From Arachnophobia to Itsy Bitsy, from Tarantula to Abyssal Spider, killer spider movies have always been in style. But there’s something special about the newest eight-legged offering, Sting. Sting is everything that’s amazing about creature features.
Sting is about a young girl named Charlotte (Alyla Browne from the unfortunate Children of the Corn remake) who spends her time drawing comics and creeping into her neighbors’ apartments by crawling through the apartment building’s air ducts. One day while doing the latter, she comes across a cute little spider which she takes home and names Sting – not after the rock star or the wrestler, but after the short sword in The Hobbit. Yes, Charlotte is a dork.
But Sting isn’t a normal, run-of-the-mill spider. It’s an alien spider that crashed on Earth in a meteorite. First, Charlotte starts feeding Sting small things like cockroaches. But Sting starts growing (and growing and growing), and cockroaches don’t satisfy his voracious appetite for long.
Written and directed by Kiah Roche-Turner (who also did Wyrmwood: Apocalypse and Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead), Sting is a B-movie with A+ execution. It’s got the Roger Corman spirit with the Blumhouse slickness. Everything about it is laugh-out-loud fun. The little girl lead, the monstrous arachnid, the supporting cast of oddball characters, even the heavy-handedly foreshadowed final battle. It’s all a blast.
To his credit, Roche-Turner does throw some familial drama into the mix, with Charlotte’s mother and stepfather (played by Penelope Mitchell from Hemlock Grove and Ryan Corr from House of the Dragon, respectively) juggling the emotional needs of their pre-teen daughter with the priorities of their newborn son. This stepfamily dynamic gets a little awkward at times, but the situation itself is strained, so the awkwardness feels natural. And it does help build character so that when Sting starts wreaking havoc, the audience has something to care about.
The rest of the characters serve both as cannon fodder and comic relief. From the mean old aunt (Relic’s Robyn Nevin) whom viewers can’t wait to see die to the exterminator (Jermaine Fowler from The Blackening) who is as hilarious as he is heroic, from the upstairs neighbor biology student (Danny Kim from Born to Spy) who provides necessary technical exposition to Charlotte’s dementia-riddled grandmother (Candy’s Noni Hazlehurst) who has very little idea of what is happening, there’s no shortage of meat for the titular monster in Sting.
So now, let’s talk about Sting. This spider is a menace in the best possible way. Everything about Charlotte’s “adoption” of the creature has the viewer shaking their head. And that headshaking only gets more and more pronounced as the girl’s relationship with her new pet grows. It’s horror movie 101 – there has to be a bad decision somewhere. In Sting, that bad decision sets the whole movie in motion. So, we all have Charlotte to thank for our good time.
And it all leads up to a final battle that is part Alien and part It. But it’s all awesome. Sting is a bittersweet family drama in the clothing of a terrific monster movie. It’s heavy subject matter that’s given a hysterical treatment. More funny than scary, but Sting has still got all the chills that one can expect from a movie about a gigantic creepy-crawly.
There’s not much new in Sting, but that’s not the point of it. It does what it does well, and we’ve already established that killer spider movies will never go out of style. With a little luck, we’ll get a Sting sequel.
GRADE: A
MPAA Rating: R for bloody images, violent content, and language
Release Date: April 12, 2024
Running Time: 1 hour 31 minutes
Distributor: Well Go USA Entertainment
