The Lair (2022)

I really enjoyed Neil Marshall's debut, Dog Soldiers, back in the day; and though I didn't understand what all the excitement was about, lots of people praised The Descent, because apparently feminism is two women in a cave arguing over who owns a man; and I am a sucker for people being trapped in a cave stories and even more so when there are flesh eating monsters, so I didn't not like that film.

I can't think of anything amusing to say here, so I will say nothing.

But The Lair is a very, very poor excuse for a monster movie - even if large parts of it are set underground and, yes, there are flesh eating monsters. It's an entirely predictable Aliens-but-in-Afghanistan nonsense. Plodding and dull, without surprises or innovation. 

So, Lt Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk) is an RAF pilot deployed in Afghanistan.  We see Sinclair in a plane in the skies above Afghanistan, in the throes of getting shot down.  Then there is a brief flash back, to TWO DAYS EARLIER, as she bids goodbye to family and her sleeping child.  I'm no military man, but it seems quite a rapid transition from peaceful home life to the war torn skies of Afghanistan.  Perhaps why that's the reason she's struggling with the whole keeping-the-plane-in the-air thing, which I understand is considered quite important in flying circles.  Perhaps a couple of briefings on the risks of hostile action or at least a chance to get over jetlag, and we wouldn't have had a movie at all.  Which would not have been a bad thing.

Anyway plucky Kate ejects, survives an encounter with some insurgents / freedom fighters (you can bet this film is not going to waste its time with a nuanced investigation into the legitimacy of the Afghanistan invasion.  There's monsters to be unleased!) and is pursued into a handy old Soviet era bunker. Ivan just left with the doors half open and which no-one had ever bothered to go take a look in before.

It is dark down there, until someone switchs on the lights and inexplicably everything wakes up.

Guess what?  Inside the bunker are monsters, which immediately wake up after Kate scuttles in because someone throws a switch.  It seems the top secret military research facility (surprise!) didn't have much in the way of safety, failsafe or containment protocols for its savage charges.  These dudes which have been in their giant test tubes since the Soviets went home just hanging out.  Mysteriously, they are all still alive, even though there was no power to the place and I guess no-one had been sending them food parcels.

Luckily for Sinclair the revenants gobble up all the Afghans an she manages to run away, encountering a grab back of American military stereotypes who take her back to camp where she tries to warn them about the freed horrors but no-one believes her until it is almost too la ...

"I fucking said there were monsters but you were all like, yeah, right, whatever, hahaha.  Whose laughing now?"

If this sounds suspiciously like most of the best bits of Aliens, only curiously made worse, then you are right.  It doesn't deviate from template by an iota.  While Dog Soldiers managed to be funny, scary, familiar and different all at the same time, and The Descent was at least appropriately claustrophobic and grim, The Lair is just by the numbers, with out the frantic energy that can occasionally elevate the predictable retread into something that feels fresh.

You can see everything coming from miles away, except the moments where the director decides to throw logic out the window.  Why is there suddenly power after years of neglect?  Why are the entities revived so quickly, so aggressively and why are they still alive at all?  And why don't people notice the huge terrifying monsters climbing the ladder up the the really deep shaft RIGHT BEHIND THEM?  Not once, mind you, but twice!

Performances range from okay to inept, but you can't tell if that is down to incompetence by the actors.  They are given nothing to work with - characters are completley one dimensional, and the dialogue clunks leadenly.  You can type this shit, but you sure can't say it, as Harrison Ford allegedly scolded Han Solo.  Someone should have had a word with Neil Marshall.

"If I die, does that mean I don't have to be in this movie anymore?"

Special effects are - generously - run of the mill.  The monsters are supposed to be humanoid, as they are created from human subjects subjects - but they are depressingly, obviously guys-in-suits that would have been convincing in the 1950s, but aren't impressive, interesting or startling today.

There just isn't any reason to watch it - watch Aliens for the 500th time, it will still be more exciting and surprising.

Star Rating: *