So just to recap the events of the original "Ginger Snaps" (SPOILERS!!!), Ginger and Brigette are sisters ... Ginger is bitten by a werewolf ... Ginger begins to turn into a werewolf ... Brigette infects herself with Ginger's blood ... Brigette kills Ginger.

We rejoin Brigette after an undisclosed period of time. She's living in a cheap motel room in a city somewhere, shooting up on wolfsbane and keeping a chart of how long it takes for self-inflicted wounds to heal -- hoping against hope that she might never become a werewolf. Occasionally she is visited by the ghost of her dead sister, who haunts and taunts her throughout the movie (you can't have a Ginger Snaps movie without a Ginger, right?). One night she manages to overdose on wolfsbane, and she gets picked up and taken to an outreach centre where she is kept caged like an animal and deprived of the drug ... but what they don't know is that she's being hunted by another deadly werewolf, who has a strong desire to mate with her.

Ginger Snaps : Unleashed is even darker than the original, both in the metaphorical and in the literal sense of the word. It's also a lot weirder ... so if, like me, you're a big fan of weird, odds are you'll probably lap this up like a bloodthirsty wolf. There are plenty of great twists and turns in the plot, and the casting is really amazing. Eric Johnson and the young Tatiana Maslany both deliver superb performances in the two main supporting roles. In most respects, many agree that this sequel is in fact better than the first movie ... but they're both so great, I don't even feel the need to compare them.

I was a bit concerned about the fact that this wasn't written by the same team as the first movie (in fact screenwriter Megan Martin seems to have no other credits to her name), but it is actually an interesting twist on the original, written by someone who clearly understood what Ginger Snaps was all about. There are two main formulaic werewolf plots ... the first involves our hero changing into a werewolf, which will eventually lead either to finding a cure or to their death (as in the first movie), and the second is about a group of characters being stalked by a werewolf, and for an added twist perhaps the werewolf is one of them. This film incorporates both of these formulas into an excellent, engaging horror story.

Ginger Snaps is probably the first great werewolf movie to have a worthy sequel, and if that wasn't enough they had to go and do it again a third time. If you haven't seen this whole trilogy yet, you definitely should.