Red in Tooth and Claw

I’m one of those people who keeps Halloween in his heart all year round – mostly because I just like horror movies – but I do welcome October, because the scary stuff just pours out of the studios.

In fact, Warner’s 4K discs of Little Shop of Horrors arrived as I was writing this column, but I’m saving it for my next catalogue roundup to pair it with another Steve Martin musical. So for now, let’s tackle a pair of recent releases – an indie werewolf franchise and a big studio vampire movie that was supposed to launch a franchise, but didn’t quite make it. Let’s start with the Canadian content, by way of Australia’s Via Vision Entertainment … which has just upgraded its Ginger Snaps Trilogy collection to include the first film in 4K.

A quarter-century after its theatrical release, Ginger Snaps now plays like a fascinating time capsule of teen life before social media. (It’s 2000, but these kids still read books and talk to each other!) And while this certainly wasn’t the first movie to link puberty and monsterism, by explicitly connecting adolescent female rage to lycanthropy screenwriter Karen Walton found the perfect high-concept horror premise, applying ’90s riot-grrrl energy to a character who’s actually growling.

Director John Fawcett found a great double act in Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins, who play the stricken Ginger and her younger sibling Brigitte as two sides of the same person – one empowered by her new bloodlust and the other horrified by it. And both of them are helpless to stop what’s coming.

Fawcett uses the limitations of a low-budget Canadian production to his strength, creating the fictional suburb of Bailey Downs in the greater Toronto area and making things look as generic as possible before sliding into more stylized setups as Ginger’s more wolfish side comes out. (He also stuck with prosthetics and practical monster effects at a time when CGI was both expensive and unconvincing, which turned out to be a very smart move – as was hiring a pre-Cube Vincenzo Natali as a storyboard artist and uncredited creature designer.)

And Walton’s script finds a powerful engine in the sisters’ ride-or-die bond, which looks increasingly like it’s heading toward “die” as the darkness closes in around them. And even that’s set up by their introduction as weirdos obsessed with staging their own bloody deaths well before the wolf comes to their door. This is a dark movie, much darker than either of the films that followed it, neither of which was written by Walton or directed by Fawcett.

Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed was a fairly generic sequel that follows the mayhem that ensues once Brigitte – now infected with Ginger’s contagion – is institutionalized after the events of the first film; oddly, it feels more like a Nightmare on Elm Street movie than a Ginger Snaps sequel. (But we do get early appearances from Tatiana Maslany and Eric Johnson, so that’s neat.)

The subsequent Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning took a bigger swing by reuniting Isabelle and Perkins as 19^th-century versions of the Fitzgerald sisters, taking refuge at a fort besieged by werewolves. It’s not entirely successful, but it does understand that the series lives or dies on the chemistry of the sisters, and it has a murderer’s row of Canadian character actors as the residents of the fort.

VVE’s new collection is … not new, exactly, expanding an earlier Blu-ray collection of the trilogy to include the Lionsgate 4K disc of Ginger Snaps released earlier this year. It’s not a content port; this literally is the Lionsgate 4K release, right down to the label art and the Vestron Video opening logo. Which means you get an excellent 2160p presentation of the film, with the soundtrack remixed into Dolby TrueHD 7.1, and the Lionsgate Limited retrospective featurette “The Pact: Ginger Snaps Forever” in addition to a slew of supplements produced for earlier DVD and Blu-ray editions: Individual audio commentaries with Fawcett and Walton, the hour-long retrospective doc (“Blood, Teeth and Fur”) and half-hour critics’ panel (“Growing Pains: Puberty in Horror Films”) produced for the 2014 Shout! Factory BD, half an hour of deleted scenes (with optional commentary from Fawcett or Walton), twenty minutes of audition and rehearsal video, a fun look at the “Creation of the Beast” and a media gallery.

VVE’s earlier Blu-ray release didn’t include the Shout extras or the audio commentaries, so if you’re UHD-equipped this is an automatic improvement over the earlier set. And of course it means those of you without all-region players finally have a chance to watch the other two films in the series in 1080p, which is the other reason to pick up the box. It’s frankly inexplicable that neither picture has been released on Blu-ray in North America, especially since Lionsgate seemed determined to release its entire catalogue in the early 2010s – but nope, the only Blu editions of Unleashed and The Beginning were produced in the UK and Germany, and coded for Region B.

VVE’s set appears to use the same masters as those discs, and while they’re not new restorations, they’re still considerable improvements on the DVD versions in pretty much every respect, with both films offering 1080p/24 transfers, DTS-HD 5.1 audio and comprehensive supplemental sections. Me personally? I’m happy to have them all in a single set, complete with lenticular box art and a replica poster.

And speaking of films I haven’t thought about in a while, Warner’s new 4K edition of Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire is here to remind you of a time when Hollywood was afraid to look directly at the subtext of Anne Rice’s Lestat novels … though I suppose that mainstream audiences weren’t quite ready for the rampant queerness of Rice’s books in the early ’90s, and once Tom Cruise signed on to play Lestat there wasn’t much Neil Jordan could have done about that, even riding high on the success of The Crying Game.

And so the toxic romance of Lestat and his ward Louis turns into a mopey roommate drama, as Cruise’s debauched sire and Brad Pitt’s endlessly mopey baby vamp sit around getting on one another’s nerves for two hundred years, pausing only to add a “daughter” to their brood (Kirsten Dunst’s perpetual child Claudia, a highlight) and fend off overtures from fellow undead played by Antonio Banderas and Stephen Rea.

It’s all beautifully lit and photographed by Philippe Rousselot, but Jordan can’t give the episodic story any momentum or dramatic heft; the whole thing becomes awfully dreary. This may of course be the point – in an introduction recorded for an earlier release, Jordan describes the film as “a movie about the saddest vampires you’ve ever seen” – but it also explains why Warner didn’t let him make the sequel. It’d take three decades for Rolin Jones to relaunch the property as an HBO series, embracing Rice’s original intention in all of its grandiosity and lust – for blood, and for everything else.

Still, Jordan’s movie does have its fans, and Cruise’s interpretation of Lestat is fascinating in the larger context of the actor’s subsequent career. And Warner’s 4K edition is as gorgeous as you’d want it to be, with a UHD restoration that shimmers and glistens with unnatural beauty and a new Dolby Atmos mix that’s almost indistinguishable from the original theatrical mix, which is also included in DTS-HD 5.1. The supplemental section offers all the extras from both the original DVD and the 20^th anniversary Blu-ray, along with eight minutes of never-before-seen deleted scenes and two new retrospective featurettes.

“Eternal Night and Deadly Light” pairs Jordan and editor Mick Audsley for an appreciation of Rousselot’s cinematography, while “Interview with the Vampire: Creating the World” lets production designer Dante Ferretti walk viewers through the film’s various sets and locations, with some further input from Jordan. Is it a little disappointing that none of the cast is available to reminisce about their work? Of course it is. But it’s not surprising, either.

The Ginger Snaps trilogy is now available from Via Vision, and Interview with the Vampire is available in 4K from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment.

Up next: Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, Jackass: Best and Last and The Pope’s Exorcist all come to disc, and that catalogue wave I mentioned last week is still racing towards us – and picking up a few other films along the way. But first, there’s a new edition of What’s Worth Watching landing in paid subscribers’ inboxes tomorrow … and if you’ve been thinking about upgrading that subscription this might be a pretty good week to do that.