Review: ‘Sting’ is a Charming Creature Feature and What I Wanted from ‘Evil Dead Rise’

By Lindsay Traves | Film | April 13, 2024 |

By Lindsay Traves | Film | April 13, 2024 |

Maybe we’re meant to be more afraid of lions, tigers, and bears, but I don’t think any of us would sleep comfortably with even a single eight-legged freak nearby. I quickly closed my tab and chucked my phone away after quickly searching for Arachnophobia to grab its year of release when the trailer auto-played at the top of my screen. (It was 1990, by the way). On the heels of this year’s Imaginary, which also felt like a throwback to silly Disney Channel horror, comes Sting, a charming little story about a girl and her pet spider who grows rapidly and feeds on large animals.

Kiah Roache-Turner, who brought us the whacky internet demon battle flick, Nekrotronic, writes and directs this cute little creature feature. His horror-comedy flavor is ever detectable, not losing itself to comedy and gags but keeping the tone light enough to land somewhere between gateway horror and a full-on murder party. Alyla Browne stars as Charlotte (cheeky, for a spider tale), a young girl trying to find her way in the apartment she shares with her mom, her young sibling, and step-dad. Ethan (Ryan Corr) moonlights as an illustrator, which serves as a way to bond with his young stepdaughter, a task increasingly difficult for him as the family gets busier staying afloat. Because she has busy parents, Charlotte is able to sneak away and gallivant through her apartment building into her senile grandmother’s space, where she finds a spider that she doesn’t realize has landed here from outer space. Raising her new pet, Charlotte starts to notice the arachnid is gifted, and before she can contain it, Sting outgrows the jar with holes poked in it and begins terrorizing the building’s residents.

With Charlotte as the lead, the tone is adjusted around a spunky young girl (one who is not one of horror’s creepy kid villains), which is what keeps this one light. Plucky music, the gruesome action happening off screen, and everything being adjusted for what Charlotte can stomach is what gives the movie its gateway/ horror comedy tone. It’s reminiscent of vintage Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi. It also utilizes the apartment building for story geography like Attack the Block or Demons 2 (you can see why it’s what I expected from Evil Dead Rise). It also plays with movies like Evolution or even Small Soldiers where people use ingenuity to craft creative weapons to fight a novel sort of enemy.

For all its self-aware derivative bits, Sting loses itself a bit to a flimsy attempt at injecting drama. A story about a growing monster stuffing vents with goo trapped bodies that it sucks dry (it should give the Xenomorph a ring) maybe needed a bit more beefing up, but stuffing in the stepparent story feels unwelcome and at times, unnecessarily cruel. There are lots of ways to have a young girl finding her way to her father figure that don’t need to involve a blowout about an absent biological father and fights between couples about loving one kid more than the other.

Sting’s creature design is quite restrained, the alien arachnid looking like an overgrown black widow. It works, keeping the monster faceless and mostly voiceless, allowing it to serve as an anonymous threat, making it easier to buy Charlotte’s pivot from wanting to raise it to wanting to kill it (which serves the “finding her way to loving her family” portion of the narrative). Sting’s design thrives in shadows, making it unclear just how big the bug has really grown, and making for a terrifying tableau as it creeps over a crib and rattles in the vents.

Sting might not be perfect, but it’s another feature able to break through at a time when fun horror is back on the menu. It’s imperfect in building its drama or suspense, and makes it easy to glance away from with stakes never being perfectly clear. While I don’t expect it to have quite the cultural impact, Sting made me grin thinking of the kids who caught Little Shop of Horrors on TV and grew (like an extraterrestrial spider) into long time horror fans looking for the next alien monster they might hide under their bed.

Sting hits theaters April 12, 2024