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The Lair
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Acorn Media Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (17th July 2023). |
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The Film
 April 2017: Royal Air Force officer Captain Kate Sinclair (Vice's Charlotte Kirk) is shot down over Nangarhar Province and crash lands in the middle of the desert. Her WSO (Alex Morgan) is riddled with bullets in a shootout with insurgents and Sinclair escapes, salvaging a weapon from one of the insurgents. They corner her in a quarry and she is forced to take shelter in a bunker, squeezing throught the gap in the chained doors. With the insurgents following her, she has no choice but to descend further into the mine and take her chances in the labyrinthine tunnels. Sinclair discovers a lab with a mummified corpse, a McGuffin recording device, and papers with Cyrillic text, but her investigation is cut short by the insurgents and the chase takes them into a laboratory full of chambers with humanoid being in stasis. A bullet bursts one of the chambers revealing a hulking creature that decimates the insurgents with claws far more efficiently that Sinclair with a gun. She only just manages to escape with a deep mauling from the creature before being knocked down in the road by a Humvee of American soldiers searching for her. Sinclair is taken to a remote outpost run by Major Finch (Strike Back's Jamie Bamber), demoted and exiled for losing two men in an unsanctioned maneuver, who dismisses her claims of a Soviet bunker with deadly creatures to her face yet reports it to headquarters as possible "unusual activity." Sergeant Tom Hook (World War Z's Jonathan Howard) reveals to her that the outpost is made up of army misfits including kleptomaniac Lafayette (Kibong Tanji), Everett (Mark Arends) who accidentally shot another soldier in the foot, Serrano (Adam Bond) who managed to knock up both daughters of a disgruntled general, and addicted medic Wilks (Northmen: A Viking Saga's Mark Strepan). They are soon joined by a trio of British soldiers lead by Sergeant Oswald Jones (Mr. Selfridge's Leon Ockenden) who have come to collect Kate. When the only survivor of the insurgent force is captured in meek driver Kabir (The Covenant's Hadi Khanjanpour), he tells them of a series of disappearances and bodies seemingly mauled by wild animals that all abruptly stopped when the Soviets pulled out of the area thirty years ago. Kabir has part of the answer, but so does Finch; however, his attempt to use it to negotiate a way back to civilization may amount to little when the creature and his newly-awakened friends lay siege to the outpost. This return to low budget horror from director Neil Marshall (Doomsday) – so low that Marshall himself and cinematographer Luke Bryant (The Marine 5: Battleground) double as masked Black Ops agents – was presumably pitched in the producer's own words on the behind the scenes EPK piece as "Dog Soldiers meets The Descent"; however, it feels more like a film by some hack who saw Dog Soldiers rather than the guy who made a name for himself in the British and American film industries with it. The film lacks the claustrophobia of The Descent in its subterranean scene while leaning heavier in retread approach to Dog Soldiers – from Finch and Kabir possessing different parts of the story to a climactic canteen standoff between one of the soldiers brandishing kitchenware against one of the creatures – but everything that made that film a mix of humorous and horrifying falls flat here. The film revels in military movie cliches to the point that the viewer assumes they are satirizing them, from the "Dirty Half-dozen" cast of quirky misfits and the slow motion shot of the group of survivors strolling into battle to rapidly-forged bonds of loyalty through shared combat and character redemption by literally jumping on a grenade. All of the attempts at establishing banter fail to amuse or endear, and only a few of the cast members manage to make a little something more out of their cardboard characters; indeed, it seems like a miscalculation by Marshall that we find Khanjanpour's Kabir far more charismatic than Strepan's Wilks as comic relief characters. Accents range from competent to murderously bad, particularly in the case of British actor Okenden doing a thick presumably Irish brogue and fellow Brit Bamber doing a particularly awful Southern accent (which may surprise Battlestar Galactica fans), while Kirk – who co-wrote the film with Marshall and had previously appeared in the director's The Reckoning – does what she can with the overly-familiar character of the soldier determined to both honor her comrades and return home safely to her child. Creature effects are proficient but the details are indistinctly-photographed while the gory brutality they inflict on the humans fails to resonate with the viewer due to the flat characters. The Lair is ultimately a misfire as an action/horror film, a blackly-comic horror film, and even as a DTV diversion. 
Video
Shot on the digital HD Sony Venice camera, The Lair's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.39:1 widescreen Blu-ray presentation – a direct port of the U.S. release since RLJ Entertainment owns Acorn – looks as slick as any action picture of this budget with the same cookie cutter moody grading, and it is perhaps deliberate that the creatures are underlit. 
Audio
The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is also what one expects of a horror picture, generally front-oriented with sedate atmosphere until the action sequences when the rear channels are utilized for gunfire, monster roars, and surround rumblings. Optional English SDH, French, and Spanish subtitles are included. 
Extras
The sole extra is "The Making of The Lair" (6:58) which is standard EPK material with the cast, Marshall, and producer Daniel Cooper (Dunkirk) discussing the motivations of the project as a crowd-pleasing idea. 
Overall
The Lair is ultimately a misfire as an action/horror film, a blackly-comic horror film, and even as a DTV diversion.
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