Sting is ridiculous. Still, it's a better movie than it needs to be. A dramatic family backstory sets Sting apart from myriad other creature features.

Though its characters and story could've benefited from a deeper, more original development, Roache-Turner ultimately knows what audiences are coming to see and delivers that in droves, offering horrific deaths, a tense atmosphere and stylish direction to entertaining effect.

Sting is a creature feature that tinkers too much with familiar horror/sci-fi concepts but has plenty of heart to make it memorable.

Overthinking Sting is a proper exercise in futility, and shedding such a tendency makes enjoying the adventure easy. It’s a minor little effort, with only a tiny venom, but its bite should do the trick for any genre head with 90 minutes to spare.

“Sting” isn’t great fun or great really in any sense. But it’s not bad for a giant spider killer thriller B-movie set in snowy New York and shot in Australia.

Not at the top of the list, necessarily, but writer and director Kiah Roache-Turner’s film is a solid if unspectacular entry into the eww-gross-spiders category. It’s pretty good on that front. But when it tries to wedge in some version of Meaningful Family Drama, it loses its way a little bit.

Sting is sweet, silly and savage in sectioned bursts, but fails to pull everything into an intricately woven web of creepy-crawly terrors.

There’s decent fun to be had in this crafty and contained Aussie skin-crawler (a low-budget affair that doesn’t scrimp when it comes to its WETA-created monster), but Sting is a bit too small for its massive alien spider to maneuver itself in unexpected ways, and the tender human story that Roache-Turner weaves around her lacks the bite it needs to melt your heart or liquify any of your other organs.

Sting is a horror movie about a killer spider from outer space that somehow falls short of the fun potential of such a premise.

Sting has a lot of the right ideas but not enough inspiration to string them all together.