Directed By Kiah Roache-Turner

Starring – Jermaine Fowler, Penelope Mitchell, Alyla Browne

The Plot – A mysterious object falls from the sky and smashes through the window of a rundown apartment building. It is an egg, and from this egg emerges a strange little spider. The creature is discovered by Charlotte (Browne), a rebellious 12-year-old girl obsessed with comic books. Despite her stepfather Ethan’s (Ryan Corr) best efforts to connect with her through their comic book co-creation Fang Girl, Charlotte feels isolated. Her mother (Mitchell) and Ethan are distracted by their new baby and are struggling to cope, leaving Charlotte to bond with the spider. Keeping it as a secret pet, she names it Sting. As Charlotte’s fascination with Sting increases, so does its size. Growing at a monstrous rate, Sting’s appetite for blood becomes insatiable. Neighbours’ pets start to go missing, and then the neighbours themselves. Soon Charlotte’s family and the eccentric characters of the building realise that they are all trapped, hunted by a ravenous supersized arachnid with a taste for human flesh, with Charlotte the only one who knows how to stop it.

Rated R for violent content, bloody images and adult language.

STING – Official Trailer – Spider Horror 🕷️ (youtube.com)

POSITIVES

Without the film willfully embracing the pulpy campiness that comes with the tonal territory of its plot, the film would’ve been dead on arrival, but as it stands there’s quite a lot of fun to be experienced within the depths of its material, which I summarized as a fine line of homage between “Arachnaphobia” and “The Blob”. This is solidied almost immediately, as the opening scene of the movie lures you in to the quirkiness of the characters and bleakness of their despair that are often caustically enacted with dark humor that takes full advantage of its R-rating, but beyond that periodic gags in vulnerable animals or astute observations that help supplant no shortage of effective laughs to the engagement, but never the kind that are compromising to the integrity of the elements of horror that quite literally surround our setting. For that, I not only enjoyed this old, run down apartment complex, with few interacting neighborly characters outside of central family that drives the narrative, but also a freak snow storm outside of their doors, which effortlessly articulates a dreaded isolation factor that proves little solace in the opportunity of escape. These firmly established ingredients solidify a damply chilling and claustrophobic conflict contrasting Sting the spider that makes optimism feel like another in the pile of stacked bodies, all the while imbedding extra emphasis in the technical capacities, which permeate wonderfully while working against little to no obscuring distractions in sight or sound. Roache-Turner’s most ambitious production to date brings forth a lot of energy and exhillarance in his camera movements that help make up for some of the less than desirable instances of visual frights throughout, with winding navigations and versatilic placements that constantly drive the anxieities within the phobia factors, while equally indebting themselves to the aforementioned tone that it plays so terrifically towards. Because of such, Kiah is definitely a director who feels like he constantly attempts to make the most out of what little he’s given, and as a result there’s a credibility to his craft that I wholeheartedly appreciated, making you feel the passion that he has to convey this story in the dark and damp surroundings that house it. The sound mixing here is also quite effective in articulating the communicative capabilities of Sting, as well as the expanding girth of her size, during nighttime escapes into a hollow ventilation duct that connects many of the apartments. When Sting begins as a small spider no bigger than a nickel, small squeaks are utilized to convey her petite influence to where she travels, but as her thirst for blood grows dominating, her mimicking vocal capacities not only become evidently thicker, but her bodily mass takes on more influence to the ducts whenever she’s hunting a human character, giving for my money what were the only legitimate scares throughout, which built the anticipation factor accordingly in us waiting on her to casually strike. Lastly, while most of the performances are bland and flavorless, I found Jermaine Fowler to be a welcoming fresh breath, despite him only appearing in roughly twenty minutes of this film. Fowler as this honest exterminator is essentially one of the first characters we are introduced to, and between his dry deliveries amid hilarious observations, he helps us navigate to the film’s intended tone, all while solidifying a legitimate screen presence that constantly feels like a shot of much-needed adrenaline to the film’s integrity, each time he moves back into frame, as the brave force to be reckoned with against Sting’s advances.

NEGATIVES

While the film shows a lot of promise in the depths of its potential, it’s ultimately disappointment that becomes most palpable by film’s end, especially in a barrage of familiar tropes within the genre that start to look like a bingo placemat, with the audience marking off each one that invades their screen. Unnecessary bitchy side character, wise and weird backstory delivering side character, lack of cellular connection to the outside world, and plot convenience that comes out of nowhere, are just a few of the detected familiarities, with plenty more to be mentioned, but with spoilers as a consequence, and while the biggest cliche of the characters isolation factor is ironically one that works in this channeled environment, the rest serve to drive the plot in ways that would otherwise be resolved within fifteen minutes. Beyond an overindulgence of instances seen in other movies, I found the visuals of the violence to be emphatically underwhelming, especially with expressive production values of practical make-up and prosthetics that feel like they’re spent entirely on the film’s one cool kill throughout. Even considering there’s little you can do with a killer spider, the blows of devastation here feel sorely underdeveloped in visual accompanyment, not only undercutting the cool factor of Sting’s established capabilities, but also giving the horror hounds in the audience little to chew on, with obscurred visuals and off-camera conflicts that constantly rush the pay-off to many of characters’ fates. For my money, this feels probably a product of a limited production budget, but considering every other kind of cinematic value reaches appeal in what they respectively pull from, the lack of payoffs here feel vitally disappointing, wasting away possibilities in adult-rated horror that we sadly don’t get too often anymore. Likewise, the script is nothing special, especially within the depths of an 86 minute run time that forces strain on quite a few ongoing subplots building meaning among its characters. None of these are squeezed as noticeably as the dynamic between Charlotte and Ethan, who obviously as a step-union initially begin trepid with one another, before evolving to downright bitter, with vulgar disputes between them that embrace the personally bitter with the subtleties of a mac truck barreling through a nitroglycerine plant. This then evolves to a dramatic sentimentality between them by the film’s undercooked third act, and while it’s nice to imbed some heart to the proceedings of the characters, it’s so undeserved and unbelievable that it makes them feel like completely different people, without them ever earning it in front of the camera. This brings me to my final and perhaps greatest issue with the film; in the performance of Alyla Browne. As someone who has never been afraid to critique child performances, I feel like Browne’s penchant for the melodramatic brings out the worst and most unlikeable qualities in character design, and considering she is our established protagonist who is meant to stop the evil actions of her eight-legged antagonist, it makes it difficult to invest or even like her character, especially in that even her abilities to articulate fear are never palpable towards getting over the magnitude of conflict that she basically helped usher in.

OVERALL
“Sting” doesn’t quite have eight legs to stand on, as a result of underwhelming horror and undercooked arcs, but there are enough fun factors and momentary thrills for 90’s creature feature fans of the genre to shamelessly indulge in, with one expressive pay-off during the beginning of the second act serving as the limitless potential that could’ve and should’ve demanded more. The film’s greatest issue is that it lives in the shadows of better films it casually homages, with a lack of vitriolic venom in ambitious instincts to be something bigger and more terrifying.

My Grade: 5/10 or D+