 A few days ago I went to the Regal Monday mystery movie and I was very surprised. Borderline shocked that I was watching something I really enjoyed. It's called Sting. It's a lower budget, I'd say, Indiesk film featuring a young girl named Charlotte. Who befriends a spider? Charlotte? Charlotte's web? You see what's happening here. The movie's actually really good. I'm going to talk about it for a few minutes. March has been surprising me with horror films. Immaculate I saw last week and reviewed it. Thought it was pretty good. This is another one. Sting, by the way, terrible title. Sting, really? That's not scary. That's not threatening. Thankfully that's the worst part of the film. Before I jump into the spoiler-free review, why don't you do me a favor and hit that subscribe button? I post movie content every single week on the channel. I would love to have you stick around. This quaint film is set in a crappy apartment complex during a winter storm. Our main protagonists here are Charlotte, a 12-year-old girl and her father figure, Ethan, not her real dad, but he's trying to fill those abandoned shoes. Charlotte is a bit of a collector. She goes from apartment room to apartment room through vents, looking for little trinkets that she can sell on the internet, and she finds herself one worth keeping, which is a mysterious spider who can kind of mimic sound. She's very fascinated. She jars this thing up, and as this movie unspools, this spider is gonna grow to a frighteningly large size, and start finding that crickets and other little bugs are not enough to fulfill its needs. This movie's an hour and a half. It's rated R. It's got some good gore. It's got some great scares. I really like the tone. I love the setting. It's all isolated inside of this apartment building. There's a few different key players that come and go, family members, a bitchy aunt, senile old grandma. It's got it all. And one of my favorite characters is Frank. He's the pest control guy who keeps making stops over at this apartment complex to try to take out whatever's going on. I haven't really seen a good spider movie since Arachnophobia. I'm a fan of that one. I really dug it, and this kind of gave me shades of it. Obviously, this goes more into the horror side, less into the comedic angle, but this is pretty funny too. There's some genuine laughs to be found, especially from some of these weird apartment dwellers. One of the hang-ups I have a little bit with the movie is Charlotte. She's both likeable and incredibly unlikeable at moments. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that the character is written in a way where she is supposed to be angsty. She is crying out for attention. She's upset that her dad left her, and she's dealing with Ethan, who's actually a great guy. He's an illustrator. He's working on the comic book. But overall, I enjoyed Charlotte more than I didn't, and she does make for at least an interesting character to follow. As I might have stated, I'm not actually sure. This is a lower-budget movie for sure. Some of the CG, which the spider jumps between being computer-generated and with more practical effects. The CG stuff is rough. Not enough to pull me out of the movie at all, but it's definitely noticeable that this thing is not real. But because of the atmosphere, because of how they put it in shadow and kind of play with lighting, it's doing enough right that I can look away from it. I can say, yep, I'm still terrified by the spider. I hate spiders. This is working for me. It's one of the few movies where I watched, and I was actually tensing up because they do great shots in this film where a person's in a vent holding a light, and the flashlight's doing the classic. It's not working. Hit the flashlight. And you just know it's going to come back on and that fucking big spider is going to be staring at you in the face. And bam, it happens. But I'm sitting there the whole time like, I want to look away, but I can't look away because I'm a man, damn it. And then it hits. And I go, ah, god damn it. I was right. They got me. It works. It's a tried and true formula. I like the simple bottle episode style approach. People are trapped in a situation. They have to fight their way out or hide or do something or just die. I guess just die at the end of the day. As I stated, there are some great kills in this movie. They look fantastic. Outside of the spider sometimes looking not so fantastic. Atmosphere really sells it. It's got a good color palette. I don't really have any negatives about the movie. It just worked. It's a simple story. It doesn't get convoluted with some crazy back drama or whatever. Like the spider has got mystical powers and it came from this world and no, it's just very, very straightforward. And these are the types of movies Hollywood should be investing more in. Not these $300 million grand experiments. Get down to a couple million dollars. Make a decent beginning to end story arc. And just let us enjoy a film once in a while. That would be nice without having to talk down to us or pander or preach or any of that. It's okay once in a while if you want to do that. That's part of your story, but it doesn't need to be in a spider movie. And thankfully it's not. Again, the movie's called Sting. Terrible title. Truly, truly awful title for the film. But the movie was actually great. Really like this one. Check it out when it hits theaters. Whenever that is, if it hits theaters. I don't know anything anymore. Okay. When movies come out, I go to them. Like there's probably four new movies on Netflix streaming right now that I haven't heard of and I should probably check out at some point in review, but there's just not a lot of time anymore, folks. There's so much crap coming out all the time. It's hard to know what to focus attention on and to tell you about. But those are my thoughts. Let me know if you saw this, what you thought. Are you in the same boat as me or did this one not work for you? Please like the video. Again, I would love if you subscribed. Post tons of movie reviews. Good, bad, and otherwise on the channel. I don't even know what otherwise would be. So I would love to have you stick around. Hopefully I see you then. Take care.