Writer-director Kiah Roache-Turner spends too much time on the relationships of the main characters in his creature feature Sting for them to just be anonymous monster food, but he doesn't give them enough depth or charm to make the effort worthwhile. That's the frustrating paradox of a movie that attempts to emulate classic Amblin-style family fantasy films like Gremlins, but also wants to fully earn its R rating with brutal, nasty kills. The result is neither affecting nor scary, just annoying and predictable. There are no genuine emotions or genuine shocks in Sting.
After an opening flash-forward that promises plenty of gore to viewers who can sit through the next 40 minutes of tedious family drama, the movie begins with 12-year-old Charlotte (Alyla Browne) discovering what looks like a small spider in a locked room in her grandmother's apartment, where she's been snooping around. She's a sanitized movie version of a weird little girl, so she takes it home with her. What Charlotte doesn't know, however, is that her new pet isn't really a spider, but rather some kind of spider-like alien that hitched a ride on a passing asteroid.
The whiny, defiant Charlotte is meant to be an endearing heroine, but she's mostly an irritating brat. When her stepfather, Ethan (Ryan Corr), assures her late in the movie that none of the terrible preceding events are her fault, he's entirely wrong. Charlotte eagerly feeds the spider she dubs Sting (after Frodo's sword in The Lord of the Rings) a steady diet of cockroaches, watching it grow at a freakishly accelerated rate. She doesn't seem bothered when it mimics sounds that she makes, or by the fact that it matches no known spider species when she searches for it online.
The opening scene has already revealed that Sting is going to start killing people, so much of the movie is just marking time until the gruesome deaths begin. Roache-Turner uses an appealing mix of practical and CGI effects to make the most of his limited budget, and there are some decent gross-out moments once the body count starts rising. Those moments are too infrequent for Sting to be a satisfying gonzo gore-fest, though, and the humor is similarly sporadic and underwhelming.
Aside from Charlotte and her family — which also includes mom Heather (Penelope Mitchell), baby brother, grandmother and great-aunt — there appear to be only two other residents in the unconvincingly Brooklyn-set apartment building. This kind of cramped single location is often a reliable source of suspense, but Roache-Turner makes poor use of the space, never providing any significant obstacles for the characters as they flee from danger.
Charlotte and her parents have lots of downtime to argue with one another, making them increasingly less sympathetic just as they start to fight back against the monster that's stalking them. Browne and Corr are equally grating as needy, self-pitying people whose inevitable reconciliation is hollow rather than heartwarming. The longer they're around, the easier it is to root for them to get eaten by a giant spider.
Once Sting grows large enough and starts to roam free, the movie trades its Amblin influences for equally uninspired homages to movies like Alien and Predator. At one point, the tiresome comic relief exterminator Frank (Jermaine Fowler) even observes that if the spider can bleed, they can kill it. But Frank himself is just a retread of John Goodman's memorable exterminator character in Frank Marshall's spider-filled Amblin movie Arachnophobia (another obvious touchpoint). Roache-Turner has clearly seen a lot of horror movies, but the references in Sting just remind viewers that they could be watching one of those superior classics instead. ♦
Sting
