'Sting' doesn't have enough venom

Following a snow storm that traps a number of people inside an apartment building in Brooklyn, things go from bad to worse when a fragment from an asteroid lands inside and carries with a tiny flesh-eating spider. Taken in at first by precocious Charlotte (Alyla Browne), the spider - whom she's named Sting - begins growing in size and starts to target the adults (Ryan Corr, Penelope Mitchell, Robyn Nevin) in the building...

For a movie that's all of ninety minutes long, 'Sting' wastes so much of its time trying to pad things out and make itself into some kind of deeper character study. Sure, horror is at its most effective when we can connect with the performances and the actors, or when it begins as the kind of story that you hope doesn't turn into a horror. This isn't something that's kept solely to so-called "elevated horrors", either. You only need to look at something like Lee Cronin's excellent 'Evil Dead Rise' to see how these two disparate ideas can be harmoniously blended inside an hour and a half.

'Sting', however, wastes far too much time before it gets to the good stuff - and then the good stuff isn't all that exciting or interesting. We're introduced to a snowbound apartment block that couldn't look more like a set if you tried, and a cast of cardboard cut-out characters. There's a frazzled stepfather, a well-meaning mother, a precocious pre-teenager whose dynamic with her stepdad is off balance. There's a wacky exterminator called in to help, and then the weird and unfriendly neighbours / in-laws, and then the monster itself who we see sparingly if at all. Again, conventional horror logic tells us that we imagine the horrors and expand upon it when the reveals are strategic and measured. Yet in 'Sting', it's not so much that they're done in this way to maximise tension, but it feels as if it either can't be done because of budgetary issues, or because it'd give the game away too early in the story.

But again, when you've got a story and an idea like this - flesh-eating spider gets bigger, starts to eat people - you have to go for over-the-top. It practically demands it. Why else are we here, if not to see a flesh-eating spider - from space, no less! - go ham and start chomping? Do we need a whole subplot about artistic roadblocks and agents giving short shrift? Do we even care what's going on between the old neighbours, or a whole thing about the teenager's dad? Character development is necessary, sure, but only really if the plot requires us to understand the motivations. Otherwise, it's just trifling with the audience in order to draw out and manufacture atmosphere.

Far and away, the best thing about 'Sting' is the use of practical effects and while it's taking inspiration from 'Alien' in many ways, the results are nowhere near as compelling. In the end, the bite might take you, but the venom doesn't last.