The Lair

Shot down in Afghanistan Lt Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk) if forced to take refuge in an abandoned bunker after a firefight and then chase by the local Afghani militia. The bunker looks as if it is a left over from the Soviet occupation and a place for experimentation going by all the documents strewn about the place. Large tanks that look as if they contain something are waiting to be broken open. Which one does and then all hell breaks loose.

Managing to escape Sinclair comes across some US troops based in an outpost. Naturally, they don’t believe her story. The troops led by Finch (Jamie Bamber) are a collection of rough-necks. Hardened soldiers slung together as no one else with have them and they are not too comfortable around each other either. There's a few Brits in there too. (The collection of accents could be fun for the viewer, if they don’t feel offended by them.) But the main thing is that they will look after each other’s back when the time comes. Which is pretty soon as there’s more than one monster in the bunker from which they have escaped and are now looking to kill and eat.

This is very silly hokum with plenty of blood and violence and some imaginative kills with faces bitten off and plenty of bashing as the creatures are very hard to kill. The monsters themselves the viewer won’t take long to work out are diabolical experiments that went wrong. But is there more to it and who knows what and why is also a question is posed.

Written and directed by Neil Marshall this is not a patch on Descent and Wolf Soldiers and it probably isn’t fair to continue to hang those on to everything that he has since been involved with. But The Lair is in its own right a passable monster movie that, save for people who are precious about accents, will enjoy on a very primal level. There’s plenty of action with some cracking effects and stunts and enough intrigue as to what the creatures are and why they are there to stop it being little more than a stodgy stand up and shoot ‘em up fare.