Good buddy: Alyla Browne and friend in ‘Sting’.
STING *** (91 minutes) MA
Ask any serious, self-respecting entomologist about the importance of spiders and they’ll tell you how important they are to the world’s ecology.
Yet filmmakers have long misrepresented our spider-friends, casting them as villains that just want to inflict harm on humans and give filmgoers the shivers.
That disgraceful tradition continues with Sting, an old-style monster movie in which writer/director Kiah Roache-Turner (Wyrmwood; Wyrmwood Apocalypse) plays on our collective arachnophobia (fear of spiders, as we all know by now.)
And it would be easy to dismiss the film as just another piece of anti-spider propaganda if it wasn’t such a fun, effective, tightly wound creature feature.
The critter in question is a nasty little bastard who has shot down from outer space and landed in a shambolic apartment house in a chill-blasted New York.
The thing is befriended by Charlotte (Alyla Browne; aka young Furiosa), a pre-teen girl who doesn’t get along much with her new dad Ethan (Ryan Corr), who is having a hard enough time with wife Heather (Penelope Mitchell), their new baby and his job as the building’s vaguely competent repairman.
Though it’s never made explicit, the arachnid seems to feed off all the negative energy and begins growing a tad faster than normal.
The single location setting feels dangerously constricted and claustrophobic, making it the perfect feeding ground for when the beast goes looking for dinner.
To his credit, Roache-Turner pays more attention to the domestic situation than you’d normally see in a film of this stamp, thus raising the stakes as things heat up.
Browne is very good and Corr makes the most of his dad-in-a-tight-spot situation, yet it’s veteran Robyn Nevin who serves up the scene-stealing performance as a heavily accented tenant. Fellow veteran Noni Hazelhurst also stars.
Kudos to the makers for managing to wrangle two greats of Australian cinema for this fun-filled little shop of horror.
MR BLAKE AT YOUR SERVICE *** (110 minutes) PG
In this modest, charming French gem John Malkovich plays a grieving British gent who runs from a major career celebration to revisit the castle-like mansion where he and his wife first met.
Owing to a misunderstanding in the online ad he begins working as the butler, endearing himself to the house’s host of inhabitants, each of whom are afflicted with varying degrees of loneliness. He also becomes concerned with the financial troubles of the owner Nathalie (Fanny Ardant).
Unspooling as a comedy of manners, it’s a pleasant yarn and light as a soufflé, with some unforced messaging nice about the inevitability of how regret and loss are a part of life.
LONGLEGS * (101 minutes) MA
Also dripping with creepy atmosphere but far less effective is Longlegs, a dirge in which writer/director Osgood Perkins (son of Psycho’s Anthony) microwaves a host of horror movie cliches – weirdo predators; Satanic devotion; evil codes; possessed dolls (shouldn’t this one have hit retirement age by now?) – to deliver a jaunt that proves positively soporific.
Set in the 1990s and taking out a huge loan from The Silence of the Lambs, it follows slightly psychic FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) who is on the hunt for a family-slaughtering serial killer.
Looking like he crashed into a shelf of discounted Halloween make-up, Nicolas Cage plays the cryptic Satan-loving predator. In one scene he repeatedly bangs his head on a table. Lovers of horror films with originality will know the feeling.
To be fair, the film has received mostly rave reviews in the US and has proved to be a surprise hit but, in all honesty, it’s a prime example of a nice try.
The film is all cream and no pie. Seriously, what’s the point of a horror film without one decent scare?
BIRDEATER * (113 minutes) MA
Another Australian movie dud. What is going on?
Two women attend what is apparently the worst buck’s party ever as a group of dysfunctional friends gather at a secluded spot in the high country.
They drink and dally with drugs as they bitch and moan and snipe and tell bad jokes.
They don’t seem to like each other, none of them are particularly interesting, they have abrasive personalities and there’s nothing dramatic going on that’s intriguing enough to justify the film’s inordinate length. (It’s 10 minutes longer than The French Connection, for crying out loud.)
Enduring this yapfest is akin to being trapped inside a bad dinner party with a bunch of odious bores who refuse to say anything in the least bit engaging.
It’s another Australian film that signals how you’re in for a rough time within the first 10 minutes.
And it’s a brain ache trying to figure out the intended audience for this film. Why is Australian cinema going so far off-track again? It was supposed to be passed this point.
Oh, for another 2015. Oy.