A twelve-year-old girl named Charlotte (Alyla Browne) discovers an incredibly talented spider and secretly keeps and feeds it. But when ‘Sting’ begins to grow to mammoth size and residents of Charlotte’s apartment block show up dead action needs to be taken. 

Sting is the sort of horror movie that should embrace its B-Movie schlocky credentials. Instead though it chooses to start well and end well with a rather large amount of soap opera family drama in the middle. 

The opening features a lady with dementia unknowingly delivering a string of exterminators to the giant spider as snacks before snapping back to four days earlier. We then see the extraterrestrial origins of our spider before being introduced to Charlotte. When we first see Charlotte she is traversing the apartment block she lives in via the vent system giving us some clues as to what her pet may do later on in the film. She is also fascinated with spiders and loves to draw them and has even created a comic character based on their powers. Her age allows us to try to ignore the fact that she is cultivating a clearly deadly creature that has powers and behaviours no spider has. Whilst her knowledge of spiders also makes that fact bewildering. But heck, we need a giant spider to eat people and this is the plot leap we all need to make! 

The film then grinds to a halt. At only 92 minutes long it seems insane that we spend the large bulk of its time learning about the human drama in Charlotte’s family. She has a new baby step-brother and a fractious relationship with her stepfather (Ryan Corr). Whilst her mother (Penelope Mitchell) is trying to juggle her own mother who has dementia (Noni Hazlehurst), a career, a newborn and her daughter’s relationship with her partner. Oh and Charlotte’s Great-Aunt owns the building and is a bit mean. We also meet other residents and hear about their lives when really we just want to see them killed by a giant spider. 

It then finally kicks back into action in the final twenty minutes delivering some really gruesome moments which is exactly what we are all here for. 

It’s a real missed opportunity. There is half an hour of gruesome fun bookending the sort of “seen it all before” family drama that offers little entertainment value. It is really at its best faking out some scares with shadows from hanging plants and cables before delivering gruesome venom bites.

Avoid if you have arachnophobia or an aversion to dull family drama. Or give it a watch this Halloween season aware of its shortcomings in the knowledge that there is some B-Movie treasures within.