This week, a horror film – and with it, a whole load of alien spider insanity. If you’ve been hankering after a whole load of alien spider insanity, then Sting will hit the spot. As a rule, I avoid this genre, as I still suffer from nightmares after bunking off school to see The Exorcist (aged 12), but this is playful, B-movie horror rather than horror horror. It’s 90 minutes of silly, daft fun. I think I’ll leave a shorter gap between these films in future. Maybe every 35 years rather than every 40?
I think I’ll leave a shorter gap between horror films in future. Maybe every 35 years?
It’s from writer-director Kiah Roache-Turner and it’s set in an apartment building in Brooklyn. If it’s not a cabin in the woods, it’s an apartment building. I suppose it’s because apartment buildings offer dimly lit corridors and the opportunity to terrorise multiple households and air duct systems involving those ventilation shafts that no one can crawl through but, for cinematic purposes, they can. (The top ventilation-shaft films are probably: Dr. No, Die Hard, Alien, and the first Mission: Impossible, although in this one it was actually feasible, as Tom Cruise is very small.)
The insanity begins with an alien egg crashing to earth, ending up in one of the apartment rooms, opening like a Venus fly trap, and hatching a little black spider. It’s discovered by Charlotte (Alyla Browne), a young girl who opts to keep it as a pet and names it Sting.
The movie is also a family drama. Charlotte’s dad is out of the picture, but she does have a stepfather, Ethan (Ryan Corr), who is a comic book artist as well as janitor of the building. They’ve, however, yet to bond.
Charlotte’s mother (Penelope Mitchell) and Ethan have just had a baby and she is jealous of the attention her little brother is receiving. Hence, perhaps, the need to have something that is her own. Meanwhile, her demented maternal grandmother lives on the top floor along with a nasty, Roald Dahl-esque aunt. Aunts always get bad rap on screen for some reason. As do spiders. Contained in their tiny brains is, apparently, the geometry for a million webs. Isn’t that incredible? And you know their legs are hydraulic? OK, I tried, but I’m not especially fond either. (I once stayed out of our kitchen all day because it looked like there was a big spider on the worktop that turned out to be the stalky bit of a tomato.)
Charlotte keeps Sting in a jar and feeds it live cockroaches. The more Sting is fed the more Sting grows and the more Sting grows the more food it demands. It’s like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, but with legs. The film is pacy; it doesn’t mess about. Soon, Sting is the size of a Fiat 500 with a taste for meat. First to go is grandma’s parrot, who is left looking like it ‘had sex with a blender’. What could have done that sort of damage?
The plot includes things you always knew it would: one, someone picks up the phone only to find the line is dead; two, someone calls for a cat that will never return; three, a dog barks at seemingly nothing; four, an ice storm outside means no one can go anywhere; five, everyone and everything at some point will be crawling through the ventilation shafts that no one in real life – except Tom Cruise – could crawl through.
Roache-Turner is no Hitchcock or Spielberg, but he has a sure touch when it comes to knowing what fans of these films want and expect. And as Sting seeks flesh, and scuttles and drops from ceilings and wraps victims in slimy cocoons, the film does offer a couple of decent jump-scares. (That said, fans of the genre might not find it frightening enough.)
It’s wildly derivative but as that’s its intention, you can’t feel hard done by. I won’t say how it concludes but, of course, by the end our spider is dead, dead, certainly dead. Or is it?
Comments
Comment section temporarily unavailable for maintenance.