‘Sting’ Film Review: Spine-Tingling Arachnophobic Chills

“Creepy Crawlies, creeping round my creepy house.” These lyrics from the Horror Rock group Scary Bitches perfectly capture the unnerving chills found in writer-director Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting, a thrilling creature feature about a young girl, her family, and the man-eating spider that terrorizes them all. In the tradition of Frank Marshall’s 1990 classic Arachnophobia, Roache-Turner has crafted a fun and creative horror thrill-ride that will make audiences’ skin crawl in the most entertaining of ways. As the tagline warns, “Your biggest fear just got bigger.” and are they ever right!

12 year old Charlotte (a very good Alyla Browne) lives in a Brooklyn apartment with her mom Heather (Penelope Mitchell), step-dad Ethan (Ryan Corr), and newborn baby stepbrother. Heather’s mother Helga (Noni Hazlehurst) lives in the apartment above them and suffers from dementia. Helga’s grumpy sister Gunter (Robyn Nevin) reluctantly shares the caretaking duties.

Charlotte loves comic books and Ethan does his best to bond with her as the two create their own joint effort, a popular comic series called Fan Girl. While still keeping Ethan at a distance, Charlotte has not been too welcoming to her new stepfather, as her biological father abandoned his wife and daughter years ago. She retreats into her room for hours, feeling isolated and ignored due to the constant attention on the new baby.

One night, a fiery object falls from the stars and into Charlotte’s apartment building. The young girl discovers it to be a little spider, yet one that can mimic sounds. Intrigued, she keeps it as a secret pet, naming it “Sting”. As Charlotte feeds the creature more and more bugs, the spider begins to grow and does not stop until it becomes a full-on monster with an unquenchable thirst for blood.

In the apartment building, strange noises are heard behind the walls and soon, pets begin to disappear. A widowed mother named Maria (Silvia Colloca) and deadpan-strange scientist Erik (Danny Kim), are among the unlucky tenants that come into the path of the blood-thirsty arachnid from another world.

Kiah Roache-Turner knows how to play with his audience’s fears. Taking a cue from Hitchcock’s style of creating tension, Sting opens with Grandma Helga calling exterminator Frank (a funny Jermaine Fowler) to deal with whatever is inside the walls. We see him come into contact with the beast, as Frank is dragged into the air ducts. This is no spoiler, as the rest of the film takes place in flashback, playing up to the opening incident that might not have the outcome viewers will expect.

While breathing with properly eerie atmosphere, this is more than a basic monster movie. The film examines the weakness and strength of the human spirit and the bond of family through the well written relationship between Charlotte and Ethan. There are many moments where the human drama becomes as equally involving as the horror. This is not to say Kiah Roache-Turner hasn’t given fans a good time. The scenes of spider terror are quite effective, as the director leans into the monster moments with a gleeful vigor.

Brad Shield’s camera keeps the film’s vision darkly threatening while the excellent special effects (courtesy of the five-time Academy Award- winning Weta Workshop, led by Creative Director Richard Taylor) are realistically gruesome and give the film a great deal of its palpable chills.

The director has described himself as “intensely arachnophobic” and uses those fears skillfully in the crafting of his exciting horror tale, while injecting the film with an involving emotional center.

With passionate direction and an inventive screenplay, a few tips-of-the-hat to Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens, and some excellent old school frights, Sting is a creepy and entertaining monster picture that should give the cinematic “willies” to genre fans and scare the hell out of anyone who has ever recoiled at the sight of an eight-legged beastie.