Neil Marshall’s The Lair heads to DVD and Blu-ray on the 17th of July and so today we bring you our review of his latest movie that is reminiscent of the brilliant Dog Soldiers.
The Shudder original brings us tense moments, terrifying monsters, gory scenes and some of the “squaddie” humour that we saw back in Dog Soldiers.
When Lieutenant Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk – The Reckoning, Ocean’s Eight) is shot down over Afghanistan, Sergeant Tom Hook (Jonathan Howard – Thor: The Dark World, World War Z) is sent in to lead a specialised team of SAS troops to find the missing soldier and bring her home.
As Sinclair desperately tries to evade her pursuers, she stumbles across a forsaken military bunker and seeks refuge, but little does she know that this seemingly abandoned base holds a dark secret… a horde of nightmarish creatures known as Ravagers, half-human and half-alien, ravenous for flesh.
Narrowly escaping from the bunker, Sinclair finds safety at a nearby army base led by Major Roy Finch (Jamie Bamber – Marcella, Signora Volpe). But it’s not long before some unexpected and extremely dangerous visitors arrive, eliciting an adrenaline-fueled mighty battle for survival…
The Lair is a movie that certainly packs in some gory on the edge of your seat moment in its short run time of 97 minutes, Neil Marshall has brought us a movie that not only looks good with its cinematography inside the dark foreboding bunker and still gives enough detail with some great set lighting to put you at unease of what is in there, but he also delivers the action and humour that we came to love in Dog Soldiers.
Imagine the tension of The Descent and throw in the aspects of Dog Soldiers and this is what you get with The Lair, there may be moments when the movie seems to slow down a tad but that is made up for with the last half of the film as all hell breaks loose with the creatures causing mayhem.
The cast all work well together and they bring the characters to life very well on the screen, you do start gunning for them and you hope that they will survive their ordeal, but we all know that that is never the case with movies such as The Lair.
With any creature feature the monsters are something that you look forward to seeing and I have to say that I wasn’t disappointed with the look of them. They reminded me of Venom but with much more horror, they are ferociously fast when they attack and they seem to be more intelligent than we first expect.
Neil Marshall’s The Lair is a movie that is enjoyable to watch, it keeps your attention from start to finish and has some nice little twists and turns, for me it’s hard to top Dog Soldiers, but this movie is certainly close to doing so.
The Blu-ray looks great, the quality of the visuals works very well and the sound mix for the 5.1 surround works very well to add to the atmosphere, it does lack a little on the special features and all we have is a 6-minute feature of the Making of The Lair.
It's like Dog Soldiers with scarier monsters!
Movie title: The Lair (2022)
Movie description: When Royal Air Force pilot Lt. Kate Sinclair is shot down over Afghanistan, she finds refuge in an abandoned underground bunker where deadly man-made biological weapons - half human, half alien - are awakened.
Date published: July 15, 2023
Country: UK
Duration: 1h 37m
Director(s): Neil Marshall
Actor(s): Charlotte Kirk, Jonathan Howard, Jamie Bamber
Genre: Action, Horror
Summary
If you are a fan of Neil Marshall’s work and the brilliant Dog Soldiers, then The Lair is worth checking out.
Karen Woodham is the founder and owner of the Blazing Minds. She is also a Cinema reviewer and works with RealD 3D reviewing the latest 3D releases and IMAX, she has also had several articles published in various publications including the first edition of SFW Magazine. In 2015 she became an Award Winning Blogger and also has her website listed as one of the UK’s Top 10 Film Blogs.
