Flasz On Film

Let us begin with a pseudo-philosophical quandary: do you need to love movies to make movies? Do you need to watch many movies to make one? The answer to both questions is probably a reasonable “I guess so” but it potentially invites a follow-up conversation and perhaps a scientific process of identifying whether there are examples of filmmakers who just don’t watch any movies at all.  

I suppose, this is an extension of a broader “do you need to ingest X to produce X” question which has been bouncing around the perimeter of my cerebral latitude for a while now, and to this point you can probably find filmmakers who just don’t watch nearly enough movies as you do. Probably because they are busy making them and they simply do not have the bandwidth to wind down in front of the TV like a regular Joe Schmoe. They are busy making potato mash mountains, if you know what I mean.  

Conversely, finding filmmakers who do nothing else but watch movies, and who smuggle their film-watching passion into their craft, is undeniably much easier. Think Steven Soderbergh. Quentin Tarantino. Robert Rodriguez. Hell, go all the way back to the 60s and remind yourself that the very existence of the French New Wave is owed to film critics—people whose job it is to watch and evaluate other people’s cinematic output—who picked up the camera and started making movies themselves. Now, what is perhaps hiding in the shadow of that general question “do you need to watch a lot of movies to make movies” are two follow-up quandaries: “do you need to watch a lot of movies to make good movies” and “can you make a good movie out of nothing more than a collage of references to movies you love?” 

In this case, the answer is a resounding “it depends.” Or maybe, scratch that. The answer is “no.” Simpler that way, isn’t it? 

Just stitching together movie references and blatantly disregarding literally everything else is a solid recipe for an expensive disaster and a surefire way to displease a few people who may have gone out of their way to see your work. Which is more or less where I am having caught up with Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting. In the interest of complete transparency, I have been looking forward to this film for months now, as the trailers I have seen thus far promised the kind of self-aware fun I’m particularly partial to. In addition, I do remember liking Roache-Turner’s Wyrmwood, especially because it was essentially a homemade movie spliced together with nothing more than passion, good intentions and extemporaneous drive, all seasoned with hefty amounts of references to Mad Max, all manner of zombie films and even Frank Darabont’s The Mist.  

Therefore, I wasn’t exactly surprised when I found that Sting carries out a similar mission, albeit on a considerably more respectable budget, which translates to a better production design and a larger scale of the spectacle the filmmakers were attempting to reduce to practice. In a nutshell, the movie is a cocktail of tropes and references carefully picked out of what seems to be a bookshelf of iconic works that defined the filmmaker’s cinematic upbringing as much as the George Miller and George Romero movies did (if Wyrmwood is anything to go by, that is). Accordingly, the story concerns a young girl, Charlotte her name (Alyla Browne, interestingly also recently seen in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga), who lives in an apartment block with her mum (Penelope Mitchell), her stepdad (Ryan Corr) and a baby brother. One fine day a teeny-tiny meteorite busts through the window, lands in an antique dollhouse owned by Charlotte’s gran (Robyn Nevin) and from it emerges an equally teeny-tiny spider. Which Charlotte immediately adopts as a pet.  

Problem is that Sting—as named by Charlotte—is not a regular spider but an extra-terrestrial one. It displays signs of increased intelligence, it sings, and most importantly, grows way faster than a regular spider would. Way faster. And as you may expect, with this accelerated rate of growth comes increased appetite for increasingly larger prey. Soon enough, Sting decides that cockroaches and flies are no longer enough to satiate its appetite and the spider escapes the confines of a jar with a pierced lid Charlotte had lovingly arranged as its homebase. And as you might expect, bodies pile up.  

That’s the movie, at least conceptually, and it doesn’t take a genius to realize just how close to some well-loved classics of genre cinema Sting is flying. Nothing wrong with that, by the way. In fact, for at least a little while, the movie shapes up as a veritable where’s Waldo of 80s classics that you may or may not have some fond memories of, depending on how far down you need to scroll whenever a website asks for your date of birth. Thus, you should be able to pick out how Sting connects to Joe Dante’s Gremlins, as the space spider communicates like a mogwai, and the film as a whole is aesthetically indebted to Dante as much as it is to Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson. These crash zooms and aggressive wide-angle close-ups didn’t just find their way there accidentally. Similarly, the character of Frank the exterminator (Jermaine Fowler) is strongly tethered to the John Goodman character in Frank Marshall’s Arachnophobia. Who was also already a functional tether to Ghostbusters, too… so you wouldn’t be too far off the mark if you saw the Reitman connection in there. From there it is only a matter of time for you to spot the connection to Ridley Scott’s Alien, David Fincher’s Alien 3 (one specific shot is a dead giveaway), or Predator with a variation on the “if it bleeds, we can kill it” line, presumably butchered a tad to avoid copyright disputes. The big finale of the movie is an homage to The Terminator and the way the animated metal skeleton met its end in a hydraulic press and the setting in a basement with a rowdy boiler is nothing more than a subtle nod to The Shining. It’s all there for you to pick out.  

So, I ask again: why doesn’t it work the way so many other movies do? In fact, why doesn’t it work on me – a guy who loves that kind of self-aware find-a-reference moviemaking? It worked in Malignant. It works in Scream movies. It worked in Thanksgiving and a number of recent horror films with arguably fewer dollars to their name. Yet somehow this one is a chore to sit through and I can only surmise that a parade of movie references isn’t enough if the movie itself isn’t fun or engaging enough to work on its own terms. Which is true for all the aforementioned examples I did have considerable fun with.  

Having thought about this long and hard—and I do mean that, actually—I can only surmise that Sting lacks one thing all those other films have and even Roache-Turner’s previous effort Wyrmwood had as well. Bravura. A willingness to go places. To upset. To go bonkers, even for a second, like a piece of 80s genre filmmaking it is so lovingly referencing with its every frame. Maybe that’s what I’m missing here because Sting has ample opportunity to indulge, be it in violence, gore, body horror or gross-out comedy, and it pulls back every time. The camera pans away whenever I am about to wince. It is as though the filmmaker’s edge had been blunted. Or sheathed because Sting is no longer a homemade gonzo-fest on a shoestring budget. It is a real movie with a real budget that may or may not be Kiah Roache-Turner’s ticket to Hollywood.  

Ironically, his real ticket to greatness is his ability to manipulate all those references and go places, which is where the fun should be. Sadly, Sting comes across as half-baked and because it never sent me on a visceral rollercoaster ride, like Fede Alvarez, the BOGs, Eli Roth or James Wan would without as much as a how-do-you-do, I have no other recourse but to pay closer attention to the story and the drama underpinning the spectacle. Which is almost always a risky idea whenever the movie you are watching is supposed to function as an indulgent genre piece.  

Therefore, I couldn’t help but cringe at the truly undercooked faux-Spielbergian drama (arguably transplanted from any of the Spielberg movies the filmmaker is particularly fond of) or at the fabulously illogical plot elements that simply do not stack up when inspected with even a modicum of scrutiny. Again, this wouldn’t have been a problem. I don’t mind dumb plotting or drama as shallow as a puddle after an April drizzle… as long as there is something—anything! —to distract me from it. Body horror. Violence. Mood. Tone. Gore. Anything.  

Well, as we have established, movie references alone are not enough to accomplish that and a treasure hunt for winks and nods can only elevate what’s already there. Like MSG. It just goes to show that MSG without a piece of beef or chicken is completely useless. As it stands, Sting is a where’s Waldo find-a-reference parade with very little intrinsic value or staying power. Not much to chew on, see?  

Or maybe I simply cannot get over the glaring fact that Charlotte shouldn’t have named her space spider Sting… She does so as an homage to Tolkien’s The Hobbit, in reference to Bilbo’s magical sword. But spiders don’t sting. They bite. And there is a spider in the Tolkien lore with a respectably iconic status and a cinematic presence of her own. Her name is Shelob and that’s a spider I shudder at the thought of. But I suppose titling the movie Shelob the Space Spider is an open declaration of war on millions of Reddit-dwelling Tolkien zealots who lay dormant temporarily until the next season of Rings of Power makes landfall on Amazon Prime.  

In any case, Sting is a miss because it forgets to have fun and go places while it’s building its intricate collage of winks and nods. It could have been this year’s Malignant. Alas.