Sting

Grade: C-

A great scary movie might “ruin” something for you, like what Jaws may do for swimming in the ocean, or The Blair Witch Project for camping. Sting didn’t have any influence on me like that. I’m still not afraid of potentially being attacked by a camera that zooms in on my face.

This happens over and over to characters in Sting. It doesn’t seem to have the budget to show the spider doing much. The plot is strikingly similar to Little Shop of Horrors. Sting begins with news of an asteroid collision. A tiny spider egg drops in through the window of a South Brooklyn apartment. A pre-teen girl named Charlotte (Alyla Browne from Three Thousand Years of Longing) takes a liking to the baby spider and adopts it as her pet, for some reason. “For some reason” is a phrase that will come up often when describing the movie.

She names it Sting. This is no ordinary spider. You might say every little thing Sting does is magic. It has an unusual appetite, and as it eats more, it outgrows its original home (a jar) by a long shot, and continues to get even bigger. At first, Charlotte is fiercely protective of Sting, but when it begins feeding on humans and animals, she’s on board that it needs to be destroyed.

The movie almost never goes outside, except for some establishing shots. These exterior shots probably took a day or less to capture. Otherwise, we don’t leave the apartment building. Everything looks like a set. There are no extras. By all appearances, there are about 7 residents in the building – most of them family. The foul-mouthed exterminator cracks dirty jokes, one-liners, and cusses up a storm on the job in front of literally everybody. The elderly. Kids. Babies. He doesn’t discriminate. After a kill that we see in great detail, we then get a scene where a character discovers the body. The sequence is stretched out, with ominous music, but of course it isn’t suspenseful for us, because we saw it happen. It’s like the rule of screenwriting: don’t devote a scene where characters do nothing but talk about something the viewer just saw. Certain parts are lit so dark, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on. It seems like a trick to obscure what they can’t afford to make look better. The last shot is of a “the killer’s not really dead” type, which could set up a Sting 2.

At times, the waters get muddy when I’m deciding what to rate a movie, when we’re in the low C to F range. Like, how can you tell which turd smells the worst? I am rating Sting slightly higher than Imaginary, which I called the stupidest movie of the year. It didn’t work me up into a frenzy of dislike, as opposed to some others. It’s too short to be insufferable. When we CAN adequately see things, the color palette is neat. The film is just boring, amateurish, and disappointing. The three words that best describe it are as follows, and I quote: “Sting. Stang. Stung.”

Grade: C-