Bullet Points: Sting (2024)
It’s Stiiiiiinggggg!! No, not that Sting, he’s retired now. This Sting is the 2024 film from writer/director Kiah Roache-Turner. If you’ve been tapped into this site for a while you know we love Kiah’s previous films Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead and Wyrmwood: Apocalypse and it’s easy to see that the man who made those films would be perfect for something like this. Be prepared to hate spiders even more than you already do!
Synopsis: After raising an unnervingly talented spider in secret, 12-year-old Charlotte must face the facts about her pet-and fight for her family’s survival-when the once-charming creature rapidly transforms into a giant, flesh-eating monster.
- Not Again: As a person who was terrified of Arachnophobia (1990) as a kid, this feels like the perfect time to re-live some of those old feelings with another killer spider movie. One major difference between this film and Arachnophobia is that Sting leans a little more into the creature design and the gruesome kills. Not a surprise when you think about who made the film.
- A Family Affair: The most important thing about Sting (not including the spider) is the family at the center of the story. Young Charlotte and her baby brother. The mother, Heather and her husband Ethan. We see how they fight to make ends meet while still having dinner as a family and enjoying their special moments together. Being a step-father to Charlotte is tough for Ethan and he has to work extra hard because of her feelings towards her real dad. It all adds to her desire for a secret pet spider that she finds in her building.
- Sting: As Charlotte and the tiny arachnid spend time together, she names it after looking up at her Tolkien books on her shelf. It’s growing at an out of control pace and it seems like it doubles in size each time she feeds it. It’s food so far has just been roaches and bugs but it isn’t long until Sting learns to get out of his glass jar and feeds inside the apartment complex.
- The Kills: As Sting grows larger and larger so does the death toll. Exterminators, old ladies, and random cats in the building are all prey to the massive spider. The effects are really cool. You can tell that a real effort was made to make it look as real as possible but also scary at the same time. The film isn’t afraid of its fantasy style, though, and we get plenty of things that wouldn’t make sense if not for the creature-ness of the film.
- Not so Itsy-Bitsy: By the end of the film Sting is so big that it would take a Paul Bunyan sized shoe to squish this bug. Charlotte is forced to face her former pet in order to protect her family from this monster creature. The kills come fast and the blood spills.
The Verdict: Sting was an awesome ride! A short runtime, great characters and performances (I really liked Frank the Exterminator), and a really well written script that felt like people doing real people things and not something in a movie. The creature designs were scary and the environment of the apartment complex gave the spider plenty of places to hide and/or hide his prey. Massive thumbs up from me. Find it on digital or Blu-ray and DVD courtesy of WellGo USA!
