If Frank Marshall’s spiderific 1990 bug-out, Arachnophobia, could be considered the Jaws of killer spider movies (and it should), surely then the far sillier Eight Legged Freaks is the Deep Blue Sea in this shark-to-arachnid comparison that I’m obviously trying to drill into the ground. But if we continue the thread – or web, if you please – then surely after an eternity of Z-grade, direct-to-video trash, we are due a classier return to form in the shape of 2016s The Shallows, no?
Well, it seems that 2024 isn’t going to give us just one equivalent as we’ve already had the superlative Infested (aka. Vermines) scuttle onto streaming services earlier in the year; but while this French frightener proved to deliver the squirm infusing goods, US release Sting is poised to spring into the fray and sink its fangs into the competition. But are two competing spider movies that are released only months apart, that also admittedly have pretty similar set ups, just too much for a phobic audience to handle? I guess it’s down to Sting to prove that the killer spider movie still has legs.
As a frigid ice storm freezes up the city, we spend some time with Charlotte, a rebellious twelve year-old still bruising from the time when her father ran out on her and her family. Living in the dilapidated apartment block run by her mother’s slum lord aunt, her family does the best they can with their lot with Charlotte’s stepfather, Ethan, trying to balance being both a comic book illustrator by night and the overworked building superintendent and her mother, Heather, who is also trying to juggle a job with raising newborn Liam and caring for her dementia stricken mother.
Yep, it’s a hard life, but helping Charlotte negotiate her growing pains is the discovery of a strange little spider whom she adopts as a pet, feeds it copious cockroaches found around the building and names Sting. However, Sting is no ordinary spider, as she grows to twice her original size in a couple of hours, displays the ability to vocally mimic what she hears and has the arachno-smarts to escape her jar at night and go wandering freely around the building’s air ducts. Of course, we know that Sting arrived via the 50s monster movie express in the form of a tiny meteorite that pocked a little hole in an apartment window, but as Charlotte is blissfully unaware of this, she keeps feeding her beloved pet until disaster happens.
Soon there’s a spider lurking in the building that’s the size of a damn truffle hog, and after sucking all of the pets in the place dry, Sting moves onto more bipedal prey, webbing up tenants and visiting exterminators aplenty in order to gorge herself huge.
Can Charlotte manage to stop this uncontrollable feast and save her family before her former pet consumes them all?
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of Sting itself, he have to get into the fact that went you release two movies than concern the exact same subject (spiders preying on the residents of a dilapidated building), then certain similarities can’t help but scuttle into view. Not only is the basic set up damn near identical to Sébastien Vaniček’s aforementioned Infested, but the whole shebang is kicked off by an emotionally vunerable lead foolishly adopting the main, eight-legged troublemaker as a pet. While hopefully the notion of emotional support spiders won’t catch on anytime soon, there’s lots of familiar moments between the two including the fact that 2024’s cinematic bingo card calls for two completely different film to include a moment where an over zealous arachnid crawls either in or out of somebody’s mouth; but if I had to choose between the two, unfortunately, Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting comes off second best.
However, that’s not to say that the film isn’t a legitimate bundle of fun that includes many squirm-inducing moments even if you aren’t freaked out by our web-spinning friends. For a start, Sting’s more stylized, amiable approach feels very much like Michael Dougherty’s Krampus, what with the comic book tone, dysfunctional family and copious amounts of snow. The leads are likable and are lead by Alyla Brown’s mercifully un-annoying Charlotte, who manages to convey the illogical mood swings of a rebellious pre-teen without being completely punchable and her relationship between her and Ryan Corr’s struggling stepdad is engrossing, if a little wobbly in tone. Elsewhere, a colourful cast is utilised to fill out the eccentric residents who are all about to become a spider-buffet; but while some of them veer fully into the cartoonish (Danny Kim’s dead-voiced science student is a highlight) there’s also a feeling that Roache-Turner is trying to invoke the supporting cast of Gremlins – after all, who else is Robyn Nevin’s poisonous slum lord but Mrs Deagle but with a European accent? By the way, while we’re on the subject of Robyn Nevin, it turns out that her partner is Nicolas Hammond, who spider-geeks will recognize as the Spider-Man from the original, 70s TV show! If this is deliberate, it just goes to show how deep Sting’s references go, but even if it isn’t, Roache-Turner’s in-joke game is still fairly strong – the main character is called Charlotte for crying out loud.
Of course the real star of the show is Sting herself, but while I’d personally venture that thousands of normal-sized critters is way more arse-loosening than just one big one, the CGI and animatronic used to bring the hefty bugger to life are top notch. In fact, one of the more rewarding aspects of the film are the neat, little visual motifs that the director plants here and there with a early shot of a tiny Sting making her way through a dollhouse being a cool bit of foreshadowing once the size scales start shifting to alarming degrees. Also, while there’s going to be few films this year that will present a more blood curdling concept of Infested’s prospective escape route heaving with spiders and webs, the sight of giant spider slowly lowering itself towards a crib with a bubbling baby inside, certainly has no trouble nailing you right in the squirms and on this level, Sting acquits itself with phobic-triggering honors.
However, Sting unavoidably feels a little too throwaway at times, and it suffers from the fact that all new horror films that plants themselves in crumbling tenement buildings all feel a little too much like Evil Dead Rise. Conversely, I’d take a single Sting against a thousand cheap, sloppily made, direct-to-streaming crap that we usually have to put up with.
It may take silver in the recent, cinematic Spider Olympics but rest assured, there’s no flies on Sting – for obvious reasons.
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