Sting in the Tail

This month, the nuisance Martin Unsworth slaps on the insect repellent and risks anaphylactic shock to bring you...

We’ve all done it - set up to have a nice day out in a park or picnic in the country, then been set upon by some of Mother Nature’s winged pests. By the time you’ve finished fending off the buzzing buggers, the ants have made off with your cucumber sandwiches. Now that sounds terrible, but not half as bad as what happens in this month’s film.

Stung (2015) mixes the ‘animals bite back’ subgenre with a huge dollop of ‘mutated creature feature’ to present a fun and frantically exhilarating ride. While such films used to be plentiful, now they have been overtaken by overly CGI-ed shark movies and straight-to-TV atrocities. Directed by Benni Diez, who worked on the special effects for Lars Von Trier’s visually stunning misery-fest Melancholia (2011), but is tackling his first feature here, the film takes place at a posh garden party being held on the grounds of the Perch family mansion. The old mother (played by Eve Slatner) and her son, Sydney (Clifton Collins Jr.), a hunchbacked, slightly backward, twitchy alcoholic, gather their friends and locals every year to commemorate the passing of the master of the house, who had made his money in pharmaceuticals.

Julia (Jessica Cook) has just inherited her father’s catering business and has brought along her friend Paul (MattO’Leary) to help out as a bartender for the big do. They are both young but seemingly polar opposite in attitude. Paul is a carefree pothead with designs on Julia, who is level-headed and desperate to make a success of the evening and the business. What goes wrong isn’t her fault, but it’s certainly not the outcome she would have liked.