Before I go ahead and say that any movie -- any movie -- is a shitty movie, I have to stop and recognize that making movies is really, really hard. I have a particular respect for B-movies since lacking an army of bodies and effectively unlimited resources to pull the best talent in the world exacerbates this process. It doesn't feel good to dump all over the effort of the actors, staff, writers and technical crews when so much of their time, effort, and more of than not honest-to-god love went into 85 minutes of screen time me and maybe other six other dorks will watch. Sooooooo... with all that being said, 2015s Stung is a really shitty movie.
Listed as a comedy for some reason, Stung is funny only if you enjoy a particular kind of bro-tastic humor where a pathetic and somewhat hopeless bro tries (and fails, and fails, but ultimately prevails!) to mack a weapons-grade hottie. It's also supposed to be a horror, although aside from some cookie-cutter ominous-music Attacks from Planet Jump Scare, it isn't exactly frightening. It was also hailed for months as my favorite kind of B-movie, the practical effect sci-fi, but it's staple giant wasps are animated on screen for just as long, if not longer, than the puppet counterparts. Don't even have plot yet and we're in "Three strikes, yer out!" territory. Yikes.
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| No, the other kind of wasp. |
I, and I imagine others, came away from Stung with a strong, "I don't get it" feeling. For all of the empty promises, the framework is largely there. Human beings impregnated with giant wasp eggs that literally explode the hapless ambulatory wombs on the way out doesn't exactly breed chuckles, but there was opportunity in the victims being a gaggle of insufferable rich couples. The unlikely heroes, two small-time caterers running a failing family shop, trying to keep a straight face as they sneak booze and tokes to get through the night and make wage had some potential. Neither Jessica Cook or Matt O'Leary come across as bad actors, but I got the feeling they did scenes written with jokes and nobody told them they were supposed to be acting funny. When O'Leary's character Paul sneaks off to share a joint with the hired musician, Paul, who we've established something of a rebel and a layabout, just comes off as sad, out of his depth, basically pitiable. And Cook's young on-the-ground business owner Julia jumps between right bitch and intensely protective mom figure but doesn't quite live up to either (because there can't possibly be a woman with any modicum of power who isn't a total queen-b, amirite?), and of course takes her clothes off more than once. The script is sort of dumb, but the party guests, particularly Lance Henricksen's grouchy, alcoholic town mayor, are developed a bit. And even though the animated wasps are horrendous, there are some nice touches, like chunks of former human clinging to the newborn abominations virgin carapace as it is first gently caressed by the air. The failing here, as I see it, is a lack of focus, and taking the usual Hollywood path of cramming in far too many elements into one movie and ultimately watering all of them down.
Stung is an unintended consequences movie, sometimes better knows as chaos theory or The Butterfly Effect, as made famous by that film about seemingly predictable events spiraling wildly out of control. You know, Serendipity. The ill-fated party is thrown for Sydney, a disabled son of a wealthy chemist, and it is later explained that Sid doesn't have much love for dear ol' dad. Sydney, played quite well by Clifton Collins Jr., has a hunch and a limp, and his father tried to improve upon the original but giving him growth hormones, fueling the next generations descent into drinking and generally being an asshole. Sid, however, finds dad's hormones (of which there are several 55-gallon drums up lying around the house for some reason) might not work on birth defects but does wonders for plants, so he sews it into mom's garden to grow some impressive foliage and ease the widow's grief.
Gallons of growth hormones also work well on wasps. Who knew!? Bet you'll think twice before throwing that pan of anti-freeze out in the back, yes?
Fast forward through a bunch of exploding guests and Sid gets stung (haha, get it?), but the wasp only grows out of his hunch, takes over his mind and makes him a kind of human-wasp emissary and the movie, once again, has the chance to be funny but the actors make the critical error of taking it seriously.
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| Basically this. But with wasps. |
It's around this point he kidnaps Paul and tries to impregnate him with a queen wasp using a giant grub, and Julia comes to the rescue. And it's also around this time that the entire end sequence shamelessly rips off Aliens. Lt. Ellen Ripley is not amused.
Stung ends with the wisdom that nothing gets a girl in heat like nearly being burned to death by a eight-foot airborne arthropod that's on fire almost taking you out, so sad bro Paul and Julia get jiggy 'wit it in the back of an ambulance in full view of first-responders and still covered in wasp-goo. I hope there's no such thing as wasp herpes. Yick. And to add a whiz-bang factor to the end, Paul, Julia and whole lot of very confused EMTs are beset upon by more giant wasps, burst forth from cows and dragging the carcasses behind them. Certain death for all descends from the sky the clanking of cowbells and roll credits.
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A far better example of this genre of unintended consequences movie is 2013s magically titled Blood Glacier. I have to start by warning that the English dub is terrible, so if you catch it, make sure it is in its native German (the title in that is Blutgletscher... not exactly scoring points there Germany*).If Stung's Paul is presented as a I-do-my-own-thing tough guy but comes across as a pathetic loser with serious self-esteem issues, then Blood Glacier's hero Janek (pronounced yann-eck) is an actual pathetic loser with serious self-esteem issues, in a sort of self-imposed exile working with a geology team as a kind of handyman in literally The Middle of Nowhere, Austria. Janek is a supreme screw-up, barely able to stay sober enough to keep his job doing patrols and menial repairs around the base, and is the subject of relentless abuse at the hands of his snooty scientist co-workers. Why is our hero in such a state? A woman, of course. The same woman who is now visiting the base with some government dignitaries to visit the operation and take some landscape photos.
Janek and Tanja, played by Gerhard Leibmann and Edita Malovcic respectively, are not exactly the breakout starts of tomorrow, but Blutgletscher has a segmented leg up on Stung in that the two actors know they are in a campy, extremely obvious homage to John Carpenter's The Thing and while the humor isn't overt, it is obvious the two are just having fun with it.
Tanja shows up with an obvious stand-in for current German president Angela Merkel. She's there to assess climate data the mountain-bound team is gathering, and while there they discover that the nearby glacier they are monitoring for shinkage has started bleeding. Another plus this latter film shows off is that it actually is a practical effects sci-fi. The "blood" from the glacier is actually an ancient, possibly alien bacteria that combines the DNA of an animal with whatever other animal is touching it (and also sends these chimera-like abominations into a murderous frenzy, though presumably if you woke up and had become half groundhog overnight you'd probably be a little pissed off about it).
The prospect of certain death or mutation pulls Janek out of his stupor and he becomes the de-factor leader of the survivors, although the award for pure badassery goes to Herr Chancellor, because who doesn't want a scene with a woman in her sixties murdering a mutant deer with goddamned rock drill? Tanja tries to explain the events as they unfold and Janek strains his mind to get it, but it's his survival skills that win the day.
Blood Glacier has a lot of the elements of Stung: disgusting, gooey monsters, an awkward love story, finding creative uses for power tools, and a final bang! at the end to tie things up. But instead of the cow/wasp airdrop, Blood Glacier ends with Janek and Tanja finding that a pregnant dog on the base has given birth to a mixed-up, half-human puppy. It is a quiet and somewhat somber ending, considering the revelation that the pair's former fling crumbled when Tanja got an abortion and neglected to inform Janek. It's a far more mature, and darker, setup, resulting in a bigger impact when the two are brought closer together by the dog-faced boy. Ellen Ripley approves.
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| Or at least won't melt your face off. |
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Oddly enough. Stung's plot resonates somewhat with this week's climate conference in Paris, where the industrial world will decide how much it can pollute the planet while still making things comfortable for the people they don't exploit as much as everyone else, with uninvited U.S. representatives trying to prove that the basic pillars of the scientific method are a Herbalife-style scam. Blood Glacier might be about the more existential and arguably dire threat of global warming, but pollution is just as large an issue, and in many ways is much easier to understand and do something about. Both movies work off of our basic fear that each new convenience mankind invents, the side-effects are going to be wide reaching and ultimately unreversible. Will there be giant wasps and recombinat virus monsters? Probably not. But something made that bloop and if the oceans get much warmer, I bet it's gonna be pissed.
* Despite how funny Mark Twain's essay "The Awful German Language" gets, German is actually quite pleasant when spoken in a normal tone; literally the only exposure Americans get to German is old broadcasts of Hitler, so it does come with quite a lot of bias. But just imagine for a moment that a person mutters to you in a reassuring tone, "Warum Insekten haben so viele Beine ? Es ist einfacher, um durch Ihre Albträume zu kriechen."
Beautiful.
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