Panic Fest 2024 Sting Review- More Entertaining Than Scary, But Still Fun

Creature features usually fall into two categories. They are either horror comedies like classics Arachnophobia or Australia’s Boar or prey on our innate fear of nature and the unknown like Jaws or Mimic. Both subgenres bring something unique to the table. Unfortunately, the horror movies that scatter laughs like fairy dust without forethought fail to do either well. Sting, showing at Panic Fest 2024, smartly walks a fine line between being too funny to scare and not self-aware enough to know what we want to see in a movie about an alien spider.

It is clear that writer and director Kiah Roache-Turner is aware the movie has heavy influences. Roache-Turner leans into that and manages to make it endearing instead of grating. When you have a spider movie in which the main character is an adorable, precocious girl named Charlotte, you know they understood the assignment. Jermaine Fowler(The Blackening), playing hilarious exterminator Frank, is a bright spot established early and sprinkled liberally throughout. Charlotte’s grandmother is played for laughs as a dementia sufferer who can’t remember either calling the exterminator multiple times or the strange noises in her apartment. This plot beat, although wrung laughs out of the audience, could be insensitive to those with family or friends who suffer.

The film begins with a tantalizing look at where it ends. Something in the vents of a rundown apartment complex is making ungodly noises. It’s obviously not the sort of thing one should try to tackle on their own. Ordinarily, it would warrant a full-fledged freakout and flee if there wasn’t a blizzard outside. These are also people with nowhere to go and not many options left to them financially and emotionally. Shifting gears quickly after the setup, we flash back several days to something careening through a window and landing in the bedroom of the slum lord, who happens to be Charlotte’s aunt.

Charlotte is a curious little girl, so instead of fearing the spider, she flips it into a mason jar and whisks it downstairs to keep as a pet. As you can imagine, things don’t go well. The intelligent, ravenous beast is there to eat, and no silly lid is going to stop it. The part digital and practical beastie doesn’t have the same authentic look as the horde of spiders in Arachnophobia or the disturbing realism of Infested. Instead, it is a glossy, shiny octopod that is more plastic than natural but fits right into the extraterrestrial angle and the slow-burn comic book backstory that fills out the family drama side of things.

New Zealand effects shop Wētã, who has done everything from the Lord Of The Rings Trilogy to Avatar, created the creature for Sting. Roache-Turner’s monster is a slick, smoothly gliding nightmare designed with a mix of practical and digital effects to capture the exact look he wanted. The spider is both familiar and foreign at the same time, serving the story arc well, even if we never know if more spiders landed on Earth or where they came from.

Although the trailer heavily implies a Ben-like relationship between Charlotte and Sting, there is no love lost when bodies start piling up. These two had barely a day to bond before the spider escaped its jar and started killing off pets. Charlotte isn’t using Sting for misguided revenge, nor is Sting protecting Charlotte from human baddies. Sting is just an animal with an insatiable appetite. This disconnect between the trailer and the final film will likely confuse viewers who expected one thing but got another.

Charlotte’s stepfather Ethan, House of the Dragon’s Ryan Corr, is likable, and he and Charlotte make up the heart and soul of the film. Less than the spider, this is a story about the two of them finding their way to each other. Charlotte feels loyalty to a biological father who can’t be troubled with her and fears that her new baby brother will mean Ethan doesn’t care about her either. Their sometimes affection and sometimes discomfort with one another reads genuine and ups the ante significantly once Sting starts running amok in all its gigantic glory.

Spiders have fallen out of vogue in horror. I don’t know if there were just too many people who were actually scared of our eight-legged friends or if the rigors of the practical effects were not interesting to most. Still, the result was a desert following the original Arachnophobia in 1990 and Eight-Legged Freaks. The hotly anticipated remake of Arachnophobia is still probably years away. Shudder’s deeply scary Infested is getting the most buzz out of The Overlook Film Fest, but flying under the radar is Sting.

Standing out in a sea of spider legs and eggs is hard. Sting takes a heartfelt approach and never strays. At its core, Sting is a sweet family drama about an out-of-this-world arachnid. Is it scary? Probably not by most standards. If the question is: Is it entertaining? Absolutely. There are enough scares to make it fun, and the laughs come easily. The cast is likable, and Alyla Browne is a star in the making. It premiered at Panic Fest and gets a wider release on April 12th, 2024.

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