Bite concerns former prison guard Roman (Costas Mandylor), who is restless in his retirement. He gathers a group of criminal friends to pull off a kidnapping job. They break into a house, intending to abduct the daughter of a very rich man and holding her for ransom. The job goes smoothly at first, but just as they’re about to get out, all of the doors and windows are suddenly locked down. It turns out that this isn’t any ordinary house, and that their intended victim isn’t quite as helpless as she appears.
The first thing that should be noted is it appears that the film has been cut down a bit for the local release. Either that, or the film is even more incoherent than it already seems. The film seems to have been built from a purely visual perspective. It doesn’t really seem to put much stock on narrative, and doesn’t really bother to craft a story that would give these visuals any substance. One could accuse of putting style above substance, but that would be giving it too much credit in the end. Even on the level of pure aesthetics, the film isn’t able to come off as coherent.
To its credit, there is an oddness to this picture that makes it feel marginally memorable. An early sequence introduces the main character at his retirement party, sparkler candles going off in the middle of a dark prison block as his colleagues fete him. It really sets the tone of the rest of the movie, which occasionally surprises with a somewhat daring bit of visual incongruity. Two characters might be taking a hot spring bath outdoors in what looks like a construction site. They might stumble into a room full of babies while searching the otherwise gloomy location.
But oddness works better when it is contrasted against a measure of rationality. And this film just doesn’t try hard enough to put together a coherent narrative. It doesn’t really bother telling much of a story at all. Its opening scene gives away the ending, for example. From then on, the characters are often wandering about with no real purpose, seemingly just waiting around to die. And for all of its visual panache, the film doesn’t really come up with interesting ways for these people to meet their demise.
It doesn’t really work as a horror movie at all. Putting aside the fact that these characters aren’t fleshed out enough to make their fate worth caring about, the film doesn’t really offer much that’s actually scary. Again, the characters are too often just stumbling around. The threat gets to them without much effort, and the deaths lack visual punch. It doesn’t help that the acting isn’t very good. Costas Mandylor looks fairly committed to playing this role, but there just isn’t anything there. And his co-stars can barely be understood when delivering their clunky dialogue.
Bite might turn out to be a little better if it was shown uncut, but the improvement would be marginal at best. At the very least, it would make the climax make a little more sense. There is so little shown in the final sequences that it may as well been excised completely. But by then, it’s clear that the movie has very little offer, other than the occasional burst of weirdness. The rest of the movie is just long stretches that don’t really matter in the end, the characters spinning their wheels while waiting for their turn to die an uninteresting death.
My Rating:
