Sting (2024)

The main creature at the centre of Sting may actually be a small alien, but it looks like a spider, makes webbing, and generally triggers my arachnophobia, so I will be referring to it as another spider horror flick, coming along relatively hot on the heels of Infested.

Annoyingly starting with a sequence that shows some peril and the apparent fates of one or two characters, we then move back a few days to see how we got to that point. We got there thanks to a young girl named Charlotte (Alyla Browne). Charlotte finds a spider and decides to keep it as a pet. She feeds it, she learns that it can mimic certain sounds it hears, and she watches it get bigger in the jar. Things soon get out of control though, and when Sting, because that is what she has named it, is free and roaming around the building, Charlotte can’t imagine just how big and mean it is going to get.

Writer-director Kiah Roache-Turner has a lot of fun here. I have been a big fan of pretty much everything I have seen from him, and this is another success, albeit a low-key one. It’s not as effective as it could be, often missing major opportunities to make viewers skittish and uncomfortable, and it’s disappointingly tame for most of the runtime, but works brilliantly when it sets everything up to maximize the fun of the concept.

Roache-Turner knows exactly what he wants to do, and he starts the film off by filling up scenes with Chekhov’s Everything. The character details, the quirks of the building, the behaviour of the spider, viewers used to this kind of movie will know that almost everything is a set-up to some kind of pay-off, big or small, further down the line. And once everything is in place, it’s just a waiting game to see how much pain and death can be caused by the central creature.

Browne is a solid lead, likable enough to compensate for the stupidity of keeping a strange, potentially deadly, spider in a jar in her bedroom. Penelope Mitchell and Ryan Corr play her mother and step-father, respectively, with the latter more involved in the central storyline the tension in their relationship, and in the household. There are other people who may or may not end up in grave danger (played by Silvia Colloca, Noni Hazlehurst, Danny Kim, and Robyn Nevin), but the one who gets to make the most impact is Jermaine Fowler, playing a pest control guy about to be in way over his head. Fowler is fun, and it is obvious what film Roache-Turner is trying to emulate with his scenes, but his energy and humour would work better if the rest of the film was a bit darker and sharper.

I can understand people not liking this. It certainly isn’t great, and it’s generally far too predictable. I enjoyed it though. It did what I wanted it to do, even if I would have preferred some more blood and gore, and the pacing and set-pieces all show that it was made by someone with a real knowledge of, and love for, creature features. There’s still an even better modern spider horror to be made, in my opinion, but this is the better of the two recent ones, although most people seem to think otherwise.

7/10

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Stormy Monday (1988)

A 1980s British crime thriller that puts a man unwittingly in the middle of escalating events between some violent gangsters and American businessmen. And the title incorporates a day of the week. I'm not saying that Stormy Monday seems designed, in places, to ride along on the coat tails of the legendary The Long Good Friday, but there are certainly some interesting similarities, although the whole thing being set in the North of England, as opposed to London, is enough to give it quite a different general flavour.

Young Sean Bean is the man who ends up in the middle of a messy situation. He's working for a man named Finney (Sting), he ends up entangled with a woman named Kate (Melanie Griffith), and he's really a spanner in the works for people like Cosmo (Tommy Lee Jones), a VIP from America, and a pair of thugs (one played by James Cosmo).

This is the feature debut from Mike Figgis, who both wrote and directed the movie, and it's an interesting and strange piece of work. While it is perhaps a bit too beholden to the film it hews closest to, Figgis also shows a confidence in his own material, never feeling an urge to rush things along or make the infrequent moments of violence feel too cool or glamorous. He takes his time with all of the main characters, good and bad, and keeps a lot of different parts moving smoothly as the plot winds towards the finale.

Unfortunately, due to the deliberately slow pacing, the film doesn't really ever feel as tense as it should. Nothing really builds up, instead simply moving from one event to the next. To use a clumsy metaphor, Stormy Monday shows you a lot of separate explosions without ever showing you the fuse burning down.

The cast help to make things better though. Sean Bean is believable as the fresh-faced new lad in town, willing to take any job going as he gets back on his feet. Griffith is appealing enough, I've never been her biggest fan but the moments between her and Bean show just enough chemistry to make their relationship believable. Tommy Lee Jones is solid, Sting is okay, and everyone else does just fine, particularly a youngish Cosmo exuding a real sense of menace.

You can look around and find many better movies than this one, whether you want a better Figgis film, a better British thriller, or even a better film featuring a performance from any of the leads. But that doesn't make this film unworthy of your time. It's an interesting, fun, curio that places these names alongside one another, and also features some Roger Deakins cinematography.

6/10

Pick Stormy Monday up on bluray here.
Americanos can get it here.

Sci-Fi September: Dune (1984)

I was taken to see Dune when it was first released in cinemas. I was about 8 or 9. My mother and her partner, I assume, thought that this was going to be the next Star Wars. I can't remember every minute of the experience, but I can sum it all up in one word. Boredom.

Revisiting it now, about 30 years later, I can sum it up in two words. Interesting failure. It's still boring in places, but the visual style does keep it worth at least one viewing and there's something enjoyable about watching something so gloriously messy.

I'd attempt to explain the dense plot if I thought I could. Let's face it, the film itself has an opening narration from a young Virginia Madsen that tries to explain a hell of a lot to viewers in the space of a few minutes so I don't think a few sentences here will do any better. Let me just say that the whole movie is a bit like Dallas in space, with a magical spice replacing oil, Kyle MacLachlan as a Bobby Ewing figure (albeit one with the potential to become much more powerful than anyone else around him), and Gordon Sumner (AKA Sting) appears in a metal codpiece at one point, just to haunt your nightmares for years.

I really couldn't begin to run through the entire cast of characters and their relationships to one another. This is one dense film. MacLachlan is the lead, he's the character you get to stick closest to throughout the entire movie. His parents, played by Jurgen Prochnow and Francesca Annis, also play a large part in the proceedings. And then there's a love interest in the shape of Sean Young. The main villain is a boil-covered, rancid Baron, played by Kenneth McMillan (it's worth checking around for other articles that make the case for Dune being one of the most homophobic movies of the decade, based on that character alone).

Adapting the mammoth novel by Frank Herbert would have been no easy task, but David Lynch seemed to think he was up to it. Sadly, he wasn't. He does much better in the role of director, mainly thanks to the impressive visuals of the movie that he allows to take centre stage, but that clunky screenplay is the wobbly foundation that sets this sci-fi house of cards tumbling.

The performances often don't help either, with MacLachlan just not impressive enough in the lead role. He's an actor with a very particular style, one that works in the right roles (Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks spring to mind) and really doesn't in the wrong ones, as we see here. Sting is another weak link, and the least said about Alicia Witt's turn the better, although I don't hold that against her (she was only 9, it was her first movie role, and Lynch seems to have helped in creating the performance he required). McMillan is a lot of fun as the repellent Baron, and there's fun to be had in the performances from great names such as Patrick Stewart, Jose Ferrer, Dean Stockwell, Max Von Sydow, Siân Phillips, and Everett McGill.

There's an enjoyable soundtrack from Toto, with a decent contribution from Brian Eno, some impressive creatures from the great Carlo Rambaldi, and a few darker sequences that hint at a very different approach to the material that Lynch may have been more comfortable with. None of these things, sadly, can make up for the many problems that drag the movie down.

But at least it inspired Fatboy Slim to sample the line: "walk without rhythm, and we won't attract the worm" - allowing me to end with THIS music video

5/10

http://www.amazon.com/Dune-Blu-ray-Kyle-MacLachlan/dp/B00371QQ0M/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1411739580&sr=1-2&keywords=dune