Who likes wasps? And the room falls quiet… Then why have we clowns, spiders and snakes plaguing the cinematic world, with little thought to a more popular pet hate, the yellow jacket bastards themselves, wasps!

 

Put together a group of people in the vicinity of a chemically imbalanced wasp nest and you get the stuff of nightmares. Add into the equation that one sting will turn any human into a giant flying demon and you have a beast on your hands.

 

‘Stung’ doesn’t beat around the bush in unleashing it’s monsters and plays well to deliver panic at the disco but it’s once the panic calms down that the film loses its bite.

 

As far as creature features go, you can do a lot worse than ‘Stung’ but behind it’s glorious special effects, the bitter sting in the tail is it’s inability to create any great characters. Lance Henriksen steals the show but that’s only down to the awfulness of the amateur support cast. There are moments that the actors may as well be holding their scripts in their hands as they deliver their lines without any sense of emotion or drama.

 

The dull relationship between its two leads is borderline annoying and the will-they-won’t-they drama becomes careless as you count down until the cast are wiped out by the legion of wasps. Add into the mix a Psycho-esque relationship between a mad man and his mother which comes out of nowhere and the films characters seem to have been added because they need to and not because they feel like a constructive part of the film.

 

The issue with ‘Stung’ is that behind it’s passion for bringing back a classic creature feature, it falls short of bringing justice to its subjects. What starts off looking like a film about killer wasps turns into a cat and mouse chase around a house with these giant creatures and takes away any relation to a wasp as it takes away the functionaility to fly as well as the element of surprise as the giant beasts creep through the house as stealthily as Michael Myers.

 

There is some love to be had for ‘Stung’... At 2am when the brain cells are long past dead. There’s enough to give faith in the movie’s heart, it’s execution meets with the exterminators.