“NOT THE BEES! NOT THE BEEEEEES!”
It’s come to this, random horror movies again. Not that they all turn out horrible, but playing Russian roulette with my movie time is always difficult.. Anyway, we’re here to talk about a recent addition to the Netflix library: the film Stung directed by Benni Diez. It claims to be a “comedy horror” film. This however, doesn’t give the film an excuse to be bad (as many films try to do). They tried to bank on that excuse… and it kind of worked. Hell, this movie was a struggle for me to even sit down and watch, but once I did, I had a pretty good time.
Stung is set at a dinner party being set up by catering company owned by a young woman. The night of the party, a swarm of killer insects attack, infecting their victims with some pretty big stingers. Chaos ensues as our cast to try and survive. Think Alien but with hornets instead of aliens. There’s plenty of gore, plenty of blood and plenty of entertaining kills.
The acting is a mixed bag, but the main leads do a damn fine job. Not amazing, but they carry a good performance. Matt O’Leary (Paul) in particular does a standout job. The female lead Jessica Cook (Julia) is more or less forgettable in the role. The supporting cast does okay, but overall nothing amazing unfortunately. The romance between the two leads is at trope status at best. Cook and O’Leary have next to no chemistry and shine best when not interacting with each other.
Stung does have a pretty fantastic soundtrack, featuring a pleasant mix of rock music ethereal pieces that blend from the music the characters hear to the overall score of the film. It’s actually a really clever device; compounded with the fact that the music is good and there’s one piece of this film that works.
The effects actually kick a lot of ass. Goo effects from dead wasps looks as gross as they should. The computer graphics are pretty damn solid, too; giant wasps are believable enough when mixed with the puppeteering. Damn do the puppets look awesome! This wasn’t a lazy movie like I expected; the filmmakers really did a fine job making this one look good. Being set in an old mansion doesn’t hurt either, as the locations in the film look pretty bad ass. Set ups for scares are creative, but if we had more time with some of the supporting cast, their deaths would have been a lot more impactful.
Well, final verdict is:
The film did a great job of building suspense, displayed some good effects in an age where lazy CG is usually the go-to and had a plot just absurd enough to make any body horror fan get interested. Yeah, I say watch it. You won’t have a bad time. Check out the trailer here.