Insects Run Amok in Gruesomely Thrilling Stung
Julia (Jessica Cook) is worried she won’t be able to keep her family’s catering business going in the wake of her father’s untimely death. She’s headed to Mrs. Perch’s (Eve Slatner) annual garden party at her lavish country estate, tasked with putting on a top-notch show with minimal staff and even less of a budget, her only help the woman’s undervalued maid Flora (Cecilia Pillado) and a sarcastic bartender, Paul (Matt O’Leary). With a small cadre of wealthy guests making merry, including the easygoing Mayor Caruthers (Lance Henriksen), all appears to be going just fine, Julia’s worries misplaced as she’s more than capable of picking up her father’s mantle and running things like a seasoned professional.
PHOTO: IFC Films
Then the wasps arrive. Without warning the party comes under assault by the mutated critters, made especially aggressive thanks to the genetically modified fertilizer Mrs. Perch’s timorous son Sydney (Clifton Collins Jr.) has been using on the estate. Now trapped, Julia, Paul, Mayor Caruthers and a small group of survivors must figure out a way to get through the night alive and get back into town to warn everyone about the venomous dangers heading their way. It’s going to be a tough fight, but if anyone can pull out a victory it’s the distraught caterer and the cynical bartender, because if anyone is upset that this party has devolved into bloody chaos its definitely them.
In a lot of ways Stung reminds me of a tongue-in-cheek melding of 1993’s super silly mutated insect creature feature Ticks and last year’s wonderful Austrian import Blood Glacier. Featuring a number of impressive practical creature effects combined with better-than-average CGI (at least as far as low budget B-movies are concerned), this is a wonderfully pleasing blood-splattered chiller filled with more than its fair share of winning moments. Benni Diez, a former visual effects supervisor who worked on Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, does a pretty nice job as far as his feature-length directorial debut is concerned, treating Adam Aresty’s requisitely silly script with more respect than it maybe deserves while at the same time maintaining a low key sense of humor that keeps things from getting bogged down in unnecessary melodramatic excesses.
Not that we’re talking anything awesome. Unlike 2013’s sensational Irish horror-comedy Grabbers, this effort is more than happy to stay true to its meager retro 1980’s-style sensibilities never rising too far above what is readily expected. While better than your typical SyFy Channel enterprise, Diez’s feature would still fit right at home on the channel, and there were moments where I kept thinking to myself all that was missing were a couple of commercial breaks and a segment urging me to watch the next episode of “Face/Off.” The ham-fisted, not particularly well realized romantic longings shuttling back and forth between Julia and Paul don’t exactly help matters, while not enough time is spent with the one-percenters at Mrs. Perch’s garden party to make their devolution into 7-foot-tall insects as delectably gruesome as it theoretically might have been.
PHOTO: IFC Films
Yet for fans of this sort of thing Stung can be a heck of a lot of fun. Cook and O’Leary are well cast as the youthful leads trying to make it through the night without being transformed into insects, while old pro Henriksen actually gets to do more then behave like a wickedly evil one-note madman, a part he’s unfortunately been frequently typecast in for the past two decades. The creature effects are sensational, especially the transformation sequences when they burst forth out of their human shells, and I particularly loved the fact that once unleashed bits of skin, hair and viscera still cling to the wasps like giftwrap dangling from a half-open present.
I get it. Stung isn’t exactly the sort of entertainment most are going to go crazy for. But for those who do like this type of thing, who are open to all its icky, sticky, gruesomely sadistic, blood-slathered charms, Diez has done a nice job of giving Aresty’s script life. It builds well, has some superb set pieces and offers up a relatively winning climax I was more than satisfied with. Could it have been better? Certainly, but that doesn’t make the film that does exist any less fun, and I for one don’t think I could have asked for anything more.
Film Rating: 2½ (out of 4)
