Much like heights, I don’t necessarily have a fear of spiders, but I do have a healthy respect of them…

“Sting” follows a young girl (Alyla Browne) who finds an alien spider, only for it to begin to rapidly grow and begin to terrorize her family’s apartment complex. Ryan Corr, Penelope Mitchell, Robyn Nevin, Noni Hazelhurst, Silvia Colloca, Danny Kim, and Jermaine Fowler also star, while Kiah Roache-Turner writes and directs.

Small-budget horror films, especially ones that rely on creature designs, can be hit-and-miss. Sometimes the limited resources forces filmmakers to get creative and the end result is inspired, but at other points the end result is too cheesy or fake-looking to overcome. “Sting” lands a bit in the middle, with some creepy and effective practical spider and webbing effects but also some wonky CGI, though a sense of fun and brisk runtime make it an overall worthwhile experience.

Alyla Browne played a young Tilda Swinton in “Three Thousand Years of Longing” and will play a young Anya Taylor-Joy in the upcoming “Furiosa,” but here she is simply playing a young… girl. Browne has some good “fine, I’ll do it myself” energy that we typically see from final girls in horror films, and I think she will be a decent household name one day soon. I like Jermaine Fowler in most things and have for a while, but he is acting in a completely different movie than everyone else here and at times it takes you out of the experience.

The creature design of Sting the spider is pretty gnarly at points, especially when we get a close-up of her face. From all the eyes and fangs to the hissing as it crawls about and drops from the ceiling, I winced at several points, and commend director Kiah Roache-Turner and his team for those moments. There are a few other points, specifically when the spider is small, that the CGI can be a little distracting (it looks like an unrendered or unfinished PS4 graphic), but luckily those moments are only on-screen for a few seconds.

The film overall does a good job balancing tones, though when push comes to shove or definetly leans more into the comedy than the horror, and I think with a film like this you need to commit to the fact a giant spider crawling inside your walls is terrifying. Some moments meant to be played for dramatics can come off kinda cheesy, which is a shame because there are other parts that the actors do a good job selling fear or the family dynamic.

There is not an original bone in this film’s body, so if that sort of thing bothers you while watching movies then perhaps you should look elsewhere. Roache-Turner is at no point being shy about the films he is *ahem* borrowing from, even using direct shots from “Aliens” and lines of dialogue from “Predator,” but it is a case of you will inevitably find yourself comparing “Sting” to those much-better movies.

Like the titular arachnid, “Sting” is small and simple but has some scares about it. At 91 minutes you’re in and out without much fuss, and I am interested to see what Roache-Turner could do with a decent studio budget. After a slow and kind of awkward start, things pick up and we get the creature kills that we came for, and when the credits rolled I found myself overall satisfied with how I had spent the last hour and a half of my evening.

Critics Rating: 6/10