Andrew reviews the icky, goopy, gross out, comedy horror called Stung.
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| "I already told you!!! I don't eat meat!" |
Going into the recently released IFC Midnight offering
Stung, with its opening cue of a
cheesy looking CG rendered bumblebee being attacked and destroyed by a wasp
seen from a Beetlejuice-esque aerial
opening shot, you kind of know from the get-go nothing here is to be taken
seriously. Goofy and silly with a lot of
the slip on slime and goo gags, Stung promises
mayhem, laughs, blood and guts and doesn’t disappoint on delivery. The modern equivalent of a 1950s drive-in
creature feature, Stung takes the
played-out giant killer-insects concept and manages to inject it with a fresh
perspective. Where most throwaway
efforts of this kind depict your usual gaggle of prepubescent yet oversexed
teens boozing and sexing their way to death, Stung gives us a pair of struggling young caterers, Julia (Jessica
Cook) and Paul (Matt O’Leary), trying to make ends meet servicing rich elderly
clients. For the most part we’ve seen it
all the cheesy fun before but this small detail in the heroes’ background sets Stung apart from the usual creature
feature fare.
Giant killer wasps borne as a side effect of
experimental fertilizer aren’t all that dissimilar from the giant ants in
1954’s Them! It’s no secret why Lance Henriksen makes a
comical cameo as an alcoholic town mayor, as much of Stung’s thriller tropes borrow
heavily from James Cameron’s Aliens. The way the movie boils down to lone
survivors barricading themselves indoors against monsters trying to get in from
outside including an episode where one of the characters is rescued from a
cocoon within the wasp hive echoes Ripley’s rescue of Newt in Aliens.
Most of the gross-out body horror lends itself to David Cronenberg’s The Fly as full grown adult wasps claw
their way out of their human hosts. More
than the film’s cheap sounding and instantly forgettable synth score, Stung sticks around thanks to the sound
design of multichannel buzzing of wasps and a lot of gross and disgusting
squishy sounds.
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| "This is not the kind of party I thought it was!" |
The
mixture of CGI and practical effects are pretty low budget and not always up to
par with some sequences working better than others. Of the recent low budget tongue-in-cheek monster
movies concerning survivors barricading themselves indoors, I myself prefer
2005's Project Greenlight flick Feast for
going balls to the wall with the over the top gags and taking no prisoners
detailing its characters’ grim and occasionally hilarious fates. Despite being kind of run of the mill and a
cut above Asylum Entertainment’s usual output, the two lead characters were far
more interesting than movies of this ilk deserve and Lance Henriksen clearly
has fun getting drunk and battling giant wasps with shovels and one
liners. Not as funny or memorable
overall as something like Feast but
still a fun night at the drive in.
-Andrew Kotwicki