The Lair

When Royal Air Force pilot Lt. Kate Sinclair is shot down over Afghanistan, she is forced to take refuge in an abandoned underground bunker, only to realize too late that there are some long-dormant and very deadly man-made, half human-half alien biological weapons that have been abandoned there, and they are waking up.

I’ll always turn out for Neil Marshall.

Dog Soldiers is an all-time Werewolf classic. An all-timer. Seriously, if you haven’t seen Dog Soldiers, you need to. I loved it. Also, Doomsday is complete insanity and it’s an absolute blast to watch. Plus, I’m a sucker for any story that’s even nominally about the Lost 9th Roman Legion, so Centurian is great too. Marshall made some of the best Game of Thrones, Westworld, and Lost in Space episodes too, so yeah, the guy’s got the goods, is what I’m saying here, people, and as a result, I am here for his latest film, The Lair.

And, well…

It’s no Dog Soldiers.

After being shot down in Afghanistan, a British fighter pilot is on the run from the Taliban, forcing her to hide in a decrepit old bunker with some Russian words that are scrawled across the door that obviously—OBVIOUSLY—say “For the love of God, and all that is holy, do not go in here.”

She goes in.

(Big sigh)

Inside the bunker, there are a bunch of dead bodies and a whole lot of lizard men in big vats. Turns out, the lizard men are the results of an old Russian Cold War Black Science project intent on creating super soldiers. It didn’t go well for the scientists. Even worse? The lizard men are still alive in those vats, and due to the cat-and-mouse shenanigans between the pilot and the Taliban soldiers who are hunting her, the vats get broken, the lizard men get loose, and there’s only a small contingent of American and British soldiers in a nearby FOB available to stop them.

This generally does not go well for most of the American and British soldiers.

After that, The Lair is basically the Alamo meets Predator, or Aliens in Afghanistan, but filtered through a lens of old B-movie rubber suit monsters and maybe some old copies of Weird War Tales. Which honestly sounds kind of great, right?

It mostly is.

Mostly.

It checks all the boxes. Marshal has a real knack for over-the-top violence in the middle of an action extravaganza spectacle that feature some square-jawed bad-ass archetypes as they TCB while flinging about witty and/or noble war movie cliches, and that’s all totally on display here. Plus, at only 96 minutes, The Lair gets into the shit with a quickness, which is great.

But also, if we’re being fair… it’s very dumb. Very dumb. The script is a total clunker. The dialogue is bad. The performances are wooden. In daylight, the monsters have a real “last minute purchase from a picked-over Spirit Halloween Store” feel. Another weird thing… every single character’s accent sounds fake. Maybe this was just me, but yeah, all of them… super fake. I don’t know if they are fake or not, in fact, I’m pretty sure that at least some of them aren’t, but god damn, they sure as shit sound fake. Is it possible that every single actor had to play a character with an accent, like they hired Americans to play British and British to play Americans, and somehow none of them were able to pull it off?

That would actually be kind of amazing.

Anyway, consider this review to be your obvious warning, written in blood, and scrawled in Russian across a pair of obviously long-abandoned bunker doors in the middle of the desert. Enter at your own risk.