(18) 92mins
SPIDERS get a bad rap.
Most of us loathe their creepy-crawly ways, and the people that do like them are often classed as weirdos who probably wear hemp.
So it’s a bold move to make the main protagonist in this film a little girl so infatuated with her pet spider that she eventually allows it to massacre an entire building of people.
This is 12-year-old Charlotte (Alyla Browne) who lives in an apartment in Brooklyn with her mum, stepdad and baby sister.
We first meet this creative rebel when she breaks into her great aunt’s apartment to find a spider that has just crashed through her window on an asteroid.
She names the insect Sting and pops it in a jar to examine in her bedroom.
She soon discovers it has superpowers, like being able to mimic noises.
Sting also likes to munch on cockroaches that Charlotte brings for it, and soon outgrows its jar.
Oh, and Sting also has a desperate hunger for human flesh.
Which isn’t ideal for the occupants of her apartment.
Or the bug-catchers that try to wrestle with the giant arachnid.
Director Kiah Roache-Turner gives this low-budget horror a comic kick with OTT characters and some flesh-eating moments — there’s an especially horrifying moment with a tiny dog in a jumper and its alcoholic lush of an owner.
But there’s also a couple of jumps that will make even the most experienced terror-film watcher excited.
The set-up of the family dynamic is decent, with a frustrated mother, an overworked stepdad and a bitter daughter.
But the web of family life is never able to grow with so much else going on — as in, a giant killer spider growing in a jar.
Aside from Charlotte, most of the characters in the apartment block are pretty one-dimensional — the quirky scientist in one flat, miserable old drunk woman in another.
They take up a surprising amount of the film when many of them are just there for Sting food.
Roache-Turner has clearly splashed out most of the budget on the special effects, which makes it look less silly.
But while it’s funny and jumpy enough to keep you just-about entertained for 90 minutes, there’s little to keep you enthralled.
Or, in fact, ever thinking about it again.
Could do with a lot more sting in its tail.
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George Clooney and Brad PItt join forces in Wolfs.
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(PG) 87mins
FLAWS and a lack of originality are the predominant takeaways from this unsophisticated animated Russian kids’ caper.
The plot is startlingly unimaginative – homes are inhabited by furry creatures called Finns that only a chosen few people can see.
Add the cliché-ridden script, boring piano score and an all-round lack of visual zing and the target audience of younger viewers will soon start to fidget.
The Finns are trite, resembling a hackneyed cross between Dobby the house elf from Harry Potter and a cuddly toy you’d win at a fairground.
And it’s hardly scintillating that their primary role is to secretly take care of the home.
When teenage wannabe sleuth Christine moves to a new area with her parents, she discovers Finnick, our anti-establishment, prank-playing fluffy hero (voiced by Billy Bob Thompson) in residence, whose motto is “No humans, no problems”.
The two form a grudging friendship to thwart evil in the neighbourhood, including baddie JB, who wants to “destroy all the homes and destroy all the Finns”.
Predictable, unrefined, but at least the dubbing from Russian into English is well executed.
(PG) 129mins
DAISY Ridley stars as Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel in this biopic with a pertinent feminist spirit.
It charts how the New Yorker – the daughter of conservative German immigrants – survived a nasty bout of measles as a child, going on to become a gold-medal winning Olympic swimmer before her Channel triumph nearly a century ago in 1926.
Director Joachim Ronning focuses on her struggle against the sexist US sports establishment – including a failed attempt due to bad coaching from chauvanistic trainer Jabez Wolffe (Christopher Eccleston).
Ronning’s film, although a little predictable, still manages to be entertaining and thrilling.
The unmatched performance and likability of Ridley – Rey from the recent Star Wars trilogy – makes this slightly old-fashioned biopic something altogether more respectable.
It would also be criminal not to mention a knockout performance from Boiling Point star Stephen Graham as eccentric swimmer Bill Burgess, one of Trudy’s key supporters.
Linda Marric
