‘Sting’ Review: A Giant Spider Grows in Brooklyn in a Knowingly Cheeseball Indie Horror Trifle
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Sting,” a giant-spider-grows-in-Brooklyn thriller that’s cheeky, bloody, and (most important) very gooey, Sting is the name given by Charlotte (Alyla Browne), a precocious tween, to the elegant two-inch-long black spider that becomes her pet (she keeps it in a jar and feeds it bugs).
Yet given how much slaughter is caused by this omnivorous arachnid, which grows bigger and bigger with each feeding, the moniker turns out to be a major understatement.
It’s as if Jason Vorhees were named “Paper Cut.” “Sting” is a wee sliver of a horror film that’s tongue-in-cheek but also quite matter-of-fact in its creature-feature jokiness.
It’s the monster-bug thriller as light dessert. The spider, it turns out, is an alien — after a gruesome prologue with lots of whooshing “Evil Dead” camera movement, the movie cuts to four days earlier, when a fiery meteorite crashes through an apartment roof and into a dollhouse in the home of Helga (Noni Hazlehurst), a cantankerous German grandma with dementia.
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