Six Legged Carnage Comes From The Skies! Get STUNG!

It was back in February of 2008 that ScreenAnarchy first came across German director and special effects genius Benni Diez. The occasion at the time was an eighteen minute short film titled Kingz - a phenomenal hybrid of action, horror and scifi that Diez created as his film school thesis project with co-director Marinko Spahic. Kingz left such an impression, in fact, that every few months since I first saw it I have sent Diez an email asking why he hasn't made a feature yet. The answers were always the same. Building a portfolio. Doing commercials to pay the bills. Doing effects work on films by the likes of Von Trier. Basically everything but making a film of his own.

But then, just a few months ago, the answer was different. "I've got a script, actually ..."

It seems Diez had hooked up with Benjamin Munz, a film school compatriot now a young producer at Germany's acclaimed Rat Pack Productions (The Wave, The Night Comes For Us) while doing VFX on the Munz-produced web series Viva Berlin and the two were working with writer Adam Aresty on a creature feature titled simply Stung. I asked to read it, of course, and promptly fell in love. It's a creature feature in the old style - a slyly tongue in cheek, action driven horror comedy that calls back to the days before creature features became the sole provenance of sub-Corman knock-em-out-cheap hack jobs. Think Tremors or Slither on a more compact scale. And so I offered to help and introduced the pair to Nate Bolotin, one of my partners at XYZ Films (The Raid).

All of which is a long winded way to bring you to this: The first visual taste of Stung. With the finance package being put together now we asked Diez to put together a quick VFX reel, something to show people what he can do. He did one better and created a full creature sequence. Shot in a single day, with a skeleton crew - the actor featured here, incidentally, is Daniele Rizzo who you may recognize from his Sacha Baron Cohen-esque stunt interviews which we have featured from time to time - and with post production completed in just two weeks, the clip was meant to be something for internal use only. But it turned out so well that we just have to share it. Take a look at the full clip below and get Stung.

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