Sting releases April 12th, 2024.
I love a good creature-feature. Low budget? No problem! Campy and over-the-top? Bring it on! The draw is even stronger when that creature is something that exists in the real-world. Whether it be a larger than life alligator, a drugged-up black bear or — in this case — a spider. Granted, the titular creature in Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting no ordinary Earth-born spider, but she’s a spider nonetheless. These types of movies aren’t always good, but they’re (for the most part) entertaining. This time… it’s both.
Sting Plot
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Charlotte is a 12-year-old girl living in a modest apartment with her mother, step-father and baby brother. When she discovers a small spider one day, she decides to keep the creepy-crawler as a pet. Unlucky for Charlotte — and everybody else — this spider is different. She grows quickly, is incredibly intelligent, and has an unsatiable hunger for flesh.
The Critique
Most people — most sensible people, anyway — have a natural fear of spiders. They have eight legs, eight eyes and two venom-injecting fangs. It’s the stuff of nightmares. Sting takes that instinctive urge to flee from arachnids and utilizes it to craft a (mostly) successful horror-film set in the confined spaces of a small apartment building. Admittedly, nothing about this film feels particularly fresh. The characters are paper-thin, the set-up feels forced and the plot is often predictable. It certainly follows the expected path, but it does so with a level of skill beyond what we’d typically see from this type of feature.
Kiah Roache-Turner — best known for the Wyrmwood series — writes and directs the new arachnophobia inducing horror, and his appreciation for the genre shines through. There are a myriad of side characters introduced, each of them receiving their sliver of screen-time and a bit of backstory; however, these characters are — for lack of a better word — irrelevant. Audiences don’t watch Cocaine Bear for the human stories; they watch it to see a CGI bear snort drugs and maul some people. Roache-Turner knows that audiences want to see the spider on a rampage, and he delivers that.
With each passing scene the creature grows in size and the impending violence looms overhead like a spiderweb in the corner. We know it’s coming, and the film knows we know. The third-act is where it finally caves and the tension boils over. The story is constructed in a way that purposefully leads it to the desired conclusion. Every air vent in this building is large enough to move furniture through. It’s nonsense, but it’s necessary for the ultimate goal, and for that reason it’s forgivable.
In Conclusion
Sting isn’t going to blow anybody away, but it’s got enough legs to deliver a satisfying creature feature with surprisingly strong visual effects. The monster is on full-display and it’s design and depiction are equally terrifying. Alyla Browne bears the difficult task of carrying the bulk of the human drama on her shoulders and she gives a strong effort.
7/10
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