Sting is a great lesson for someone looking to break into the movie industry. Go horror, and go campy. B Movie Horror fans always appreciate a valiant, low budget effort, which Sting is. Valiant, but not quite the scary as sh*t killer spider movie I’m waiting for some brave director to tackle without resorting to camp.
You know we’re in for something fun and silly when a small meteor crashes into the dollhouse of an old apartment tenant named Helga (Noni Hazelhurst). Inside that meteor is Sting, the titular alien spider quickly captured by Charlotte (Alyla Browne) a tween also living in the apartment complex. Feeling estranged since her mom Heather (Penelope Mitchell) and stepdad Ethan (Ryan Corr) just had a baby together, Charlotte invests herself in Sting, feeding him many of the various cockroaches around the apartment. Things start to get weird though when Charlotte visits another tenant, “scientist” Eric (Danny Kim), who’s surprised and creepily into the fact that this spider has doubled in size in 2 hours. And well, I think you know where this going.
As a horror comedy, Sting is way more into the comedy part than the horror part. The movie baselines us in horror tones, but spends most of its time going for something audacious or silly. Who’s not laughing when another elder tenant Gunter (Robyn Nevin), completely hammered, wanders around the hallways cursing at her missing cat in German? Jermaine Fowler comes in to cook as an exterminator who’s not quite seen a spider like this before. The deaths are insanely gory or grotesque, as the researchers must’ve told the director that spiders melt someone’s insides so the spider can eat the paralyzed animal, inside out. Charlotte clearly is going to have to confront Sting in the third act: and her montage of preparing for the assault is joyfully insane and stupid. By the time an apparently dead character comes back to life through, um, an inspired setup, the whole audience got it, and burst out laughing, like I did. Plus, for killer spider camp, the director knows instead of just having a million scary little spiders, have one GIANT fake one you save showing people until the end of the movie is the quickest way to get in a chuckle.
Heavy camp though means you’re sacrificing scares along the way. Sting tries its best to scare people; before the giant spider prop we get a Jaws like restraint, showing various ways the spider captures/lures prey into its grasp. The scariest stuff is when the spider is tiny: juxtaposing a real person/big animal getting beaten by a tiny, but very poisonous spider, certainly scared the bejesus out of people like me (that’s one of my nightmares). But those boo moments don’t happen enough, forcing a lot of tough character choices to amp up the stakes unnecessarily. And when your movie is going for a more winking comedic tone? The darker action moments don’t work quite as well, because the audience is waiting for the other shoe to drop.
At 90 minutes though, Sting never overstays its welcome. It lands on Earth, goes on a NYC apartment rampage, and gets the hell out of there. Someday someone’s gonna unlock a prestige spider killer movie, but for now, as long as they’re as fun as Sting, I can wait a little longer for “Funnel” about the killer spiders invading a cult in the Australian Outback. Not that I have been thinking this through at all.