A great sequel was in the back story.

My presumption makes a brand new plot point. I know you can get a whole new sequel out of my presumption, because I've written and posted a whole Ginger Snaps fan fiction novel, 200,000 words, 647 pages worth, with that "presumption" as a set piece. So, mine is not simply presumption. I've run with it, tested it and seen it work to my--and some readers'--satisfaction.

Would you like a cookie? Just because you and a few other readers were satisfied with your fan fiction novel doesn't make it any less of a presumption. I don't care if you've written a series of novels based on the source material a la Star Wars non-canon sequel novels. Hell, the amount of Twilight fan fiction out there is staggering from what I've heard, surely you're not claiming their opinions on the movies are somehow more credible than everyone else's simply because they've taken the time to write their own sequel... ?

Yours, on the other hand, is only a presumption, and it just makes enjoyment of a good scene more difficult. Thanks a bunch. Try writing a good fan fiction with your presumption that Jesse Moss is a bad actor.

Thanks a bunch? Meaning my presumption somehow makes enjoyment of a scene more difficult for you? I have no interest in writing fan fiction, but even if I did, I certainly wouldn't include characters I found boring, played by actors I thought were poor.

I liked his performance. You compare it Isabelle's. Well, she was playing a female werewolf, and she was a good looking girl. A sexualized female werewolf: it's easier in this culture to act that. It's easier to direct that. And it's easier for hetero male or a lesbians to like it. She was at least as far over the top in the hallway scene as Moss was when she says "I see fireworks, *beep* supernovas." And it was appropriate. The scene called for it.

Actually I didn't think she was over the top in that scene, I thought she was over the top in her screen test when she said it, but in the final take used she had improved enough to reel it in a little. As for how easy Isabelle's role is to play, that's entirely debatable but even if it was easy it wouldn't change a thing - it's still a great performance while Moss's is not. If his role is harder to play, tough, he should've rose to the challenge and he didn't. If it's easy, then he should think about another job. It also has very little (if anything) to do with her looks, if I judged performance by looks alone I'd be recommending Megan Fox for Oscars by now. I judged her acting talent for myself based on charisma, intonation, restraint, and so forth. If you liked Moss's performance, that's fine, personally I thought he was ridiculous. As a werewolf anyway, as an average horny teenager he was satisfactory.

How much fiction have you ever written? Have you ever submitted fiction or a script? Have you ever received detailed criticism of your writing, and read through it? Have you ever given criticism of somebody else's writing? Have you ever read your fiction or script in front of people and taken comments? I have done all of that.

Yet strangely you seem very sensitive to criticism both of your arguments and the movies you like, it's odd that someone so accustomed to it would be so offended. As for what you have or haven't done, I don't see what this has to do with anything, you appear to have a rather elitist attitude which dictates that only you or people like you are qualified to offer opinions on fiction and everyone else's should automatically be discounted.

I don't think you know what you're talking about. Period. If it's the unlikely case that you have done any of that, you're hamstrung because you have this standard for good or bad writing that means nothing to anyone but you.

Okay, so I don't know what I'm talking about, my standards don't mean anything to anyone but me... so, what's the problem? I'm not arguing with the latter, I don't expect anyone else to adopt my viewpoint simply because I say so, I'm merely sharing my thoughts on a topic.

No, Karen Walton made it clear why it was taken out. They didn't want to deal with what doctors would discover. It wasn't that sort of film. It was film about the strains on the relationship between the sisters due to puberty/lycanthropy. It's called staying on topic. (Not to mention within budget.)

Well exactly, like I said, in order for this film to be made, Brigitte had to make dumb decisions.

No, sorry, Brigitte made bad decisions because she was a fifteen-year-old in way over her head. Brigitte isn't an action hero, and this is a horror story, a tragedy, not a thriller. She had no training that would prepare for what happened to Ginger. In stressful conditions without training people make huge mistakes all the time. I would have considered this a bomb if she made unrealistically sound decisions. Like the idiot plot, there's also the genius plot, which is just as disrupting for enjoyment.

I don't think it takes a genius to see someone you care about bleeding half to death and call an ambulance, this is literally something a prepubescent child can understand. You don't need to be an action hero, you don't need special training, it's common sense. Even to a teenager.

I totally identified with Brigitte. She made the exact wrong decisions the fifteen-year old in me could understand. But she made up for it by being brave. She goes down into that basement to try to reason with a raging werewolf, with nothing in her hand but a syringe. No matter what decisions she made or would made, that is courageous. I'd put her next to Ellen Ripley. Even higher because Brigitte was fifteen, had not training, and was not as well armed.

 Ripley? Really? Come on. Although you did provide an example of a character who, for the most part, actually makes smart decisions and allows the audience to identify with her when in peril. Ripley's first instinct in the original Alien was to do the smart thing and not allow Kane back on board the Nostromo incase he infected the others. This was a masterful move by Scott because due to all the other characters opposing her and our sympathy for Kane it portrays Ripley initially as someone cold and unemotional, but later the audience realizes that despite the crew presumably all having the same training, she was actually the only one thinking clearly.

I think you're overestimating Brigitte's bravery, at one point she agrees to allow Sam to leave the closet (or wherever they were hiding, I forget) and face the werewolf while she stays put despite the fact that she knows she's been infected and if attacked will heal rapidly, not to mention the possibility that Ginger won't attack her because she's her sister. This is such an inconsiderate move that the much more vulnerable Sam (whom Ginger has already attempted to murder once) ends up being killed as a result, whereas if she'd insisted he stay put while she leave the closet he'd probably still be alive. When your decisions are so dumb they literally result in death and exacerbated illness, you don't really qualify as admirable regardless of your age group.

You missed the whole the point of those relationships. They were not good, and not just because of the sisters negative attitude. Emily Perkins says Mimi Rogers played Pamela as having an abusive history with the sisters, and in character Rogers would often say things before the cameras rolled that would upset Perkins and Isabelle for the scene. That's in the Blu-Ray Collectors' Edition commentary. Emily Perkins played Brigitte as having been sexually abused by her father. That's in the book John Fawcett's Ginger Snaps by Ernest Mathijs.

If you don't understand this, you don't understand the subversive dimension of GS, what takes it from a good film to a great film.

You're kind of shooting yourself in the foot here, because if one has to listen to the collector's edition commentary and read novelizations of a film before being able to understand its characters, once again that would be a testament to poor directing. As far as I'm concerned, any hints that the girls were being abused should've been present in the film and all I saw were two concerned parents. Well one, the father is mostly apathetic or absent but he does seem smart enough to catch Brigitte in a lie.

But if you want some immediate proof, just one example: those girls are sleeping in an unfinished basement, in Canada, where the nights are very cold. You might say, oh, they want that. Okay, they're willing to be cold together, but then why are they sleeping on two of the cheapest WWII army surplus hospital beds you can find? You think they're well treated?

Seriously? That's your example of how we're supposed to deduce that they're being physically and sexually abused? They're sleeping in an unfinished basement?

Pamela's out of touch with reality, and the sisters' worse nightmare prior to the werewolf, according to Karen Walton, was growing up and turning into her. The father, at the very least, is uninterested.

On the contrary, Pamela seems mostly in touch with reality since she sees the behaviour of her daughters and comes to the most logical conclusion: puberty. She also sees that Ginger has started her period and rather than ignore it or shame her for it like an abusive parent would, she makes a point of reassuring Ginger that it's nothing to be ashamed of and even almost celebrates it. She also confronts Brigitte about Ginger's behaviour, and we learn that her keeping a distance was a parental tactic which Brigitte pretended was paying off in order to divert Pamela's attention. Being a bit on the naive side, she accepts this, but she was still doing the right thing and supporting her children. Hell, she's even willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for them and take the fall for a murder she believes they committed. But you're right, their beds aren't as comfy as they should be, clearly she should be arrested for child abuse.

Really? I know real cases... People do all kinds of wrong things in emergencies. And denial can be really thick, especially when the person injured is an authority like a parent and tells everyone they're okay. We have an extreme difference in experience.

I'm sure there are real cases, this however does not change the fact that the majority of people who have some semblance of a brain know from a very early age to call an ambulance if someone is hurt. It's probably one of the first things most children old enough to reason are taught: what to do in a crisis situation - call for help. Get an adult. Run and get daddy/mummy. It's basic common sense.

She's in denial about the cause, not the symptoms. Let's look at it: she complained because she was clearly acting differently, but she explained it away as her hormones or period. Yet, she couldn't have forgotten the attack, but dismisses it in the strongest terms possible. When she couldn't deny the cause any more, she finally basically admits it, but then only to the one person she trusts in the world, and then swears her to secrecy.

Why couldn't she have forgotten the attack? Maybe lycanthropy causes temporary amnesia! See? I can invent symptoms of a fictional disease too. Ginger explaining it away as her hormones or period is something I interpreted as lying, not denial, she wanted to reassure Brigitte that it was normal so that Brigitte wouldn't tell anyone.

However, would Ginger have even admitted that much if Brigitte hadn't awoke to Ginger's weeping and then caught her puking blood? What would have happened if B. didn't wake up? Ginger might have just run away. Then she's psychotically furious when she discovers Brigitte disclosed her condition to Sam.

I think she was especially furious because of the fact that it was Sam, whom she was visibly disgusted by even before she knew Brigitte had told him anything because she thought he was trying to sleep with her. Plus, she probably didn't like the idea that her sister was making friends without her.

Plus, did you notice the sisters never say the word "werewolf" throughout the film? Brigitte never says it in Unleashed, either. Sorry, my observation stands up. Ginger was both secretive and in denial, in a very weird way.

Pretty sure Brigitte does say "lycanthrope" though, which is the same thing.

And I think John Fawcett did just that. I could point to things in the background in that final scene and tell you their meaning. That scene is just as deep as a Kubrick scene.

You could probably do that with a lot of final scenes in movies, whether such things were intended to be focused on or not. You may be reading too much into it, pun intended.

You must not have heard Ghost's dialog as Alice is giving Brigitte the tour. What do you think made Brigitte run for the exit? In the deleted scenes Ghost is even more obnoxious in trying to terrify Brigitte.

I'm not interested in the deleted scenes, only what's in the actual movie. I remember Ghost shouting "When you close your eyes, is it Hell you see?" or something to that effect, which I don't view as taunting, just a strange question. Although, even if it was taunting, I expect it had something to do with Brigitte's dismissive attitude toward Ghost and everyone else from the outset. If you ignore people or glare at them, they're not going to like it.

If she's living at the place, yes it is. In any mental health facility, staff is supposed to check on you, regularly. It's called a controlled environment. If it had a cliche, er, a ventilation system you could crawl through, believe me some girls would have discovered it long before Ghost and that place would have been shut down.

It's hardly a maximum security facility run by experts though, is it? It's a rehab center run by a former junkie. We don't even know how long it's been in operation, do we? For all we know the place just hadn't been inspected or evaluated yet due to staff shortages or whatever. It's an oversight, I'll grant you that, but it wasn't enough to ruin my suspension of disbelief and ultimately it was forgivable because it introduced Ghost, who to me was the most interesting character in all the films.

If that's the case, what you call bad writing is actually good writing. Why are you saying character idiocy is something bad in a horror movie?

Because you're supposed to feel like you're in peril, and the thrill is supposed to be maximized. At least that's what a good horror movie should aim for, in my opinion.

That's a relaxation of the constraints of reality. A world with werewolves has some magic to it. There, matter can be created and destroyed. Death and time might be reversible. It's almost like a vacation from the real world.

I don't want magic, not in horror. In fact in the third movie (which I despised so much I could barely finish) they introduce seers and magic and it was one of the many stupid additions, primarily because I liked that they treated lycanthropy as a biological infection in the original rather than some supernatural curse. If I wanted magic, I'd watch a fantasy film. If you relax the constraints of reality too much it stops being scary. Just look at slasher movies, the most successful ones are the ones in which the characters aren't just idiotic cannon fodder for the villain, but strong leads who give the villain a run for their money.

And we're not. I wrote "Stephen King stories," which everyone agrees are a notch above the movies based on them, at least.

Yes, and I explained why, so let's stick to movies for now.

Actually, the only reason why the meteors aren't in there is because De Palma couldn't get the special effect to work right. By your argument, that would be bad writing. Although the results are better in your opinion, they did it for real-life pragmatic reasons. By your definition, that's just plain bad writing.

Well no, it would be bad special effect planning. For all I know, DePalma might've been able to make it work, he did wonders with the rest of the novel.

The fans on the Carrie 2013 board clamor for the meteor shower to be restored into the Extended Cut. So, I don't know if its removal has the effect you think it does. I, for one, have wanted to see Carrie White portrayed more faithfully to the book, and I'm the most dyed-in-the-wool Carrie fan you can find.

That's your preference, personally I found the Carrie in the book to be largely unsympathetic, while Spacek's performance is what drew me to the character. Having said that, given the choice between what the 2013 version ended up being - a simple rehash of DePalma's film - and being more faithful to the book, I would've preferred the latter purely because it was at least something we hadn't already seen.

I'm one of the few horror fans who despise that movie. I think Kubrick lost his mind. The subtext over-dominates the text, and it's so laden with symbolism that he makes the subtext incoherent. Either that, or it was one big joke on everybody.

I won't deny the movie has problems, probably more than most fans of it are willing to admit, but I enjoy it because of its atmosphere and direction which are a pleasure to watch. Apparently Kubrick chose to approach the film as though it could've easily been a descent into madness rather than a haunting and I liked the idea, even though it fell short of its promise in parts - King famously hated it, and instead got involved with the 90's miniseries which was absolutely abysmal.

King talks down Carrie a lot, and he shouldn't. It was already a YA best-seller when the movie came out. I think Carrie was the most original horror story written in the second half of the twentieth century.

The idea was certainly original, the execution however left a lot to be desired. It was King's first novel so his missteps are understandable but the movie outclasses it by miles.

Really? Cliches, or tropes?

Cliches.






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