan, a blood spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department. He is a serial killer, but he was raised by his foster father, the late Detective Harry Morgan (played by James Remar in flashbacks) to direct his homicidal urges not toward innocent people, but toward the deserving: murderers who don’t live by this code of not harming the innocent. Since Dexter has this code, you could basically see him as vigilante, sort of a more twisted version of the Marvel Comics character The Punisher – and since I already had that thought in my mind while watching the first season of this show, I was amused to see the moments in the second where Dexter himself even starts to think of himself as a messed-up version of a comic book hero. That’s only part of the season, though. For another part of the season, Dexter makes an attempt at putting his homicidal pastime behind him. That’s because Dexter season 2 goes off in a surprising direction right from the start...

The first season of this show had already surprised me. Dexter was on the trail of a serial killer called The Ice Truck Killer throughout that season, and in the end, when the identity of the killer was revealed to Dexter, it turned out to be the good, old, “long lost brother” twist. I didn’t expect that – and I definitely didn’t expect that from the first season of a show, because the “long lost brother” twist is usually saved for episodes further down the line in a show’s run, when it seems like the writers are running low on ideas. But it worked for Dexter, and it was true to the source material, the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay. The first season of this series was a faithful but greatly expanded adaptation of Lindsay’s book – but after that first season, the TV series and the book series took different paths. Showtime kept ordering seasons of the show, Lindsay kept writing Dexter novels, but the stories did not overlap. And here’s how the show surprised me for season 2: this time around, the serial killer the Miami P.D. is working to track down is Dexter himself! This is another idea I would have thought would have been saved for later in the show’s run. But no, it’s season 2 and Dexter’s back is already against the wall. The corpses he has been dumping in the ocean have been discovered and his co-workers – including his foster sister Debra (Jennifer Carpenter) – are working to figure out the killer’s identity, not realizing they’re interacting with the killer every day.

Sgt. James Doakes (Erik King) is already suspicious of Dexter and following him around, so Dexter has to take it easy and try to suppress his homicidal urges. When his girlfriend Rita (Julie Benz) also starts asking tough questions, she comes to believe that Dexter is a drug addict and has him start attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings. This turns out to be a bad idea, because at these meetings, Dexter crosses paths with a woman named Lila (Jaime Murray) – and meeting Lila is like having a bomb dropped on his life. This woman is mentally unhinged and becomes intensely infatuated with him – so while trying to keep the cops off his trail and still dealing with information he learned near the end of season 1, he also has to deal with Lila acting all Play Misty for Me / Fatal Attraction over him. Anyone in Dexter’s life, whether it be Rita or Debra, Rita’s children, or Dexter’s co-workers Angel Batista (David Zayas) and Vince Masuka (C.S. Lee)... any of them could be messed with by Lila at any time.

The Miami PD’s investigation of Dexter’s crimes is aided by visiting FBI Special Agent Frank Lundy, with Keith Carradine making a great addition to the cast in this role. Lundy is an interesting, cool presence – and proves to be quite appealing to Debra, who is looking for love again since her last boyfriend turned out to be the Ice Truck Killer. Doakes makes a lot of progress on the Bay Harbor Butcher (that’s what they call Dexter, not knowing it’s Dexter) case on his own, but former Lieutenant Maria LaGuerta (Lauren Velez) and her replacement Esme Pascal (Judith Scott) have some issues to work out before they can really focus on this business.

Dexter season 2 has a lot of great twists and turns that kept me fully engrossed every step of the way, anxious to see how Dexter was going to get out of the multiple messes he finds himself in over the course of the twelve episodes. I also liked that there were moments when Dexter's claims that he has no emotions are brought into question, because it's been clear from early on that this guy does have emotions and does care about certain people in his life, even if he's always denying it.

This is awesome television that I should have been watching seventeen years ago, but even all this time after it first aired it still feels fresh, and it’s still fascinating.

THE BLOOD OF HEROES (1989) / THE SALUTE OF THE JUGGER (1989)

Rutger Hauer turned in an iconic performance in the 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner, so it’s a bit shocking that he never ended up working with that film’s director, Ridley Scott, ever again. He did, however, work with Blade Runner co-writer David Webb Peoples on Peoples’ sole feature directorial effort, the 1989 post-apocalyptic sports flick The Blood of Heroes – or, as it’s known outside of the United States, The Salute of the Jugger.

This one is set at some unspecified date in the future, at a point when the 20th century has been long forgotten and “cruel wars” have left the Earth a wasteland. Battle-hardened athletes known as Juggers travel from village to village to challenge locals to matches of The Game, a brutally violent sport where players beat and whip each other for control of not a ball but a dog skull, which can be used to score points. Hauer takes on the role of a Jugger called Sallow, who has played in the big leagues of The Game in the underground Nine Cities, where life is better than it is on the surface. But he was busted down to the minors and is back to the village-to-village grind, travelling with fellow Juggers Dog-Boy (Justin Monjo), Mbulu (Delroy Lindo), Big Cimber (Anna Katarina), and Young Gar (Vincent D'Onofrio). Visiting another village, they cross paths with a Jugger called Kidda (Joan Chen), who dreams of playing in the Nine Cities League.

Through his association with Kidda, Sallow decides to give League play another try... but higher-ups in the Nine Cities don’t take kindly to him, with Mad Max villain Hugh Keays-Byrne as Lord Vile and his Mad Max co-star Max Fairchild, as a Jugger who’s called Gonzo and has a visible metal plate in his head, plotting to break Sallow’s legs and knock out his one good eye.

Whether you call it The Blood of Heroes or The Salute of the Jugger, this movie is pretty obscure. I had never seen it before this week... and after watching it, I can understand why it’s obscure. It’s dark, dirty, and rather low-key. The tone and style wouldn’t appeal to a lot of viewers, and the characters aren’t easy to latch on to. It’s an interesting enough concept and worth checking out due to how unique it is, but I can’t say this is one I’m going to feel like revisiting. I’m glad I finally saw it, though.