Directed By: Kimble Rendall

Starring: Sharni Vinson, Julian McMahon, Xavier Samuel

A group of misfit strangers are trapped in a flooded supermarket by a tidal wave in this tense low budget gem.

If you thought the worst shopping experience of all time was the Black Friday sale at T.K Maxx, then spare a thought for the poor fuckers in this movie.

After an attempted robbery takes a turn for the worse and a hostage is killed, a beachfront supermarket is crushed beneath a sudden tidal wave. Not only are the shoppers stuck inside, trying to survive alongside a pair of ruthless criminals, but mother nature’s angriest aquatic asshole – the great white shark – has come to snap up the special offers too.I was honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed this movie, and I’m not sure if that’s my fault or the fault of the SyFy channel, who have forever muddied the bad movie waters with their endless deluge of ‘Not Good-Bad But Bad-Bad’ bollocks. I expected a production full of piss-poor CGI and zero-dimensional characters, but what I got was a grounded, engaging, competent experience that knew exactly what sort of movie it was.

The low budget means that a few terrible actors slipped through the casting process, but on the whole the performances are good. Dan Wyllie (who plays the movie’s resident despicable bastard) stood out as particularly bad, and a few of his lines made me actually physically cringe. Also, after seeing Australian bad-ass Sharni Vinson in You’re Next, I half expected her to punch the fuck out of some sharks here, but she isn’t given a whole lot to do besides looking sad and pretty, which is a shame.

Unusually, some character development is actually attempted, and there are a couple of them who actually have a track-able arc throughout the movie. A naughty daughter reconnects with her cop father, estranged lovers re-unite and address the tragedy that tore them apart, a blackmailed criminal steps up to save the day. A lot of movies forget to make you care about their heroes, but not Bait.

It’s actually quite nice to watch a shark movie in which not every conflict is based around the big swimmy twat in the water, although we do get plenty of limb-chewing to keep the gore-hounds happy (and the marine biologists angry).

I was particularly impressed with the corpses in this movie, which sounds weird, but let me explain.

While the survivors struggle to navigate the flooded building, they encounter many half eaten, drowned bodies of those not quite so lucky. They are wet, pale, bloated and suitably icky, which lends a lot of weight to the dire stakes of our hero’s situation. The attention to detail on some of the gore (especially a sweet torso bite towards the end) is impressive and appreciated.

As far as movies go, Bait is completely watchable. As far as ‘shark movies’ go, Bait is top tier exceptional film-making.