It’s the middle of the Afghanistan war, and the unfortunate RAF pilot Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk) finds herself shot down and, in short order, ambushed by insurgents. When she stumbles upon a secret bunker, abandoned ever since the locals drove the Soviets out in the late 80s, she may have gone from the frying pan into the fire – what kind of dark experiments had the Soviets been carrying out?
Well, as you can probably guess, they’d been making monsters, and before too long they’re causing havoc for Sinclair, along with a band of misfit Americans she crosses paths with, most of whom will, of course, be gorily and spectacularly killed before the credits roll.
Writer/director Neil Marshall made his name back in the mid-2000s with a pair of smartly-made, low-budgeted exploitation films riffing on the “Express elevator to Hell” theme of Aliens: squaddies vs. werewolves in Dog Soldiers, and female spelunkers vs. Hills Have Eyes mutants in The Descent. The Lair is his most obviously Aliens-influenced effort yet, and a welcome return to his shlocky roots after a series of excursions into other subgenres, including the disappointing comic-book reboot Hellboy. The Lair even features a literal elevator to do the job of trapping our plucky misfits right in the monsters’ underground, well, lair.
There’s little that’s new in The Lair; aside from Aliens there are a number of resemblances to Resident Evil, both the videogame series and the Paul W. S. Anderson films, which themselves owe more to Aliens than they do to their source material. Towards the end of the film, as Sinclair dons a cool leather jacket, she even starts to look like Milla Jovovich from certain angles. Then there’s a long line of monsters-in-wartime pictures, from Michael Mann’s Nazis-vs-demons curio The Keep (1983), to 2018’s GIs-vs-Nazi-mutants-themed Overlord. This familiarity of subject matter will no doubt earn The Lair sniffy reviews, yet those with an appetite for military banter (in Limey and Yankee flavours), lots and lots of gunshots, and guts splattered halfway up the walls, should have plenty of fun here – plainly the cast did, to the point the largely British cast often forget they’re nominally playing Americans. Charlotte Kirk makes a fine heroine of the type routinely described as “spunky”, yet the standout is Leon Ockendon as the gratuitously Welsh “Jonesy”.
Win The Lair on Blu-Ray, here.
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