We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Cody on stories of giant spiders and wolf men.
The following reviews originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com.
STING (2024)
Filmmaker Kiah Roache-Turner is best known for his wild and crazy zombie movies Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead and Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, which blended inspiration from Mad Max and Dawn of the Dead to tell the story of a unique zombie outbreak where the living dead have flammable blood and exhale methane. I enjoyed both of those movies, and though I haven’t seen Roache-Turner’s action comedy Nekrotronic yet, it sounds like it’s pretty much in line with the tone of the Wyrmwood flicks, as it tells the story of “a man who discovers that he is part of a secret sect of magical beings who hunt down and destroy demons in the Internet.” While Roache-Turner collaborated with his brother Tristan for his previous three features, he went solo for his latest movie, the spider-themed horror movie Sting, and he also decided to shake up his style and tone along the way. Sting is much more grounded than the Wyrmwoods, despite the fact that it deals with a man-eating, steadily-growing spider that falls to the earth in a tiny meteorite.
A lot of filmmakers like to cite the Amblin glory days as a source of inspiration when telling stories of regular people dealing with something extraordinary, and while I have yet to see Roache-Turner say he was going for a throwback vibe with this one, during my viewing of Sting I did get a bit of the feeling that comes with watching Spielberg productions like Poltergeist, E.T., The Goonies, Batteries Not Included, Gremlins, Arachnophobia, etc. I also had the occasional flashback to Critters 3 (which Spielberg was definitely not involved with), since that’s another creature feature that takes place in an apartment building. That said, when the horror kicks in, there’s at least one gory death scene that goes further than anything we saw in Gremlins or Arachnophobia, earning the film its R rating.
The story centers on a young girl named Charlotte (Alyla Browne), who has a lot of time to herself now that her mom Heather (Penelope Mitchell) and stepfather Ethan (Ryan Corr) have a baby that gets most of their attention when they’re not busy working. Charlotte spends some of her free time making her way around the apartment building they live in by crawling around in the air ducts. Of course, her familiarity with the air ducts will come in handy when things get horrific, but Roache-Turner takes his time building up to that action. The movie begins with a shot of a meteorite streaking across the sky above a snow-covered New York City (the movie was filmed in Sydney, Australia, but that doesn’t matter much since it takes place entirely in and around the apartment building). This tiny stone busts through a window in Charlotte’s apartment building, landing in the apartment her senile grandmother Helga (Noni Hazlehurst) shares with Charlotte’s unpleasant great-aunt Gunter (Robyn Nevin). Then it splits open and a spider emerges… and when Charlotte finds that spider, she decides to keep it in a jar as a pet, naming it Sting after the Elven dagger in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Problem is, the otherworldly critter grows incredibly quickly, its size increasing every time it eats something, and it’s very hungry.
Sting is soon causing trouble for the building’s inhabitants, and Roache-Turner populated the place with some interesting characters. In addition to the family already mentioned, there’s Silvia Colloca as Maria, a heartbroken woman who drinks too much and shares her apartment with an adorable chihuahua, and Danny Kim as Erik, an odd fellow who aims to cure diabetes through experiments he conducts on fish in his apartment. Jermaine Fowler has some fun scenes as exterminator Frank. As the story plays out, Roache-Turner spends a commendable amount of time on character work, making sure we know most of these people, understand their situations, and come to care about some of them… which allows for some shocking moments in the second half.
The writer/director also played around with character expectations in a fun way, starting the movie with a flash forward that indicates one person isn’t going to be around very long. Then when we jump back in time a few days, we get to spend more time with that character – and by the end, I was hoping for this person I had been eager to see more of was going to get taken out, because they were complicating things for characters I cared more about. The movie walks a fine line with the characters it puts in peril. If Roache-Turner didn’t handle things just right, he could completely lose some viewers… and I won’t say how he handled things, but I will say that the movie never lost me.
I figured Sting would be a fun creature feature, and it is, but I appreciated that Roache-Turner didn’t slack in the character department. Some filmmakers would put their entire focus on the spider action, but he actually managed to make me worry about some of these people. When combined with the familiar tone and some cool special effects work, that really enhanced my enjoyment of the movie. I had a good time watching this one, and I think a lot of my fellow creature feature fans will have fun with it as well.
The Wyrmwoods guaranteed that I would always be curious to see what Kiah Roache-Turner would make next, but after watching Sting, I’m even more intrigued to watch his career continue to grow. I look forward to his next film (especially since it’s a World War II shark thriller), and will definitely be circling back to watch Nekrotronic in the meantime.
BLACKOUT (2023)
Larry Fessenden has over 100 acting credits to his name, and if you’ve been following the horror genre over the last few decades there’s a good chance you’ve seen him show up in something, whether it be a Ti West movie, Stake Land, Late Phases, You’re Next, or the movie I first noticed him in, Session 9. He’s also a prolific producer, and has directing credits stretching back to the 1980s – most of those credits being on horror movies. Over the course of his career, he has told stories of vampires, the Wendigo, a man-eating fish, and even came up with his own take on Frankenstein’s Monster with his 2019 film Depraved. Continuing down the path of putting his stamp on the concept of classic monsters, Fessenden has now made an update of The Wolf Man, beating Universal Pictures to it by a year.
The lead character in Fessenden’s Blackout isn’t Larry Talbot, the beleaguered fellow Lon Chaney Jr. played in five movies back in the 1940s, but that character does get a prominent shout-out in the film, as the events take place in a town called Talbot Falls. Wolf Man franchise fans will remember that Larry Talbot hated being afflicted with his curse and was always hoping to be put out of his misery, whether through a cure or death. Similarly, the lead character in this film would rather be dead than be a wolf – but he has some unfinished business to attend to first.
Our lycanthropy-afflicted protagonist here is alcoholic painter Charley, played by Alex Hurt – and this could turn out to be something of a breakthrough for Hurt (who is the son of William Hurt, and there are pictures of his dad in the movie to prove it), as this was my first time seeing him in anything, and I was impressed by his performance. He does a good job of carrying the film on his shoulders and getting across the drama of his character’s situation. My only issue with Charley was actually due to the writing, not Hurt. As soon as we see Charley, we assume he’s the wolf man in this story, and it’s not too long before Fessenden confirms our suspicions. But for a long stretch of the movie, none of the everyday life scenes involving Charley show him expressing concern about his lycanthropy problem. Instead, his scenes are focused on his attempts to bring down shady businessman Hammond (Marshall Bell), who has made some questionable decisions while pushing forward his plan to build a resort called Hilltop in Talbot Falls. Charley goes around town, talking to people (including a lawyer played by genre icon Barbara Crampton) about Hammond, and it got to the point where I was getting frustrated. “Why is he always talking about Hammond instead of worrying about the fact that he’s a wolf man?” But Fessenden eventually explains why Charley is so focused on the businessman: he wants to do something good by bringing Hammond down before he exits this world. Once I got that explanation, I could go along with the story, but it took a while to get there.
Amidst all the Hammond talk, Fessenden gives Charley a few opportunities to wolf out and do the things we expect wolf men to do. Things go poorly for several Talbot Falls residents, and these sequences are fun to watch. You shouldn’t put this movie on expecting to see a really cool werewolf design, but the FX artists did fine work with their version of the classic Wolf Man idea of a werewolf.
You might think that Charley’s vendetta against Hammond would be complicated by the fact that he was dating the guy’s daughter Sharon (Addison Timlin), but his enemy and his former lover being related to each other doesn’t add much to the story. It wouldn’t have changed things if Hammond and Sharon had never met in their lives. Even though that element isn’t played up, Timlin was given some good dramatic scenes to work with, and her presence in the story was another thing that reminded me of the films from the ‘40s.
Actors who show up in smaller roles, like Crampton, include Joseph Castillo-Midyett, Ella Rae Peck, James Le Gros, Marc Senter, Joe Swanberg, John Speredakos, Kevin Corrigan, and Rigo Garay, among others, with a standout for me being Motell Gyn Foster as Charley’s buddy Earl, the only person he has told his werewolf secret to. Charley and Earl have a plan for how to deal with the problem, but you’ll have to see the movie to find out how that works.
Since he has made so many creature features, Fessenden has jokingly said that he’s competing with the major companies by building his own Monsterverse – or maybe you could call it a Dark Universe, since it includes characters inspired by Universal Monsters movies. I thought he did a great job updating the story of Frankenstein with Depraved, and while I didn’t find Blackout to be quite as fascinating as that movie was, I always liked Universal's Frankenstein better than The Wolf Man, too. Blackout is a good update of the ideas presented in The Wolf Man, and is probably more in line with the original film than the official reboot coming from Universal and Blumhouse will be.
In a nod to the major studio cinematic universes, Fessenden drops a Depraved Easter egg into the end credits of Blackout, a moment that is sure to be baffling for viewers who haven’t seen Depraved. Fessenden was just having fun by putting this quick moment in the credits, but it does give me a reason to say that anyone who watches Blackout should also seek out Depraved, and vice versa. Both of these monster movies are recommended viewing.
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