1 out of 5

Directed by: Neil Marshall

Sure, I have not seen the last couple Neil Marshall projects prior to this one (The Reckoning; Hellboy), but I enjoyed / liked “classic” Marshall – Dog Soldiers, The Descent – and though maybe I wouldn’t have ranked him as a favorite director, the way he evolved or with Doomsday and Centurion was interesting, and suggested a promising picture that balanced some of his genre inclinations with bigger scope. Throughout all of this, I maybe would never have considered a Marshall script particularly great, or his command of his actors noteworthy, but as long as things remained amped up, his imagination provided for some good romps that were worth watching.

There are, legitimately, maybe 2 minutes of The Lair where I felt like I was watching the same director. Even when trying to retain some positive things to say – I don’t really enjoy slagging off an entire flick – they weren’t consistent enough throughout to really highlight. For example, I found the lighting during some of the daytime scenes to be well handled, but that’s juxtaposed by too-dark lighting in the bunker / night time scenes, and the complimentary part of this is countered when the baddies start showing up in the light, and effective shadowing goes out the window.

The main issue with the movie, which is theoretically a goofy fun creature feature, is that… it’s not goofy fun. I mean, I think one actor – Jamie Bamber, doing a horrible (and funny) American accent, and sporting an eyepatch – got the note that this is a B-movie, and I think the script reflects that, giving us a ridiculous dump of army ne’er-do-wells and SAS and insurrectionist stereotypes, but then there’s a giganto disconnect with the rest of the actors, and with Marshall himself, flip-flopping between direction styles that call back to Dog Soldiers (camp), The Descent (legit horror), Doomsday (large scale camp), or Centurion (brutal wartime drama). If any of these styles was effected well, even bit by bit, I think the movie would still get something of a pass, but, again: only the briefest flash, when creatures swarm our army dwelling, feels like it’s vibing; everything else has an amateurish, aimless vibe, the camera poking around for no reason, and just completely uninspiring acting. Like, bad acting can be fun, but this is more just bland.

In The Lair, Charlotte Kirk is a British pilot who gets her plane shot down over Afghanistan, and is beset by infidel types who are subtitled to say “we want her alive” or somesuch, but then proceed to shoot at her with a bazooka. She escapes into a bunker she finds, and escapes from that when the science experiments inside – Nemesis-looking things – break out of their big ol’ specimen jars. She’s rescued by army fellas, but the science experiments have gotten her scent…

The structure of The Lair is utterly baffling. It kind of makes sense to set up the creatures up front so that the big set piece can be their attack of the army dwelling, but at the same time, there’s nothing further to “discover” by that point. The creatures do have a feature that rears itself during this swarming that’s pretty fun, but the story makes zero out of that, and repeats it again later on, like it should merit the same surprise. And the way the plot continues on after this point doubles down on adding nothing further, which, if you’re doing the math… uh… is not actually additive in any way. We get the requisite monster autopsy scene, and some sprinklings of ideas are there again (including the best jump “scare” in the flick), but similar to the above mentioned feature, nothing comes of this stuff.

We know Marshall can do low budget horror. We know he can do creature features. I just don’t know – and it doesn’t feel like he, or 99% of the people on set, including co-writer Kirk – what The Lair was really intended to be. If it had mustered some consistency, it could’ve worked as distraction, but from the design, to the shooting stye, and through and through, the film, at most, manages to be nondescript.