When you’re on a 10 hour flight and have to stay awake the whole time because you land in at 9am local time, what kinds of movies do you throw on your watchlist? Dumb action movies? Award winners you couldn’t be fucked to watch at any other time except when the billionaire CEO of Virgin Airlines holds you prisoner? Foreign cinema? So you can pretend to be sophisticated to hopefully impress and ideally seduce the beautiful British woman sitting next to you? Certainly not a horror movie, right? That would be stupid. At best, you’re now afraid of dying on an airplane due to racism or snakes, and at worst, a normally scary film falls flat because the color grading and sound were completely ruined by the airplane.
Haha that would so dumb!
The Best Decisions for the Mile High Club
So anyway, I watched the scary monster thriller film Sting, starring a child actress, a hateable male lead, a hateable female lead, a hateable old woman, and a lovable black man. The film follows a prepubescent, lonely, neglected elder sister as she contends with a new baby sibling, a new stepdad, winter-induced isolation, and the fact that her sweaters are way to brightly colored to allow her to express her inner goth.
Our protagonist Samantha unwittingly adopts a space spider to stave off her loneliness, which then reveals itself to be an intelligent, murderous, carnivore, and Samantha is forced to contend with the realization that “holy fuck this spider has teeth”.
For people afraid of clowns, we got Terrifier. For people afraid of spiders, we got Sting. It’s a fantastic, cinematically complete monster flick, complete with tidbits of familial drama that resolves when they defeat the horror threat, fantastic writing and emotional beats, and an incredible performance by the young Alyla Browne. Sting is a textbook-perfect film, and leaves me with no doubts that director Kiah Roache-Turner could’ve done anything better.
I will say, though, that watching a film of this calibre feels insulting to the director and to the incredible child actress lead, because these shitty plastic headphones needed to be turned up to the max, and 50% of Virgin Atlantic viewers did not like this movie. In contrast, 97% of Virgin Atlantic passengers liked the Henry Cavill film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. So maybe I’ll fill my remaining seven hours and forty-eight minutes with one hundred and twenty-two minutes of that shit. Luckily, the pretty British woman sitting next to me fell asleep a while ago, so now there’s no chance of her rejecting me based on my taste in movies!
That being said, most of my Virgin Atlantic watchlist so far is filled with shlock like the above film, Kung Fu Panda 4: The Quest for Chinese Box Office Success, a Jason Statham movie that is very likely not about environmental conservativism, and Zone of Interest– which I am absolutely not going to watch because holy fuck that would be insulting to the filmmakers because there are two toilets within five feet of me.
So I guess the answer to the question, “what movie should I watch on a 10 hour flight” is…
Anyone but You, because Sydney Sweeney titties.
I thought Sting was
GOOD
I watched Sting on an airplane, but you should certainly watch it on Apple TV or Amazon with better sound and less airplane.
Wondering how my rating system works? Let me explain!
PS- I thought I should note, with a tinge of self-depreciating humor, that the first draft of this review initially concluded with the below paragraph. My decision to mention Sydney Sweeney is a result of an ill-informed second draft that did nothing to improve my prose or communicate my thoughts on this film. As a reward, here’s a picture of Sting, too.
Holy shit I just went 400 words without talking about titties or making a pun about Sting’s Desert Rose. That British lady is going to find me irresistible once she reads my movie review on my obscure movie review blog!
85scenes Reviews 