Fridae

Ah, the simple thrills of the shark movie! Basically we watch them just to see sharks eat humans at the beach. Once upon a time though, shark movies were serious storytelling — witness the Jaws trilogy and its almost operatic, multi-generational storytelling about fate, tragedy, and bloody revenge. Okay, Jaws isn't quite the Niberlungenlied but I have to admit they don't make creature horror movies like this any more. Instead, the trend in creature horror is towards the comic and ironic. Witness how in Piranha, the film's high points and memorable deaths aren't actually the scenes where the carnivorous fish chew up their victims. The film's high points in fact the ones where the deaths are caused by anything but piranhas — accidental decapitation by crowd control tape, getting trampled by a confused and fearful crowd running from piranhas, and getting scalped by a motorboat propeller.

It comes as a surprise then that Bait is a straightforward creature horror film where the action centres on sharks eating people. It's no comedy either unless you count the set-up as being comically ridiculous. To wit, in the aftermath of an earthquake and tsunami just off Australia's Gold Coast, a supermarket is flooded and shoppers are trapped on top of shopping shelves as a 12-foot shark swims along the aisles picking them off one by one. On top of that, there's another shark swimming around in the basement car park picking off other survivors of the quake/tsunami! For all the improbability that goes into the premise, Bait is played as a straight horror film.

Even better, it's played as a serious film where every character seems to come with lots of backstory (some of which is padded in an over-long first act), and a lot of emotional baggage and drama with at least one other character. So there's a pair of former lovers who have been unhappily separated for the past year, a kleptomaniac and her store manager boyfriend and cop father, a working Joe who teams up with a psychopath to rob the supermarket in order to pay off his brother's debts, and a self-absorbed white trash couple with their Pomeranian. If you put this motley crew together, you'd expect some hilarious and unexpected interactions and repartee that are the hallmark of creature horror films, comedies or no. What we get is a misguided attempt at serious drama.

Yes, Bait is full of gory moments with sharks eating humans, though not enough wit, sublime ridiculousness, and cheerful bad taste to make it a cult horror classic.