Isn’t it kinda depressing to know that “Sting”, this creature feature about a literal man-eating spider going after an oblivious family immediately makes a better B-movie effort than Road House…..and it still isn’t all that better than that movie?
Ok, technically it is but only by DECIMETERS.
Kiah Roache-Turner’s sense of canniness is highlighted in very brief spurts and you can definitely pick it apart in certain scenes but while the direction is loose, it’s not limber if you catch my drift. There’s barely any flexibility that carries over from scene to scene; it vaguely feels like autopilot and it’s like he has to jolt you awake every half hour.
One thing he does do well though is his utilization of tight cramped spaces through a small budget; production design is very indicative of that for better but also for worse. Mining this setting in such an enclosure of cloisters does set in the inevitable conditions to come and entraps our characters to where getting out is very limited (and that’s one of the better unspoken rules of horror filmmaking) but eventually, those walls begin to cave in, making the inevitable foreshadowing of the movies events that much more obvious and that’s when you start picking up how inconsequential and unimaginative the location really is to this movie; very rarely do they get creative with this environment. I literally kept questioning to myself why this damn movie was set during the winter outside of plain old window-dressing.
Thankfully, the cinematography almost succeeded in distracting me from that; a sturdy variety and range of medium, fisheye, wide lens, high angle shots that felt very dynamic if not predictably complementary to the situations it telegraphed. Editing is decent and hell, I kinda dig the lighting in this movie.
Jump scares are back in full force and they’re once again annoying to watch play out while the foray and emphasis on practical creature effects are admittedly impressive; since this was done by the same VFX team who did Lord of the Rings, that bit is of no surprise. And it goes hand in hand with how decently-staged the action scenes are. Sucks that its use of the R-rating is aggressively tame in comparison to others, even if it does live up to the rating; the kills are competent but repetitive. Not to mention, the music here…..it comes off very droll and uninspired. How did Anna Drubich, the same composer behind Barbarian, make a music score this rudimentary and stale?
Wish I could say that helps with the play-by-play narrative that surrounds it but these characters, man……they don’t do it for me. Seriously, I thought the characters from the recent Road House movie were the most punchable lot of people I’ve seen so far this; this entire flock of uncharasmatic family members proved me wrong between their matter-of-fact dialogue and embarrassing display of comedy, made significantly worse by its rather annoying display of racial clichés you’d readily find during this genre fare back in the 90’s and 2000’s.
All the actors do the best with the pantywaist material (Jermaine Fowler succeeds at being the most charismatic while Alyla Browne and Ryan Corr do their best with their archetypal placeholders) but that can only get them so far.
If it’s not a by-the-numbers monster survival flick, it’s a weirdly muted and undeveloped take on the strained nuclear family dynamic and even with that, the film is anchored down by its ravaging indecision on whether to play up the drama or poke fun at everything, which the introduction seemed to be insinuating. The array of conflicts it builds up are annoyingly superficial and surface level to really immerse yourself into these characters mindsets and ideologies and it gets so by-the-numbers, all of that starts bleeding into the actual spider-related carnage to the point where by the time Sting starts fucking stuff up, whatever little momentum is built up fizzles out almost immediately and it actively mucks with the pacing. Balancing horror with an equal measure of comedy and suspense is admittedly a tricky conundrum to crack especially since suspension of disbelief with certain projects can only go so far so it really isn’t that bad that Sting never tries to hide its intentions but between its unadorned premise, and the litany of unimportant scenes and details that only exist to pad out the otherwise modest runtime, you really can’t help but feel a little cheated.
We talk about movies plodding around with plots without stories and stories without plots all the time; how about films that rely on being scared of the idea and not the execution? Ok ok, it makes sense in a way because spiders are technically more scarier for the fear they trigger than for the threat they represent but I don’t think the execution piggybacks off of that fact well enough to give it proper credence to the premise they’re going for here. Script-wise, it clicks with only a vague understanding of that but then you splice together the film from beginning to end and you realize the way we got there feels carelessly ripped out from an old Asylum film at best and a Steven Spielberg adventure at worst; this entire thing feels like it was constructed from the ground up to be a throwback film….only without the extensive research required to actively carry that over.
I could swear there was something within the confines of this movies plethora of tangled webs where it wanted to tie together the idea of fractured relationships; like it actively wants to be about something more but is scarcely aware it can’t fulfill those themes. Again, 91 minutes wasn’t nearly enough time to flesh all this out.
Bloody hell, this really doesn’t make either itself or Road House look all that better when you watch ‘em back to back, does it?
