Film Review: Sting offers black comedy and skin-crawling horror

A still from Sting

• Sting
• ★★★☆☆
• Cinema release

Sting (16s) revolves around the precocious young comic book artist Charlotte (Alyla Browne), who decides to secretly keep a spider she finds in her grandmother’s upstairs apartment, unaware that her new pet is (a) a highly intelligent alien interloper that hitched a ride to Brooklyn on a meteor, and (b) has a voracious appetite that causes it to grow at a ferocious rate.

A hellish prospect, soon the apartment-house residents — Charlotte’s step-father Ethan (Ryan Corr), her mother Heather (Penelope Mitchell), the weird biology student Erik (Danny Kim), and Gunter (Robyn Nevin), the cold-hearted landlady — find themselves at war with a terrifying predator, aided and abetted by the local pest exterminator, Frank (Jermaine Fowler).

Written and directed by Kiah Roache-Turner, Sting is a throwback to the classic ’50s B-movie creature features that offers black comedy along with its skin-crawling horror – think eight-legged Gremlins and you won’t go too far wrong.

If the spider doesn’t freak you out, the claustrophobia probably will.

Filmed entirely inside the dilapidated old apartment-house, much of the action takes place in the confines of the old building’s narrow air ducts, which seem custom designed to allow a gigantic spider ease of access to its victims.