Tribeca coverage continues - here's Jason on a Giant Bee Creature Feature.
We're living in the middle of a miniature horror renaissance right now. Instant classics like The Babadook and It Follows are twisting previously well-worn genre elements into strange new beasts that linger far after the credits fall, focusing on atmosphere and performance over cats jumping through windows. Those are just two of the biggest buzziest titles though - there have been loads of smaller examples, movies like Justin Benson's Spring and Adam MacDonald's Backcountry - movies made on miniscule budgets that nevertheless managed to wedge the morbid and unexpected experience of watching them unfold tight into my brain.
And there are the movies like Stung...
Creature Features have also enjoyed their own kind of renaissance as of late, which you can probably thank SyFy and Roger Corman for for their endless Sharktopi vs Sharknado iterations. Tribeca usually always crams a few into their Midnight Movie series - last year we were on the run from those pesky Zombeavers - and this year's offering gives us Giant Bees to fear. Well Giant Wasps actually (William Hurt really should've been in this), as everybody keeps feeling the need to remind us. Wasps that ate some plant-food spiked with growth-hormones - it's always growth hormones. I miss the motive-less goo of Food of the Gods, honestly.
So here was my deal going in to Stung: there is nothing in the world that scares me more than bees. (I include wasps there.) I'm not even allergic; it's an entirely unreasonable fear. But I very nearly pushed one of my best friends off a second story balcony one time feeling from a bee that came at me, and I would do it again. I will probably love Ant-Man since Corey Stoll is playing Evil Bee Man (or whatever his character's called) and that's how I like my bees. Eeeeeevil. I understand one one level that the world needs bees, that they're important creatures in the food chain, but sometimes when I read those stories about dead colonies I weigh the pros and cons of No Bees versus The World Ending and I don't always come to a firm conclusion.
And yet Stung just sits there like a suffocated thing under a glass. It strains for funny, it strains for scary, but all it can ever reach on a couple of occasions is gross and even that feels truncated and half-realized. There's no rhyme or reason to what happens; there are seemingly thousands of little wasps then a handful of giant ones then some kind of Starship Troopers-ish Zombie Brain Bug but it never feels thought out; it's just there because of somebody's short attention span.
The characters are the worst kind of cardboard cut-outs that the dullest of 12 year old boys might be alright with - the lead-dude ogles boobies so hard! - but anybody else with half a mind it's landing with a thud, and everybody's arcs and motivations are rendered inexplicable by all the swerving around.
Silly certainly has its place in horror movies - it's not like I went into this Giant Bee movie expecting the same sort of back-and-forth about the emotional devastation of grief that The Babadook provided. But give me something clever or something to care about. The practical effects can be fun (the CG on the other hand, eesh), and Lance Henriksen? Hell yeah! But don't give me a girl that takes off her Serious Person glasses and shakes down her hair and spends the entire movie learning to love the dude who can't stop staring at her boobs. Please. I beg of you, Stung. Anything but that.