Bait (2012)

Perfect cast and a good story

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Absolutely Brilliant!

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

I just had to give this film a go after reading the ridiculous synopsis. However, it was not as bad as I expected. It is full of character clichés and obvious plot developments but it's still actually quite watchable. The acting is OK, no mind blowing performances here. A couple of known faces turn up in form of Julian McMahon (Fantastic 4) and Alex Russel (Chronicle) but the rest of the cast are relatively unknown other than the fact that everyone seems to have been in Home and Away at some point. The film moves at a steady pace and does have some tense scenes and some wonderfully gruesome deaths...but mostly this is just B movie tat without the sense of humour that usually comes with that genre. The films also loses points for some truly shocking CGI when it comes to the tsunami and indeed the sharks. Still...I watched till the end.

"Bait" looks like the kind of movie the Syfy channel seems to produce every week, but it manages to be slightly above those standards. It doesn't give you much to work with when it comes to a story, but you get just enough to keep you entertained. The scene with the robbery is a pretty good set-up to the story, we get some characters we can actually care about and the switching between two main locations keeps things relatively fresh. There are really only two problems I can have with "Bait". Firstly, the special effects are incredibly bad. Even to the CGI standards of a cheap B-movie, this just looks awful. Just look at the ending scene (watch the rest first, preferably), it almost looks like an animated movie. Cartoon sharks are not scary. And secondly, this is one of those horror movies that leaves way too many main characters alive. These people sure are lucky this huge supermarket full of decaying, bloody corpses only attracts two sharks, and both of them are ridiculously easy to trick. Wouldn't this place be infested by sharks within an hour or so? It's a decent effort, but it's not without its frustrating problems.

When a tsunami traps shoppers inside a coastal Australian supermarket, their survival prospects are reduced even further when Great White Sharks find their way into the area.It's as nutty as it sounds, a bonkers but wonderfully genius premise is played out with "B" movie heart and a smile on its face. Standard rules apply, there's a myriad of characters who are in need of redemption or reconciliations, and of course it's a time for heroes and villains to thrust themselves forward. Action and suspense is never far away, and neither is blood! There's even some humour to be found, especially with a bickering couple of teenage lovers.Some of the CGI is poor and as is the norm with this type of film, there's daft scenes that ask you to just roll with it. If you can do that then there's a good time to be had here. 6/10

I went into this with low expectations, and was happily surprised by this above average killer shark movie, which doesn't take itself too seriously, but also doesn't try for cheap laughs either. After a needless dramatic intro involving death of a brother, and a love triangle, the film gets good when its main plot kicks in, and a massive tsunami traps a group of people in a now submerged supermarket, with 10-feet long sharks, and live electric cables to contend with. An interesting and unique shark attack/ disaster flick, it wisely avoids going into Jaws territory with a giant shark, keeping the sharks in a more believable 10- 12 feet range, and also doesn't make any one character the focus of the plot, giving most of the characters a fair amount of screen time.