When it come to prognostication, I default toward belief in the future. Someone will make a better dinosaur movie than Jurassic Park , a better shark film than Jaws, a better mafia film than The Godfather, and a better bouncer movie than Road House. It might take a hundred years, but forever is a long time. However, I will declare that bait will forever remain the best Shark-In-A-Grocery-Store movie.
History shows that a film with a crazy premise will often attract attention. However, most of these films start with a premise and work backwards from there. The further you get from the premise, the more stretched the explanations, until you eventually reach the Voodoo Shark limit and each answer raise more questions than it solves.
The premise if Bait obviously brings a flurry questions:
- Why is there a shark in a grocery store?
- What idiot would go to a grocery store with a man-eating shark?
- What idiot would stay in a grocery store with a man-eating shark?
- Why would a shark, which does not see people as a food source, start eating them?
- Wouldn't the shark eventually get full?
- Wouldn't a group of grocery customers, with the advantage of numbers, intelligence, and the home-court advantage of a grocery store, be able to easily defeat an endangered animal?
- Why isn't fish and wildlife doing something about the rogue shark in a grocery store?
The reason I recommend this film is that the writer thought of these questions, as well as the next fifty questions you would think to ask, then the fifty follow on questions to those answers. They then managed to find three conceits that would answer all of these questions. Don't get me wrong - it's three pieces of stupendously bad luck that happen to our protagonists, but they all happen pretty early and quickly. The film plays fair from that point onward. The protagonists are resourceful and not just horror fodder. The sharks are animals engaging in their natural behaviour, never truly villainous but certainly not benign.
Bait never forgets that it is ultimately a Shark-in-a-Grocer movie and allows itself to have fun with the plot, but taking the effort to see the concept through turns this into a real film and not just another Sharknado cash in.