Sting of Death

The main thing I dug about this movie is the cool pad under the sea where the jellyfish man hangs out! You swim down to the bottom of the lake and you find a cave. Swim through the cave you end up in a swingin' mad scientist lab/paradise cove! It's really cool, You come up through the floor of the lab and you're not underwater anymore. Surrounded by big foam rocks and special 60's science equipment in the walls, it's like a honeymoon suite or something! Plus, the color in this movie is really nice, and it makes everything seem a little extra appealing. Maybe that's why I was so impressed with this little hideout under the sea!

If you see this movie on the Something Weird DVD after "Death Curse of Tartu" you will be shocked to notice that the Florida everglades don't look like such a dismal place after all. They're all bright green and pretty, like a summer vacation! Tartu's movie make the Everglades look like hell on earth. Sting of Death shows the other side.

Lastly, my favorite thing about this movie - THE JELLYFISH. What are they, little Glad sandwich baggies tied up with sparkley ribbon floating in a lake somewhere? Just bobbing up and down like someone just ate a crazy piece of candy and threw their colorful and clear wrapper in the water. The fish don't move, just bob with the waves. They don't attack, they just chill. They don't even have recognizable jellyfish features. Since when do jellyfish heads stand out about 2 inches from the water and never sink under?

And the JELLYFISH man with the huge balloon head. I think I wanna be him for Halloween. Looked like a beach ball spray painted grey. I think I'd get too hot, though. And the deformed guy sometimes has a right eye and sometimes he doesn't. That's tricky!

This movie is funny. Watch it because it's funny. And the main girl looks like Winona Ryder and Alissa Milano mixed together. 5/10.

Montreal's Fantasia Festival has a tradition of bringing back to the screen old and forgotten films. In this year's virtual fest, that film is 1966's "Sting of Death," via a recently restored print. Karen, a college student, and several of her female friends visit her father, a biologist, on his remote island laboratory complex in the Florida Everglades. He is working with Jon, a brilliant assistant, and Egon, a strange and mutant-looking character who complains that nobody listens to him or likes him. He's especially upset that no one believes his theory that jellyfish can be grown to enormous sizes and then, you know, sting people to death. Karen and Jon, meanwhile, host a party of her father's students, who like to dance to Neil Sedaka's "Do the Jellyfish." When they make fun of Egon, however, they find that they have drifted into very dangerous territory indeed....

This is a fun, but really bad, movie - it's very hard not to crack up at the sight of a transformed Egon, for example, and little film-techniques like, oh, continuity or any ability to act, are thrown to the wayside, or rather, overboard into the depths of the very shallow Everglades. Would have been perfect to see with a Fantasia crowd, but it was pretty fun even just at home. I wouldn't go out of my way to search it out, though!

Got to give it 4/10. One point plus three more - 1) you've got Neil Sedaka singing, "Do the Jellyfish." 2) You've got really, really pretty color, better than a lot of mainstream films from the same era. 3) And the final man vs. monster confrontation is so hilarious that you'll play it over and over, if, of course, you're drunk on your ***.

Kind of disappointing, really, because this probably would've been more fun if it had either been inept and stupid start to finish, or if it had been 'way-over-the-top whack like an Al Adamson epic. Worth watching mostly so you can tell people about this messed-up movie you saw about a guy with a Portuguese Man-o'-War for a head.

[The other Southern film with a trashbag-based monster, of course, is Attack of the Giant Leeches.]

Now this movie is a hoot! A jellyfish mutant man stalks a rocking pool party of kooky biology students in the everglades! This beautifully preserved 1965 film on DVD from 'Something Weird Video' is something to behold. Yes, the acting is very bad. Yes, the color tinted Baggies' sandwich bags with rubber tentacles look nothing like Portuguese Man-of Wars. But who cares! Sting of Death is a great way to waste a rainy Sunday afternoon! Look for Deanna Lund (Land of the Giants)and Doug Hobart (Death Curse of Tartu)in smaller supporting roles!

66 was the year of William Grefé's Evergladesploitation trash hits Sting of Death and Death Curse of Tartu. The national park proved an apt locale for cheap horror; most of the time the proceedings feel almost as exotic as the Filipino 'Blood Island' movies. The lush marshlands are beautifully photographed for the most part and Sting of Death even has an airboat chase scene.

Make no mistake, the film is a stinker. A research team plus a bunch of roistering college kids are terrorized by a jellyfish-man killer who looks like a garbage bin version of the mushroom people in Toho's Matango. The pacing is not as abysmal as in Death Curse of Tartu (where an unreasonably big chunk of the runtime is padded with various characters trudging through bog to suspense music), but the movie is low on thrills of any kind. It's really only worth seeing for the scenery and that bizarre jellyfish costume.