Sting Review

Sting is an Australian horror film that shows one of that nation’s most notorious animals terrorising an apartment building in Brooklyn.

During a massive blizzard an alien spider crash lands in Brooklyn. Charlotte (Alyla Browne), a young girl and aspiring comic book writer who finds the spider, names her Sting and keeps her as a pet. Sting starts to grow at an exceptional rate and moves on from eating cockroaches to bigger prey.

Sting was an unashamed B-Movie with a tongue-in-cheek approach. The film opened like a horror short film where a dementia sufferer unknowingly kept bringing the monster new victims. This was a film where one character arms themselves with a super soaker and the character of Gunther (Robyn Nevin) was a pantomime villain. Scenes set in Helga (Noni Hazlehurst) and Gunther’s apartment showed the elderly sisters watching B-Movies which showed Sting was paying homage to their origins.

Whilst Sting was a fairly light affair, it managed to have effective horror moments. A lot of people have arachnophobia, and that fear is justified in Australia since they have spiders that can kill people. Tarantulas are generally harmless to humans but they are scary-looking creatures. Sting established that spiders eat their prey alive by paralysing them and eating them from the inside out. The trailer showed the moment when the spider went into a woman’s mouth and it was a genuinely horrifying moment. The other scary sequence involved the spider paralysing one of her victims and the potential meal couldn’t do anything to protect themselves.

The titular character in the film was named Bilbo’s sword in The Hobbit. This was a double reference. A major scene in The Hobbit was when the dwarves were attacked by giant spiders that paralysed them and wrapped them in cocoons. Sting did something similar to her victims. The other part of the reference was related to the Visual Effects company Weta because the New Zealand-based company worked on Sting, as well as the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies.

Sting has been compared to Alien. There was some credence to those comparisons since Sting was set in a tight location, showing people being terrorised by a ruthless monster. Alien had a classic setup for a haunted house/monster movie which Sting followed. When cocooned people were found in the air ducts it brought back memories of when the Colonial Marines raided the Alien nest in the sequel Aliens.

Sting had some similarities to Evil Dead Rises. This was due to both films being set in a dark and dank apartment building and both films focused on a family unit. The film’s director, Kiah Roache-Turner, and cinematographer Brad Shield, ensured there was a constant scene of motion because there was so much camera movement. It helped to give Sting a scene of dynamism, like the Evil Dead films.

Sting followed the old adage that a horrific event can bring a family together. It’s a theme explored in The Boogeyman, and Sting does the same. The character drama of the film revolves around Charlotte and her stepdad Ethan (Ryan Corr) and their attempts to bond. Charlotte was resistant because she idolised her birth father, but he did get the tween into comics. The film was trying to be emotional, but Charlotte was such a brat that I wanted her to be eaten by the spider. Charlotte seemed to get pleasure from feeding the spider live prey which seems like a red flag.

Sting was a film made for horror fans who want their films to have a knowing, B-Movie quality. Despite the dark visuals and a couple of excellent moments of terror, Sting was mostly a light affair that didn’t take itself too seriously.