Sting, 2024.
Directed by Kiah Roache-Turner.
Starring Alyla Browne, Ryan Corr, Jermaine Fowler, Penelope Mitchell, Noni Hazlehurst, Danny Kim, and Robyn Nevin.
SYNOPSIS:
A 12-year-old girl living in an apartment block secretly keeps a spider as a pet, unaware that it is not of this planet and will grow to be massive.
Sting is a creature feature that takes its cues from various B-movies of decades past – specifically the 1950s – and one or two A-movies as well, because you can be sure that writer/director Kiah Roache-Turner may have watched Alien more than once. But is imitation the sincerest form of flattery when it comes to recycling old tropes and storylines?
Well, it can be, providing the filmmakers can tell a familiar story in a new way. In Sting, we meet Charlotte (Alyla Browne), a 12-year-old girl with abandonment issues (of course), who lives in an apartment block (seen that before) with her mother Heather (Penelope Mitchell), stepfather Ethan (Ryan Corr) and her baby half-brother (this is important, because it just is). Ethan is the site supervisor for the block, which is owned by Heather’s less-than-friendly aunt Gunter (Robyn Nevin), who shares an apartment with her sister and Heather’s mother Helga (Noni Hazlehurst), who suffers from dementia, but Ethan and Heather dream of moving out into their own place.
After a small asteroid lands in the apartment block, Charlotte finds a tiny spider that she names Sting and keeps in a glass jar. As she doesn’t appear to have any other friends, and her mother and stepfather have other things going on in their busy lives, Charlotte spends most of her time playing with Sting the way most children play with a puppy, discovering that the strange arachnid can mimic her whistles (which real spiders cannot do, as the biologist who conveniently lives upstairs informs us) and doesn’t like mothballs very much, which may or may not become useful later on. In a short time, Sting starts to grow, pets start to disappear and Charlotte’s relationship with her stepfather becomes very strained, especially when he discovers what she is keeping in that jar.
Whereas Sting does add some family drama to the straightforward monster movie formula, it does so in such a convoluted way that you can see each plot device coming a mile off, almost to the point that it interrupts the giant spider action which, to be honest, is quite fun and should be the focal point of the movie. However, the heavy-handed nature of the writing is forcing you to care about people and situations that, in a dozen other movies of a similar ilk, wouldn’t really get so much screen time.
Surface-level soap opera dramatics aside, Sting does deliver some neat visuals – okay, they are straight out of Alien, as victims are trussed up in spider webs and left for the titular creature to feast on later, as well as the scene of Charlotte tooling up with mothball-infused water in a Super Soaker before entering the air vents, but it works – and the mixture of practical and CGI spider effects are superbly rendered, making Sting feel like a proper threat when she does reach her full size, but most of this comes to fruition in the final half-hour.
It is just a shame that the two different tones that permeate the movie don’t combine as successfully as the effects, because when Sting wallows in the goofy gore and comical kills is when it works best, despite the tick-box list of cliches it rattles through (including a final *ahem* stinger that is telegraphed far too early in the movie to add any tension or suspense to the ending).
Not particularly scary – even if you suffer from arachnophobia, which isn’t a great sign – Sting does just about cross the line when it comes to being a creature feature to add to your watchlist, mainly thanks to the effects that work so well and a running time that comes in under the 90-minute mark, but the combination of dumb (in a good way) B-movie theatrics and underdeveloped character drama clashes in a way that makes it frustrating if you go in expecting anything near the quality of Eight Legged Freaks or Arachnophobia, both of which managed to balance the absurd and the melodramatic a lot more successfully.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
