Bait

After a quake rocks a city in Australia, a group of survivors, emerging from within a supermarket holding water, its structure battered badly, will have to fend off two sharks blood thirsty for human meat.

**½

You’d think after Shark Night 3D I would have learned something about staying away from Jaws clones. Most of them are pure shit. Syfy has pretty much taken such a giant steaming pile on the genre of “giant carnivore monsters” with the garbage spewed from the channel’s F-movie machine over the last ten years. I guess like the moth to the flaming inferno, I will continue to get my ass torched. I guess there’s always hope for purification…nah, I will continue to fan away the smoke. I guess that’s the masochist in us horror fans…more often than not we just keep feeling the pain. Why should we complain if the expected usually is what happens? I guess we hope. We grit our teeth, clinch our fists, bite on our tongues, and hope for something at least decent. With a title like Sharknado, I know better than to even feel the hope. Of course, I have stayed away from that one…my tolerance for the pain, that threshold can only withstand so much.

I knew positively nothing about Bait. It is a film that has been featured in reviews on horror websites but for whatever reason I have avoided reading anything about it. I’m glad I did because the disaster film aspect that brings a shark into a supermarket rather floored me. I knew that all that emphasis on the gulls acting erratic and flying so low to the ground (and towards the hero’s head in an “attack swoop”) had a reason. Then came the ocean just unleashing its fury on the city, the water enveloping it. Wasn’t expecting that at all. The effects are slightly better (well, moderately better) than you would see on television. The way the water just pounds and drowns the city, people and vehicles (and structures) overwhelmed, some Aussie folks (or tourists) killed, others luckily popping up to the comforts of oxygen after briefly suffering the riptide. But, for this film, we remain in the confines of the supermarket and its underground parking garage. Frightened (more like scared shitless), with one of the cops in the group (the other a security guard in the supermarket, catching the cop’s klepto daughter snatching items off the shelves; the klepto is lashing out and causing trouble probably to get daddy’s attention and to piss him off a bit) wounded. Dead bodies join food items and condiments floating on the water inside the supermarket and throughout (into the garage), with the survivors perched on empty shelves.

I was smiling to myself because I could you just hear the pitch for this film in my mind. “How about this…Jaws in a supermarket after an earthquake sends a massive wave that slams into a city?!?!” A great white swimming past a small group of survivors holing up on shopping racks and food coolers, taking a good couple bites out of the security guard (who had swam into the garage to see if a way out was possible), leaving his head separating from an arm that was reaching out for help…it’s the little things, isn’t it? You can certainly get a lot of mileage out of turned over vehicles, mangled bodies and body parts strewn all over the place, and a shark in the midst.

There's melodrama to spare and the introductions and brief conversations of the motley group of survivors:

The suburban diva, her pet pooch, and buffoonish surf beau. The estranged couple who went their separate ways after a tragedy to the bride-to-be's brother after he was bit by a shark while out surf-riding. The bride-to-be's new beau from Singapore, adding a bit of awkward discomfort. A "hold up man" (Julian Mcmahon of Nip/Tuck) having to rob the supermarket at the insistence of a ruthless hood under a skull mask...and if you think that hood is out of the picture, think again. The wounded cop and his trouble-making daughter. The trouble-making daughter's boyfriend (who worked at the supermarket but was fired thanks to her kleptomania) in the car park trying to figure a way out despite exits blocked by wreckage, and a second shark floating around ready to eat. Another employee of the supermarket becoming a love interest for Macmahon. The supermarket's anal employer. A prick with an attitude who mocks any attempts by the others to find a way out and help themselves escape what could be a dire situation, often trying (purposely, it seems) to ruin the hope of all involved. The acts of heroism include shutting off the electrical systems in order to halt threatening electrocution (using baskets as a protective shield!), moving across a bar from one drowned car to another, facing off a shark with only a shotgun, facing a shark with a taser gun (!), and braving the waters to capture a meat hook for future use.

What would Bait be without the feeding frenzy? Humans are meat to eat, with two sharks spitting out legs and chomping away at guts, torsos, and body parts. You get the underwater shots peering upward as if the pov of a shark about to strike humans batting the water with legs and hands, the human victim getting dragged across the top of the water (their frightened faces barely visible, with hands reaching for help, with the accumulation of blood and human chum eventually surfacing once the sharks have had their meal), and sharks snapping up unexpectedly to take a large bite out of humans dangling like fish on hooks.

As far as shark movies go, Bait (2012) is one of the better ones to come out lately, but that's not exactly a glowing endorsement in its favor due to the abhorrent amount of rancid product continuing to flood cable television (and sometimes theaters, as was the case of Shark Night). The effects of the sharks themselves are menacing enough. There's always the feeling of impending doom because the two sharks never go away and are constantly hungry. The cast keep a serious face...the approach and tone of the film matches the cast's performance. The quake left the city in ruin and the citizens still alive after its impact will have to rebuild and start over...once they get past the sharks that is.